Great innovation! Now what is the cost to produce it? Can it be mass-produced?

Carbon nano-tubes are unimaginably strong but unfortunately the process to produce them puts their value at around $1000 per gram.

A near frictionless carbon-carbon coating has been developed and it can be done at a very competitive cost to tradional teflon coating but they have not been able to figure out how to mass produce the process yet.

If they can't mass produce it and show a low cost then this serves as only an intriguing science project and nothing more.

Car bodies, at least in certain places, have to be able to crush and distort in severe accidents, for the safety of the occupants. They must be made with material that is reasonably strong but also reasonably malleable under accident conditions. If this material is too rigid, there may be limits to some of these applications.

Patrick -

what they are talking about here is not carbon nano tubes but very fine strands of cellulose (i.e. finer than natural fibers). These should be far cheaper to produce.

Embedded in a resin matrix, you get a composite material with attractive qualities for non-load-bearing parts such as the bonnet, the door panels, the roof and the trunk lid of a car, perhaps the wings and bumpers, too. Even though certain composites have superior crash performance to steel, concerns about product liability will keep volume carmakers from using them for that purpose for some time yet. We could see this new material in aircraft first.

Other than cost, there are still a number of other issues that would have to be addressed: ease of embedding fittings such as hinges, surface roughness and compatibility with paints, ease of repair, material properties changes (creep, UV light, moisture, aggressive media...), ease of recycling/incineration.

The latter point is especially relevant in Europe, where carmakers are required to design their products for long life and subsequent recycling. While incineration for electricity generation is considered a form of recycling under this law, the weight fraction that may be disposed of in this way is stictly limited and getting smaller. Recovering fibers from composites is not attractive as the secondary material is usually inferior and no longer suitable for automotive applications.

Max Kaehn,
It is embeded in phenol resin, so it is going to be like Bakelite. It is more likely to melt/smolder instead of burn. Some fiber reinforced Bakelite have already been made. This is an evolution of the reinforced phenol resin composite.
_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenol_formaldehyde_resin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite

It can certainly be glued, and glue applied over a substantial contact patch can harden fairly fast.  As fast as it would take to make the same bonds with spot welds?  Perhaps.  Perhaps it's not even necessary; gluing and clamping at one point on an assembly line could allow operations to continue until the clamps need to get out of the way, which could be several minutes later.

Think armor

NBK-Boston -

any composite used for chassis construction in the automotive world is going to feature a thermoplastic rather than a thermohardening resin (i.e. NOT like bakelite at all). For volume production, the fibers would not be long and precisely oriented but rather short and randomly strewn into the molds, layer by layer. Under certain conditions, the process can be automated, which is just as well considering the haydrocarbon emissions due to the solvents used.

Composites are very different materials from metals, and using them effectively requires a completely different approach to part and assembly design. Provided you design in a way that is appropriate to these materials, crashworthyiness can even go up, in spite of the weight savings!

Andrey -

from an economic point of view, I'd have to agree with you. Composites are still too expensive for the volume production of car chassis.

From a technical perspective, I beg to differ. It is absolutely possible to craft a spaceframe chassis from composites, though metal inserts are usually used for the joints. Such spaceframes then receive non-load-bearing cladding panels. Some high-end sports and most race cars are already built like this.

Cheaper reinforcing materials will allow carmakers to revisit the concept for vehicles produced in small series. There is a strong trend toward shorter product life cycles and a larger number of product variants. Unfortunately, the presses and dies required to shape parts for metal monocoques are so expensive you need to produce hundreds of thousands of them before you break even.

Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI.org)
http://rmi.org/sitepages/pid386.php
suggests making car bodies out of composite body panels for very strong
and lightweight cars that perform better and save fuel.

You are all missing the point. This new structural material is an ideal carbon sequestration material. Cellulose is carbon dense, formed from CO2 snatched out of the air. It is like building cars and structures out of sequestered CO2.

Think of it as a Kyoto friendly technology, like responsible logging. All of the anti-logging, anti-cellulose fiber environmentalists have it exactly backwards. Let's build the artifactual world out of carbon.

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