BMW 7 Series will get carbon fiber construction
The BMW 7 Series is, undoubtedly a luxury car, a limousine, a flagship model for the Bavarians and anything else you’d use to describe a status symbol.
Once you start talking about a car like that, you expect it to have a battleship engine and to be built from marble, granite and feature a dashboard built out of solid wood.
Even if it has the dynamic DNA of a BMW, as the 7 Series does, nobody would find your description wrong. Soon that might change.
Reportedly, BMW will use new materials in the construction of the next generation of the 7 Series. Since aluminium is no longer big news in production car lightness, they’ll be opting for carbon fiber.
Carbon fiber is the holy grail of lightweight materials as it has only one disadvantage towards other kinds of materials. It is very expensive. The problem isn’t really in the cost of getting the material but in the time and money that goes into molding it.
Recently however some progress has been made in this area and costs are coming down. It seems that BMW is among the forerunners of this process if they claim they’re going to make carbon fiber available so soon.
2015 is the time stamp of the next gen BMW 7 Series and by then we expect to see the i3 and i8 EVs come in to introduce the new light weight technology appeal of carbon fiber.
All of us that have been hating on EVs have lost this battle. Though they haven’t revolutionized the way we travel, they did bring us this perk.