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Originally Posted by SCOTT26
...If you sat in the Active Tourer in Geneva? Tell me you were not impressed by the quality and space of the interior?
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I drove down for the first two public days of the Geneva show, with a request from one of my colleagues for a full report on the Active Tourer. However, for the public days both of the show cars were kept behind a wall, nose on to the public, and not even on a turning mount to see all sides. I appeared from a distance that the interior was indeed high quality. But there was no opportunity to evaluate space, driving position, or visibility. I left appropriate feedback. With the BMW reps, not my colleague, since I could tell him almost nothing useful. Luckily for me the cars I'm interested in were wide open for a good close inspection (even if the paint selections were poor).
Quote:
Originally Posted by SCOTT26
...The M cars are going to be in the greatest position of all. The M3 and M4 shows what was available at that time. But progress by 2016/2017 when the G30 based M5 arrives in 2017 that progress in CFRP will be much further along.
The G30 will use CFRP in its structure but M5 will follow the M3 and M4 and use it in key areas of the engineering and for the first time on the body panels.
The same follows true for the joint BMW/Toyota cars which will include the next generation BMW M6.
BMW is the worlds largest manufacturer in producing Carbon Fibre based cars and this is due to the significant investment to build facilities and develop the process. The benefit is that it becomes entirely cost effective and allows BMW to spread the material across their whole portfolio as it becomes produced in more volume and becomes even more cost-effective....
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This sounds very promising indeed. But I hope it will not be used to make bigger cars with more equipment that end up the same mass as their predecessors. There was previously lot of talk about reduced weight as higher end cars became increasingly aluminum intensive. But instead of absolute weight reductions, it became "comparably equipped" (and almost all the extra equipment was standard). Talk is that the CFRP intensive cars will have significantly lower overall mass. I really really hope that is true. If so, then that will be good news for enthusiasts. Given what BMW has achieved reducing total mass of the M3/M4, I'm confident BMW will deliver some absolute reduction. The open question is what ballpark % reduction is "significant?" Thanks