Carbon Fibre, which is a relatively new invention, is used a lot in cars and other motor vehicles. The reason for this is simple; it is both light and extremely strong. Having a car’s body made from carbon fibre reinforced polymer, or CFRP, reduces the weight of the vehicle by a significant margin, improving the cars performance and fuel and energy efficiency by a large margin as well. When you look at motor sports, all of the vehicles use this material, as do all modern aerospace vehicles. The alternative, and the typical choice of car owners, is a metal car body. This is a poor comparison in terms of the performance metrics I’ve already pointed out, but there is one area in which a metal body outperforms a carbon fibre reinforced polymer, CFRP, body. This is in safety, perhaps one of the most important factors in peoples car choices. One integral part of a car design’s safety considerations is making ‘crumple point’, which is where the designers include in the design specific points in the body which will crumple on impact, and thereby reduce the shock of the impact. It is far harder to do this with inflexible materials like plastic, which needs break points instead, which isn’t quite as effective.
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