Next Gen Mustang Mega Thread

[Camaro_Corvette]

Originally Posted by drummer5679

if anyone hasn't noticed, new camaros, mustangs, challengers etc.. are absolutely HUGE. like they're monstrous compared to their predecessors. Cutting down on size (and therefore, weight) will improve handling, fuel economy, speed, and so much more.

This is an incredibly good trend.

My fathers 70 challenger sits right next to his 2010 challenger. If i remember right, it looks a little fatter, but overall same size.

[Captain Awesome]

Originally Posted by Number 3

The C5 and C6 Corvettes are all composites bonded to the steel/aluminum hydroform rails. No problems at all in crashworthiness or durability. I worked on both the steel and aluminum frames and most of the parts bonded to them. No issues what so ever.

You assume that I believe that "composites" are 100% carbon fiber, which they are not.

The original Saturns and 4th Gen F-Bodies, as well as a few GM Minivans were made of "composite" body panels, which is a generic term that doesn't mean "carbon fiber".

As I said above, carbon fiber is a great lightweight and strong material, but it is very brittle and is prone to damage and failure from fatigue, etc. This is well documented in the field of aircraft design. It also costs a LOT more to produce than metal alloys. For the most part it doesn't pay for itself in weight savings and the manufacturing process for the material has a rather beefy "carbon footprint". Once everyone is fully committed to building cars with it, someone will figure out that it must be helping kill polar bears and we'll be back to square 1 with some even more expensive process making cars even more unobtainable.

[kbui]

Originally Posted by Captain Awesome

You assume that I believe that "composites" are 100% carbon fiber, which they are not.

The original Saturns and 4th Gen F-Bodies, as well as a few GM Minivans were made of "composite" body panels, which is a generic term that doesn't mean "carbon fiber".

As I said above, carbon fiber is a great lightweight and strong material, but it is very brittle and is prone to damage and failure from fatigue, etc. This is well documented in the field of aircraft design. It also costs a LOT more to produce than metal alloys. For the most part it doesn't pay for itself in weight savings and the manufacturing process for the material has a rather beefy "carbon footprint". Once everyone is fully committed to building cars with it, someone will figure out that it must be helping kill polar bears and we'll be back to square 1 with some even more expensive process making cars even more unobtainable.

I spent years of research in the crashworthiness of composites for structural components. Number 3 misses the point about composites usage in automotive. Up to now, composites have been used mainly as non-structural components and you can only reduce so much weight with this stuff, body panels, interior, bumpers....ALL of the crash structural parts are still metal. Strong light weight metals are being used. A few manufacturers are experimenting with composites (CF) structural parts but they are not cheap and they are certainly not ready for cheap mass produced cars.

The major difference in the design requirements of cars versus aircrafts and others is: the structural parts must be able to dissipate energies during the crash to protect the occupants. The ductility in metal allows for this plastic work (converting kinetic energies into the crumbled metals). This ductility in metal is a huge advantage that composites do not have. In aircraft design for example, the composites can be used to up to its brittle failure limit minus the safety factor and engineers do not have to worry about post brittle failure, i.e. if the stresses in the composite parts are exceeding the brittle failure, you already have a failure. In cars, we have to continue to work with the metals post yield because plastic flow and work hardening are what we rely on for energy dissipation.

Personally, I believe we will have to come up with more active safety systems so that we can keep the occupants safe without completely relying on the plasticity of metals before we can truly have composite structural components in cars. Got up too early this morning to run some "blast on composites" simulations and couldn't stay away. I have spent way too many years doing this stuff and it's still as interesting as it was when I got started in the 80's I love getting paid for doing stuff I enjoy doing anyway.

[Number 3]

Originally Posted by Captain Awesome

You assume that I believe that "composites" are 100% carbon fiber, which they are not.

The original Saturns and 4th Gen F-Bodies, as well as a few GM Minivans were made of "composite" body panels, which is a generic term that doesn't mean "carbon fiber".

As I said above, carbon fiber is a great lightweight and strong material, but it is very brittle and is prone to damage and failure from fatigue, etc. This is well documented in the field of aircraft design. It also costs a LOT more to produce than metal alloys. For the most part it doesn't pay for itself in weight savings and the manufacturing process for the material has a rather beefy "carbon footprint". Once everyone is fully committed to building cars with it, someone will figure out that it must be helping kill polar bears and we'll be back to square 1 with some even more expensive process making cars even more unobtainable.

No, actually I didn't. As I said, I worked on (and still work on) vehicles using extensive amounts of composites and plastics and I know that composites mean other materials so when I know why would I assume you don't?

CF just happens to be the poster child for two reasons I believe 1) generally it's the biggest mass savings and 2) show carbon like I have on my Ducati looks sweeeeeeet

Most of the composites you are thinking of have one big benefit and that is low tooling costs. A door inner panel for example would take 5 dies to make it from steel or aluminum (4 if you are lucky, good or both). And aluminum isn't cheap either so that is also one of the reasons composites (plastics) are favored on low volume applications like Corvette or special runs vehicles.

The CF materials used in the automotive applications won't be sensitive to fatigue. They are in fenders or roof panels that aren't stressed very much. In the Boeing Dreamliner though, the CF is structural and that may be what caused the brief recall.

Also SMC is much cheaper than CF and that works well in structural applications as well, it is just not as light.

Injection molded plastics also have applications for fenders. They were used on the Gen IV Camaro fenders and also on the old G bodies. The problem with those was thermal expansion. Similar to the old Saturns your door gaps change with temperature and to allow for expansion you have to have larger gaps than is considered good today. I think the Saturns had 6+ mm gaps all around the car.

You are absolutely correct in your point that they won't pay for themselves, at least in my opinion. Many of the OEMs as well as the dealers this past week have been telling us that the high cost of FE will drive many people out of the market costing millions of sales per year.

Yes, you can save 100, 200 or even 300 pounds on a car using composite materials but at a PREMIUM price relative to steel, or conventional materials. So how much? A bunch and we can leave it at that but it isn't a few hundred $ as the Group of Concerned Scientists will try to tell you. (BTW, did you know they aren't Scientists and I'm not sure they are Concerned about the same things we are)

Now if you add a hybrid battery into the equation, you have to save even more weight just to be even.

So back to the original point on the Mustang weighing 300 pounds less sure it is possible. With downsizing and clever engineering it should be no problem. And if you do it well, you can make a car smaller and maintain a roomy interior. The 3 Series is a good example of that. I think they actually made the new one a little bigger and still cut some weight out over the previous model. Look at the weight of the Hyundai Sonata, I think it's about 3200 pounds or so and yet it is roomy and does a lot of things very well.

Just watch out for the weight savings that comes from simply having a base 4 cyclinder engine. That alone with the smaller transmission you can use and the smaller axle can result in a good chunk of that 300 pounds.

[Number 3]

Originally Posted by kbui

I spent years of research in the crashworthiness of composites for structural components. Number 3 misses the point about composites usage in automotive. Up to now, composites have been used mainly as non-structural components and you can only reduce so much weight with this stuff, body panels, interior, bumpers....ALL of the crash structural parts are still metal. Strong light weight metals are being used. A few manufacturers are experimenting with composites (CF) structural parts but they are not cheap and they are certainly not ready for cheap mass produced cars.

The major difference in the design requirements of cars versus aircrafts and others is: the structural parts must be able to dissipate energies during the crash to protect the occupants. The ductility in metal allows for this plastic work (converting kinetic energies into the crumbled metals). This ductility in metal is a huge advantage that composites do not have. In aircraft design for example, the composites can be used to up to its brittle failure limit minus the safety factor and engineers do not have to worry about post brittle failure, i.e. if the stresses in the composite parts are exceeding the brittle failure, you already have a failure. In cars, we have to continue to work with the metals post yield because plastic flow and work hardening are what we rely on for energy dissipation.

Personally, I believe we will have to come up with more active safety systems so that we can keep the occupants safe without completely relying on the plasticity of metals before we can truly have composite structural components in cars. Got up too early this morning to run some "blast on composites" simulations and couldn't stay away. I have spent way too many years doing this stuff and it's still as interesting as it was when I got started in the 80's I love getting paid for doing stuff I enjoy doing anyway.

What point did I miss exaclty? I've worked on cars and trucks using all of the materials we are discussing so I'm not sure what I missed? You are bringing up energy management when we were simply discussing mass.

As I also have done crashworthiness in my career we can have that discussion as well so if you want to throw engergy management into the discussion we can. Just remember that the steel doesn't just crumple and absorb energy. If you look in detail you will see crush initiation points that are designed in to manage where the steel folds and hidden you will see many extra reinforcement and doublers and inserts to add strength in crush to other areas. This can also be done with SMC and CF as well. That just wasn't the topic of the post.

Every material has it's plusses and minuses. Walk your way simply from low carbon steel to the higher strength steels and you suddenly find yourself with materials that are also harder to form and cut. And those too behave differently in crash. So not every material lends itself to any application. It isn't as simple as how much you want to pay.

[Captain Awesome]

Originally Posted by Number 3

Most of the composites you are thinking of have one big benefit and that is low tooling costs. A door inner panel for example would take 5 dies to make it from steel or aluminum (4 if you are lucky, good or both). And aluminum isn't cheap either so that is also one of the reasons composites (plastics) are favored on low volume applications like Corvette or special runs vehicles.

Tooling costs can be spread out over a large volume of cars if they sell a lot of them, which is the point of the discussion. In order to meet the draconian CAFE standards, they will have to use exotic materials in ALL cars. So, that means volume production and the tooling costs become much less significant.

Remember that composite tooling costs less, but the fabrication process is a lot more complex, so this offsets some of the tooling advantages. It takes a lot less time to stamp sheetmetal than it does to cure composites, which often need to be made in a vacuum and cured in an autoclave and possibly heat treated as well.

The CF materials used in the automotive applications won't be sensitive to fatigue. They are in fenders or roof panels that aren't stressed very much. In the Boeing Dreamliner though, the CF is structural and that may be what caused the brief recall.

What you are talking about is current applications for carbon fiber. Essentially, it is mostly used as a decoration or a "high tech gimmick". If you say it's made from carbon fiber it impresses people more and if you expose the weave people "ooh" and "aah" at it, in spite of the fact that it is nothing more than a cosmetic thing. These uses of carbon fiber are not saving any fuel, or making the car significantly lighter or stronger, because they are not replacing heavy structural items with carbon fiber.

A good grade of fiberglass can get close to the tensile strength of carbon fiber with just a slight increase in weight. This could easily replace carbon fiber in fender wells and roof panels and would save a lot of the cost, it just wouldn't be useful as a "shiny thing" to make people buy the car.

You are absolutely correct in your point that they won't pay for themselves, at least in my opinion. Many of the OEMs as well as the dealers this past week have been telling us that the high cost of FE will drive many people out of the market costing millions of sales per year.

I saw an interesting article in one of the business sites this past week that said that the gov estimates for meeting CAFE put the cost at $3300 per car. This is going to cost a lot of sales because they said it would put the ability to get a car loan out of reach of (I believe they said) 17 million families. Since we know that it is in their best interest to paint the least damaging projection possible, I believe that the costs of a new car is going to be much higher than their predictions.

So back to the original point on the Mustang weighing 300 pounds less sure it is possible. With downsizing and clever engineering it should be no problem. And if you do it well, you can make a car smaller and maintain a roomy interior. The 3 Series is a good example of that. I think they actually made the new one a little bigger and still cut some weight out over the previous model. Look at the weight of the Hyundai Sonata, I think it's about 3200 pounds or so and yet it is roomy and does a lot of things very well.

From my experience there are a tremendous number of ways to get the weight out of existing cars in simple ways. For example, the plastics used on interior pieces could be reduced in weight or replaced with something lighter or removed completely by restyling the dashboards. There's a lot of bloat in the wiring harnesses we use as well. They could reduce the size of all the wiring by using a bus system for signalling devices and also stepping up to a higher voltage system.

Just watch out for the weight savings that comes from simply having a base 4 cyclinder engine. That alone with the smaller transmission you can use and the smaller axle can result in a good chunk of that 300 pounds.

This is the exact thing I do not want to see. It bodes very badly for V8 engines when people start thinking they MUST save weight to meet some arbitrary economy number pulled out of the air by someone who doesn't even own a car.

[drummer5679]

Holy walls of text batman

[cbass]

Mustangs weigh in the 3,400 to 3,500 range already...cutting down 300lbs would be looking at 3,100 to 3,330 range. That is feathery light compared to what we've been used to lately...and they article states they wish to maintain current power ratings....can you say Holy Shizznit? lol

Not the new ones. The v6 coupe weighs 3523. The v6 convertible weighs 3652. The v8 coupe weighs 3675. The v8 convertible weighs 3792.

If the next gen Camaro ends up on Alpha, we are still looking at the base to SS models randing from 3,400 to 3,600 lbs. Thats a very nice improvement, but will be compared to the Mustang if Ford does indeed keep current power in such a light car. (and then they will be calling us fat pigs once again lol)

The camaro always has been a little heavier than the mutang. Right now it's 257 lbs heavier than the mustang.

Have you guys read about the new Nissan Altima?? Its a refined 4 door car that weighs 3,100 or so lbs.

The I4 version weighs 3100 lbs. You want a 4 banger in a camaro? The v6 weights 3357 lbs. The V6. What would a v8 Altima weigh?

[FenwickHockey65]

Well, with the MY2013 details released yesterday...



This comes in at just over 3400 lbs in V6 form.

[DaBears]

The new Mustang will probably still weigh less than Camaro and certainly Challenger. Even if Chrysler gets rid of Challenger and make Barracuda, i dont see them as being able to find a platform small enough to be lighter than Mustang.

[camaro-dreamer]

Originally Posted by FenwickHockey65

Well, with the MY2013 details released yesterday...



This comes in at just over 3400 lbs in V6 form.

The CTS came in at about 100 lbs more than the camaro. I doubt the ATS will be 100 lbs more than the 6th gen camaro, but I would anticipate that we see some weight savings to put the car in at slightly under 3400 lbs, about the size of a new altima.

[KMPrenger]

Originally Posted by cbass

Not the new ones. The v6 coupe weighs 3523. The v6 convertible weighs 3652. The v8 coupe weighs 3675. The v8 convertible weighs 3792.

The camaro always has been a little heavier than the mutang. Right now it's 257 lbs heavier than the mustang.

The I4 version weighs 3100 lbs. You want a 4 banger in a camaro? The v6 weights 3357 lbs. The V6. What would a v8 Altima weigh?

OK, so I was a bit off on my Mustang numbers. A co-worker of mine has an 07 V6 and according to some website I saw, it stated that it weighed 3,4xx lbs so I went from that....sorry lol.

All I meant from the 3,100 lb Altima comment is that GM and Ford should also be able to build similiarly equipped Camaros and Mustangs around that weight...so by that, yes I mean a 4 cylinder Camaro and Mustang. I did not say I wanted a 4 cylinder lol. I'd take a 3357lb V6 Camaro any day!!

Originally Posted by FenwickHockey65

Well, with the MY2013 details released yesterday...



This comes in at just over 3400 lbs in V6 form.

Again...this is good news and hopefully means we will see a next gen Camaro V6 comming in right at this weight!

[cbass]

OK, so I was a bit off on my Mustang numbers. A co-worker of mine has an 07 V6 and according to some website I saw, it stated that it weighed 3,4xx lbs so I went from that....sorry lol.

They were a bit lighter earlier in their life cycle before the coyote motors and changes. So you would be correct for a 2007.

All I meant from the 3,100 lb Altima comment is that GM and Ford should also be able to build similiarly equipped Camaros and Mustangs around that weight...so by that, yes I mean a 4 cylinder Camaro and Mustang. I did not say I wanted a 4 cylinder lol. I'd take a 3357lb V6 Camaro any day!!

The problem is the big v8 and torque. You need enough structure to be able to support that kind of power/torque output. It's not just engine weight you have to take into consideration. What you need to support a I4 is different from a v6 which is different from a v8.

I too welcome lighter versions, but for some reason cars right now have become extremely heavy. It's not just the camaro.

[kbui]

Originally Posted by Number 3

What point did I miss exaclty? I've worked on cars and trucks using all of the materials we are discussing so I'm not sure what I missed? You are bringing up energy management when we were simply discussing mass..

The main different in designing for automotive crash versus other applications is the crash structural parts are not simply designed to the material's elastic limit. High strength materials give you stronger structures due to higher yield points, but they take away the ductility. The area beneath the stress-strain curve is the plastic work that the material can absorb. Metals have these plastic works and composites don't. When dealing with crash structures, you can't separate mass from energy management. With regards to the crush initiators in metal parts, they are there to control how and where the crush initiates and progress, you still need ductility to dissipate the energy. I like the analogy of a spring/damper/mass system for metals and only spring/mass for composites. Composites are great, strong and light, it's just very difficult to use in automotive crash for the time being.

Didn't mean to offend you, but I worked on a small team that started the crash simulation technology via computers at GM in the mid 80s and subsequently, I worked for the software company that developed and sell that piece of software that is being used by most auto makers today. Before the crash by computers was available, the crash design was an arduous task for any new platform.