There must be a good reason there are not many cars around with carbon fibre bodywork. Is it the cost of materials or something very tricky/specialised in working with it. Would love to have this on my locost, but the off the shelf stuff is big bucks.

Can anybody tell me why????

Genuine carbon fibre material is extremely expensive, so it would not be cost effective to use it on a car unless it was already fully lightened in every other respect possible e.g. magnesium uprights, extruded alloy chassis etc
John

REAL carbon fibre would be too expensive to be worth it. However, you can get plastic which looks a lot like it for a fraction of the cost. It looks ok so long as you don't fall into the trap of buying some coloured stuff!

Chris

Caron Fiber is great! Except for the cost which is why it's not used in production vehicles. The other reason is because it's so strong... it's too strong. Production vehicles are designed with crumple zones. Carbon fiber doesn't crumple.

Carbon Fibre isn't the fantastic material people make it out to be, yes it's good in certain applications and is very light and stiff, but when it goes it goes with a bang. A broken CF tub will be expensive to fix. Anyway steel is the greatest, easy to work with, cheap and widely available. In some applications it's the best of all materials to use.

A cheats way to get that genuine CF look is to make something in fibreglass, ie dashboard etc, but using a sheet of CF as the first layer in a clear resin. a 1m^2 sheet of CF weave comes in at around £20.