Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the base material of carbon fiber made from oil??? I suppose over the life of a car, the oil used to produce parts is significantly offset by the gas saved through less weight but you're still dependent on the global supply and price of oil.

There is another problem for you sustainability people. No One knows how to recycle carbon fiber except by burning it. Then the resins create lots of toxic byproducts.

Steel and aluminum can be re-melted and re-cycled and it is.

Maybe you don't recycle carbon fiber - just stick it in landfill (or whatever).

Anyway, lets see how they get on.

Since no-one seems to want to compromise safety for lightness, we may have to go for the two together, by using carbon fiber.
If a significant market develops, costs should drop, which would help everyone by "adding lightness".

The reason they make so many airplane parts out of CF is because every ounce saved is worth more than its weight in gold in reduced fuel consumption.

The same principle applies, at a lower scale of return, for car parts. The challenge has been to make carbon fiber parts cheap enough. Choosing the largest, simplest load-bearing structures reduces manufacturing costs and maximizes benefit. Augmenting with thermoplastic may reduce costs even further.

I suspect it is also specious to object to CF parts for concerns over recycling them, because there are many ways to recycle them. They could be gasified in a Fischer-Troph reaction and converted to an alternative fuel. They could be rebuilt and used again the way many car parts are today.

CF parts in cars, in general, is a very good and desirable thing.

At the moment carbon fiber is made from oil, but it can be made from any biomass or even [air + H2O + solar energy]. It can be recycled via a relatively complex chemistry, but if you just throw it into the sea (and make a skeleton for coral reefs), it's the perfect carbon sink. You could also reuse the fibers into lower-quality composite materials (which are still very high-quality compared to actual plastics).
in Formule-1 cars, carbon fiber is used for years. It's much safer and lighter (allowing crash-safety and better acceleration).

Another advantage is that carbon fiber can be produced without the need for mining. It doesn't rust and it doesn't produce toxic waste.
After incineration, it produces only CO2 and H2O.

In conclusion, carbon fiber is a superior material with only one disadvantage : price. It's great they're eliminating this last issue before mass-implementation.

carbon fiber should be made from carbon extracted from the air, along with all the resins.. then when its life is over it should be used as a reef starter in the ocean..

Yes, I'm being sarcastic :)

A car made of CF would never rust, a boon where they salt roads.

I have favored a space frame with plastic body panels, much like the Fiero and Saturn. The idea is to make a crash cage where the frame takes the energy of the crash and not the body panels.

I had thought of using aluminum instead of steel for the space frame, but then I saw that the Corvette Z06 has done that and only saved 134 pounds. On a 3000 pound car, you need to reduce 10%, or 300 pounds to begin to make significant headway.

It would be nice to get a 4 passenger car to weight less than 2000 pounds. Scion XB and others have lots of room inside without adding weight, but I am not sure of their crash ratings.

Stan,
sustainability is indeed difficult and requires careful lifecycle analysis to make sure the cure isn't worse than the disease. Carbon fibre may be a case in point unless we can come up with cleaner manufacturing techniques. Instead of ridiculing mistakes and throwing out the baby with the bathwater we must build a smart, learning culture that reuses and regenerates materials as in natural cycles.

The alternative is continuing on our mad once-only consumer binge, and we know how well that worked out on Easter Island and other societies where human consumption outran resources.

Or use the carbon fiber auto parts to make velomobiles, engine-less cars that run on pedal power! (E.g.: www.velomobiel.nl )
Carbon fiber nano-technology automobiles are obviously inevitable. The more carbon-fiber parts go into cars, the more carbon-fiber parts can go into cars. In ten years all our wheels and brakes will be carbon fiber wheels and brakes. Sand, iron, and rubber will become worthless once again.