4LT GS Roadster
BMW's Megacity electric car, seen here in a sketch released by the automaker, is due in 2013
BERLIN - BMW AG will cocoon passengers of a battery-powered city car in the same lightweight material used to protect Formula One drivers.
Marking the auto industry's biggest bet on carbon fiber, BMW will use the fabric to construct a passenger-safety cell for the electric vehicle.
The amalgamation of carbon fiber and aluminum will offset as much as 350 kilograms (772 pounds) of additional weight from battery and electronic components, according to Klaus Draeger, BMW's development chief.
“The economics will be balanced on a razor blade,” said Christoph Stuermer, an analyst at IHS Automotive in Frankfurt, said in an interview. “The combination of using lots of carbon fiber and breaking it up into smaller pieces may be the magic trick to reduce costs and could make the frame only twice as expensive as aluminium.”
BMW is racing to build battery-powered vehicles as governments and consumers push for viable alternatives to fuel-burning cars.
General Motors Co. and Nissan Motor Co. will introduce electric vehicles later this year. Investors snapped up shares in Tesla Motors Inc., the California-based electric-car maker, leading to a 41 percent surge on its first day of trading June 29.
BMW's carbon fiber for the vehicle will be spun at a $100 million factory near Seattle that the Munich-based manufacturer is building together with partner SGL Carbon SE. The fibers, composed of 50,000 filaments that are each one-seventh as thick as a human hair, will be made into fabrics and then hardened into components at facilities in Germany.
BMW wouldn't discuss prices for the city car. Tesla's Roadster sells for as much as 84,000 euros ($105,000) in Europe. Nissan priced is mass-market Leaf electric car at just less than 30,000 euros after incentives.
BMW is turning to carbon fiber, which is 50 percent lighter than steel, to reduce the size and cost of the battery needed to run the car.
The mega-city vehicle, which will be available in 2013, will be powered by a 96-cell lithium-ion power pack, compared with the bank of 5,088 laptop batteries that run the company's Mini E test vehicle.
“Weight in electric vehicles takes on a totally different dimension, and this weight improvement you can only get through carbon-fiber parts,” Herbert Diess, BMW's purchasing and logistics chief, said in a May interview.
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