Why doesn’t plastic account for half of the use in the automotive industry”
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Industry experts predict that the use of plastics in cars will increase by 75% in 2020. To reduce the weight of their vehicles and meet **emission standards, automobile manufacturers have begun to use new materials ； The use of carbon fiber, polymers, and composite materials can reduce the vehicle weight by 25–70%. Why is its usage so low at the moment?
Regarding the price issue, how much does carbon fiber cost? It is priced per kilogram – T300 costs over 200 yuan per kilogram, while T700 costs four to five hundred yuan per kilogram. These are just the costs of the raw materials; once it is turned into a product, the cost per kilogram is around five to six hundred yuan (including the resin used to coat the carbon fiber). If a vehicle uses 400 kg of carbon fiber, the cost will increase by 200,000 to 250,000 yuan. Can you afford it? I think there was a BMW concept car in the past that used over 50% carbon materials, but it wasn’t put into mass production. Carbon fiber materials represent highly advanced technology, and both Japan’s Toray and Germany’s SGL impose technical restrictions on our country. The products manufactured by several domestic carbon fiber companies vary greatly in quality, and the most problematic aspect is the instability of that quality. The military has high demands at the moment, and it is currently trying to figure out how to make use of carbon fiber, whose quality can be good at times and poor at other times. I’ve heard that people even buy imported badminton rackets and golf clubs, in order to extract the carbon fiber from them and use it in spacecraft.
Focusing on this topic, our company produces automotive-compliant materials in Dubai, but the production volume is very small
It’s mainly the technology that determines the price.