Press Release General Motors Lightens the Corvette with Continental Structural Plastics’ TCA® Ultra Lite™

[Rob]

General Motors Lightens the Corvette with Continental Structural Plastics’ TCA® Ultra Lite™

Press Release
Published: July 21, 2015 2:00 p.m. ET
Space-age material offers significant weight- and cost-savings over aluminum

AUBURN HILLS, Mich., Jul 21, 2015 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Continental Structural Plastics (CSP), the global leader in lightweight composite solutions, announced today that its TCA Ultra Lite material is now in production on the 2016 Chevrolet Corvette. The use of TCA Ultra Lite, a Class A body panel material, results in a 20 lb (9 kg) weight savings on the Stingray Coupe model. This is the first production use of CSP’s Ultra Lite advanced composite.

Head over to the Corvette Action Center's Home Page for the complete press release >>>

 

[Dad]

That "hood" looks a bit like the front bumper cover.

 

[catbert]

It will be interesting to see how the less dense material will stand up to temperature cycles and UV exposure over time. I hope it's as good as the prior generation.

 

[Dad]

There has been honey comb panels used for decades and to me a bubble structure would be much harder to get to fail. With the honey comb all it took was to get one of the walls to fail and if there was enough stress for that I'm sure other walls would follow. In the case of a bubble you don't have that straight wall that can give way, plus there are now materials that have unbelievable strength like the micro balls and fibers.

To your concerns I agree, my C6 front bumper cover drooped about .430 over the years and I didn't like the widening gap between it and the hood.

It would be hard not to get better panels than we have had in the past from lay up, blown in, mat, SMC and so on, time will tell.