If you like to peek into car factories, you’ll enjoy how BMW creates its mixed material bodies for the 2016 7-Series. Carbon fiber, aluminum and steel never looked this good together.
The 2016 BMW 7-Series is nearly 300 pounds lighter than the 2015 BMW 7-Series. That’s one heavy motherfucker thrown out of your luxury car.
BMW’s top of the line sedan is based on a brand new modular platform called “35up”, which uses CFRP to make the safety cell stronger, therefore making heavy steels unnecessary in many areas and saving 88 pounds on the body alone. Of course there are a bunch of other advanced features in BMW’s latest as well, jammed in there to put the 7-Series ahead of the likes of the Mercedes-Benz S-Class or the Audi A8.
But since the CFRP technology originally developed for the i8 and the i3 will continue to expand further down into BMW’s cheaper offerings like the 5-Series or even the best-seller 3-Series, you might want to have a look into how it all comes together, because your next car might have some composites under its body panels as well.
Rolling the B-roll...
CFRP M3. That’s all I want.
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