Carbon-fiber composites offer a variety of advantages for car and truck manufacturers, including lighter weight, better corrosion resistance and higher impact strength than aluminum and steel. They also offer engineers greater design flexibility and allow them to significantly reduce the number of parts in assemblies.
Composite materials weigh about one-fifth as much as steel, but are comparable in terms of stiffness and strength, depending on fiber grade and orientation. They have the potential to reduce vehicle weight by more than 50 percent.