The European Union could be about to implement a ban on the use of carbon fibre in cars, citing environmental concerns.
Carbon fibre has long been seen as a miracle material in both the motoring and aerospace industries. Although it was in widespread use from the 1960s onwards, the material came to prominence in a motoring sense when McLaren first used it to construct the chassis and aerodynamic surfaces of the MP4/1 Formula One car in 1981.
Designed by the legendary John Barnard, this racing car was, thanks to its carbon construction, lighter and stronger than anything else on the grid, and Northern Irish racing driver John Watson says that the material unquestionably saved his life.
During the 1981 Italian Grand Prix, Watson crashed heavily, the car’s impact with the barriers actually ripping the engine and gearbox away from the rest of the structure. In a contemporary aluminium F1 chassis, Watson would almost certainly have been at least very seriously injured. Thanks to Barnard’s and McLaren’s carbon work, however, he undid his seat belts, stepped out of the smoking wreckage and walked away.
Speaking to Motor Trend magazine on the anniversary of the crash in 2021, Watson said: “The MP4/1’s safety cell almost certainly saved my life. But I am convinced it also contributed to McLaren getting back to winning ways after a very lean spell. It was hugely exciting to be part of what felt like a revolution and amazing to think that not only did all racing teams follow McLaren’s lead, but that McLaren has stuck to carbon so religiously in everything it has done.”
McLaren has since been a pioneer of carbon-fibre in cars. In 1993, it created the astonishing McLaren F1 supercar, designed by Barnard’s successor as McLaren’s technical head of racing, Gordon Murray. That F1 was the first road car to have an entirely carbon-fibre structure, and every McLaren road car since has been built using the same material.
For road cars, carbon fibre isn’t necessarily about safety, but about saving weight. A carbon structure has a tensile strength about six times better than a comparable steel structure, yet will weigh about a quarter as much as the metal one. Light but strong, carbon fibre has long been seen as a panacea by the car industry for ballooning vehicle weights, assuming that its manufacturing processes – long, slow and expensive – can be made more affordable.
The EU might be about to put a stop to this, however, and for the first time carbon fibre is being spoken of as a harmful material. Carbon fibre is structurally very similar to fibreglass, albeit far stronger. By carefully aligning woven strands of pure carbon, and setting them under pressure and heat into a resin, carbon fibre can be made into almost any shape or structure.
The materials used to make it are not harmful per se, but the EU is concerned about what happens to carbon-fibre components when cars reach the end of their lives. The latest proposed End-of-Life Vehicles (ELV) regulations, due to come into force in 2029, name carbon fibre as a harmful material because when it is recycled, it’s possible that the carbon strands will break free from the resin and become airborne. If that happens, they have the potential to cause dangerous short circuits if they come into contact with electrical components, but much more seriously, they can also be inhaled and can cause painful irritation to skin or mucous membranes.
It’s for this reason that carbon-fibre components cannot be recycled, and this leaves carbon at a distinct disadvantage compared with steel and aluminium, both of which can be almost endlessly recycled when a car comes to the end of its life.
It’s a troubling balancing act – lighter cars are more efficient cars, but the batteries used by electric cars are, currently, inherently heavy. A way of breaking that cycle is to create lighter structures for the cars, using materials such as carbon fibre, but if carbon fibre is outlawed in Europe, as seems possible under these new proposals, then that route will be closed off.
The Mercedes Formula One team, which says that some 75 per cent of each of its racing cars is made up of carbon fibre, says that it is working on a more sustainable form of the material – both the fibres of carbon and the resin used to set them, but this project seems to be more about using sustainable materials and processes at the point of manufacture, rather than at the point of recycling, which is the EU’s current concern.
Murray, the former McLaren designer, has since moved on to set up his own car company, Gordon Murray Designs, and is working with Brunel University in the UK to develop Project M-LightEn which aims to design a new template for vehicle structures, using carefully extruded aluminium (80 per cent of which is recycled material) to create lighter, more efficient cars. However, even this design still uses significant levels of carbon fibre.
The car industry is not the only one to use a lot of carbon fibre. The material is increasingly in use in aviation, for wings and fuselages, and it’s also prevalent in wind turbine blades.
For most conventional cars, a ban on carbon fibre would be almost a moot point. As a material, it’s too expensive to use in a normal family car for anything other than decoration (and for decorative purposes, its appearance can be replicated by cheaper plastic). However, a ban would be a major problem for small-volume sports car manufacturers, such as McLaren, Aston Martin and, to a slightly lesser extent, Porsche and Ferrari, which rely on carbon fibre for lightweight structures and flexible aerodynamic panels.
If the EU’s putative ban is introduced, it wouldn’t come into force until 2029, giving manufacturers time to come up with alternatives. However, since carbon fibre’s introduction in the 1960s, no other material has stepped forward with comparable combinations of strength and lightness. Can a solution be found in merely four years?
