Plastic Car Bodies

When you look at the sale figures of cars with plastic bodies, they don’t really match up with the performance of them. High quality plastic outperforms metal in a number of different metrics; with the chief of them being the weight. Weight has an enormous impact on your cars performance. As long as you can maintain the balance of the vehicle, the lighter it is, the better the performance; which is why you see all of the vehicles in F1 races using ultra light weight materials. This hasn’t really translated into massive sales for plastic car bodies however. Instead, we’ve seen people voting with their wallets, and specifically looking for cars using more traditional materials; metal. Which is a shame, as the performance of the low weight plastics is better in a number of ways besides weight. Plastic doesn’t rust, it’s a lot cheaper, and it improves a car’s fuel efficiency. The only part that plastic works less well than metal, is in safety. This is because it is a lot harder for engineers to design crumple zones, which is the best available method for reducing the shock of an impact, and spreading it over a larger area and time. This is a lot easier with metal than it is with plastic.