大众宣布向德国碳纤维企业SGL投资1.4亿欧元以获得其8%的股份。SGL同时也是宝马汽车的合作伙伴，宝马持有部分用SGL的股份。
现在很多小众车比如F1已经广泛使用碳纤维了，大众的目标是再量产汽车上扩大碳纤维的使用范围，因为碳纤维的在强度，重量方面的性能确实很诱人。此前阻碍碳纤维进入量产车型的原因有很多，一个是价格昂贵，一个是碳纤维部件的制造不像金属件那样可以通过冲压等工艺来快速自动化生产，相对来说更劳动力密集一些，还有复合材料损伤后很难做局部修复。
http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2011/03/vw_buys_bmws_carbon-fibre_dream#comments
VW buys into BMW's carbon-fibre dream
Mar 1st 2011, 14:31 by P.M.
VOLKSWAGEN sprang a surprise at the Geneva car show today. The carmaker announced that it will invest €140m ($194m) in an 8% stake in SGL Carbon, a German firm which constructs things from carbon-fibre composite materials. The deal surprised many because SGL is already instrumental in BMW’s quest to use carbon fibre to manufacture lighter vehicles, and BMW also has a stake in the company. Ferdinand Piëch, VW’s chairman, says he does not think sharing ownership of SGL with one of VW’s big rivals will cause any problems. Mr Piëch has good reason to hope it will not because the use of carbon fibre is turning into a critical area of competitive advantage for carmakers.
For the car industry, the race to master carbon-fibre technology began 30 years ago when McLaren, a British-based Formula 1 team, built a racing car with a unique carbon-fibre monocoque (as a structural body which also doubles up as a chassis is called). It did not take long before the car, driven by John Watson, won the 1981 British Grand Prix at Silverstone. Within a few years all the F1 teams raced carbon-fibre cars.
The attraction of carbon fibre is that it is extremely strong (one reason why racing-car drivers now walk away from horrendous crashes) but also very light—some 30% lighter than aluminium and 50% lighter than steel. This means it can be used to greatly reduce the weight of a car. A lighter car can go a lot faster or use less fuel—or a combination of both. Hence carbon fibre is being used to build both supercars, like the new McLaren MP4-12C (pictured above) and a range of electric cars which BMW is developing. With electric and hybrid cars lightness can be used to increase both performance and range.
The difficulty is that carbon fibre can be an expensive and labour-intensive material to work with. Customers for high-performance products like aircraft wings, racing cars and tough mountain bikes are prepared to pay the extra cost for added performance. But to take these performance gains to broader markets producers need to find ways to make carbon fibre more suitable for high-volume production. And that is what companies like SGL and McLaren are now doing. Hence VW’s interest.
BMW has been extremely impressed with the potential of carbon fibre, so far. The company has been working with SGL on a type of injection-moulding process that can produce parts in minutes, and be handled mainly by robots. Parts can be bonded together or larger parts made as a single component. As the aerospace industry has already discovered, producing things with fewer parts greatly reduces the cost of assembly. The cars have also performed well in crash tests and shown that in many cases damaged parts are repairable. There are other advantages too. Unlike steel, carbon composites do not corrode.
Anthony Sheriff, managing director of McLaren’s automotive division, reckons carbon fibre will move to more mainstream production. McLaren, which has been working with CarboTech, another German firm that specialises in carbon composites, is planning to build 5,000 cars a year with carbon fibre at a new factory near its base in Woking—which in supercar terms is mass production.
--
FROM 92.77.109.*