What are the pros and cons of plastic cars?

Making cars lighter obviously increases fuel efficiency. There the benefits end as far as I'm concerned. If you've ever seen a regular (steel) sedan car that's gone up against a Ford F350 pickup (of which there are many where I live) you'd think more than twice about driving a little plastic car. Little plastic cars are only safe if everyone drives little plastic cars.

In Europe, many cars have plastic body panels as well as the bumpers. I've seen the results of someone hanging a bike rack from the rear hatch of a popular French car - While driving along a freeway, the fiberglass simply tore away at the point where the rack was hooked on, dumping the unfortunate owner's expensive bicycles in the path of oncoming traffic.

Formula 1 Racing, in fact several classes of auto racing, have always been on the cutting edge of safety. With cars reaching speeds far greater than normal drivers drive at, it is important that they make cars as safe as possible.

This link is to a clip on youtube that shows a crash that, believe it or not, the driver limped away from with a sprained ankle. Plastics and composites made that possible. You can't tell me that heaver or steal is better.

If the link is blocked go to youtube and search for f1 crash montreal

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_0HoXRcYrY

Pros: hides damage well, and lighter body means better fuel efficiency.

Cons: some insurance companies capitalize on the fact that the damage is hidden and use this to undervalue claims.

I recently read an article that some new cars have these "crumple zones" built in for PEDESTRIANS. It used to be that if you had a minor fender bender with a "frame" car, a good body shop shop could just pound out the damage and you are good as new. Now it seems that there is no such thing as minor. If the car crumples with a pedestrian, that sure sounds like a totaled car if you back into a light pole at 2 mph, or hit a dog, or some vandal decides to jump on your parked car in the middle of the night. But this is great for car companies. They can claim "safety feature" and increase sales. No more keeping a car till it falls apart after 15 years!

I'm for anything that will reduce weight which in turn will reduce energy consumption.

It appears that safety doesn't necessarily have to be compromised with unibody construction and airbag technology.

A great deal of the average auto/truck is already composites...

Instead of burning the black gold they should make electric plastic cars and stop the global warming so Mister Black Gold wouldn't have a reason to make WAR over it.

The demand would drop so would the price of it and we would live in a better world.
They are making to much money and their are polluting are lungs, are life, are nature and we stupid people are paying for their pollution. Come on wake up!
Always the F.... money that comes first,why not are beings, are planet???
We could accomplish so much more all together in are short lives, we are all on the same ship.

Space the final frontier, no it's are cupidity and the biggest and the first is Mister Black Gold!

Make America proud again! Never mind Mister Black Gold let's all go forward, we don't need him and his polluters.

Who Killed The Electric Car? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsJAlrYjGz8

Tom Hanks Electric car :Funny guy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNZT61Dgbvs

http://www.climatehotmap.org/

http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/

http://www.climatecrisis.net/

Please give generously air! Have a nice and long life, stop polluting and in the same time WAR!

After seeing my kids toys take a beating, both physically and by the sun for the last 17 years, I think plastics make great cars. Just look at those big blow-molded yard toys - indestructible in every way. The bumper covers on my '96 Taurus still look good, and it's been parked in the sun every day for 11 years. Make 'em out of recycled pop bottles and that's even better. And, the steel cage/frame can still be made from recycled steel.

I'm not really sure what my Rio's body is constructed of but I just recently parked my 1967 Plymouth Fury III due to tranny probs and the fact it got only 11 mpg- and bought the Kia. If it is/were made of plastic- 20 more mpg would be a definite pro, not being in my tank if hit by a semi would be an absolute con!

I believe that the introduction of plastic into the construction of body panels of cars is a disaster waiting to happen. If you look at the number of automobile accidents today compared to 30 years ago and then look are the survivability rates you will see that the newer plastic cars have a lower survivor rating. Granted today?s cars are not completely made of plastic however there is more and more plastic being use in their construction. I believe this should be our number one concern not if the car will rust or not I want to know I have a better chance of living after an accident. With plastic there is little protection for passengers or drivers where a steel frame and body panels provide more protection for both. If I where to have a choice I would pick metal in the construction of any car I was to drive.

I owned an '86 Pontiac Fiero GT which had a polymer body and there were several benefits. Lighter vehicle means better fuel efficiency or, in my case with this car, quicker acceleration (3 citations to prove it). Low speed impact usually results in scratch, not dent and last, but certainly not least, is that you'll never have one spot of rust no matter how badly you abuse the vehicle. I'm all for it.

Does anybody not remember the Fiero from Pontiac? The highest crash rating ever seen by the NHTSA was.....The Pontiac Fiero!!!! Steel cage to hang plastic body panels. RRIM (Reactive Reinforced Injection Molded) flexible panels below the side trim shook of door dings like water off a duck's back. The hood, rear deck, and roof were made of reinforced rigid panels. All you have to do is keep a drive train under it and it will last nearly forever. It offered 30+ mpg in the '80's. With a decent drivetrain (Quad-4 and 5 speed) the Fiero can deliver Porsche like performance for dollars less and still with 30+ mpg. By the way, please tell Lee NO car was ever made with 1/4" panels of steel.

ceramic chassis! or hydro electric aluminum, 1 liter engine.

In Germany the Trabaunt (A Plasic Body Eastern European car) was banned from the autobaun due to a massive number of traffic deaths. In fact all Eastern European Plasic shell cars were banned in Germany.

If all cars were made out of plastic so plastic cars were having collisions with other plastic cars it may make sense. However, in a country that loves its 6,000 pound gas gusseling SUV's it would be INSANE to put plastic cars on the roads. Germany figured it out very quickly.

We don't have "city" cars here in the states because they can't suvive a collision with the big cars we put on the roads hear in the US. Until we start driving based on need instead of status, we just need to keep driving steel cages to be survivable on the US highways.

I think you'll find that plastic parts can be good for some areas of an automobile and not good at all to really terrible for others. For instance, when it's exposed to engine compartment heat plastic tends to get brittle and fail over time. Ford experimented with plastic intake manifolds on the 4.6 several years ago and most of them have now been replaced by aluminum versions.

Also, steel, castiron and aluminum are ALL easily recycled materials that are used in car construction. Not far from our shop is a scrap yard where every day 5 tractor trailer loads of old cars, farm equipment, washing machines etc get hauled to "the grinder" in the city where they are pulverized and made ready to be melted down and made into brand new steel once again. While that might seem to be low tech it's really a sensible use of materials and resources, steel is a good thing.

plastic auto panels have been around for quite a few years. GM has been the leader but there are plenty of others. i am currently driving one of my brother's P-Body Fieros. there are still plenty of the U-vans (lumina, transport, sillouete), saturn's and of course the well known corvette running around on america's highways. the plastic panels are not lighter but they are easier to form into complex shapes and it saves the automakers money because dies for the p-panels seldom wear out. the other benefits are no rust and few dents. one bad thing is they tend to grow and shrink acording to the outside temperature, far more than steel, and that make panel alignment an issue. yes they use some nasty chemicals to keep the panels flexible but the steps taken to keep the steel from corroding are every bit as bad and hang around just as long.
in the late 90's i was one of the most highly trained body repair technicians in this part of the country and i spent a lot of time learning plastic panel repair. this thread brings back a lot of facts and figures i will never use again so THANKS to whoever started it.
several areas of caution keep coming up in my head. one is "lightweight" or lighter than steel. unless you get into some of the exotic materials like carbon fiber the "plastic" panels generally mean more weight in the end. the other is in recycling, a steel fender can be melted and remade into another fender. a plastic fender will be reused in something else because of contaminates, like paint. they become products we knew as blended.

Composites (plastics) have many advantages over steel, including the ability for some of them to be deformed and recover completely. Of course they don't rust. For bumpers and similar applications, you can use an unreinforced plastic that will absorb an impact with little or no damage. In high strength applications however, you need to use reinforced plastics, with fiberglass or carbon fiber, for example. These are far stronger than steel on an equal weight basis and in the rollover example I read, would easily support an SUV on it's roof. The downside is that if you exceed their ability to be deformed, they fail totally. Steel deforms easily, and in a major crash will become mangled, BUT it retains strength. Many years ago, I totaled an all steel VW beetle (the original one, not the new one). I was shaken, but unhurt and the car had to be more than a foot shorter than before the accident, but I still drove it home. There's little chance that a plastic car would be intact enough to do that although in a modern vehicle, I would have still been unhurt.
Another concept I've read here several times is that "my vehicle was undamaged" being translated to "safe". Some of these has to be luck... you were hit in such a way that you were uninjured, but tests done decades ago proved that the best scenario in an accident is for the vehicle to absorb the energy rather than the occupants. If the vehicle does not deform, that increases the accelerations that the occupants have to endure and increases the chances of injury or death. My brother had a Chrysler that had so much space in front of the radiator that you could stand in it. That car could crumple more than 2 feet before hitting anything solid. That space had only one reason to exist: absorb energy in an accident. Bumper to bumper rigidity is not safe. A vehicle that does not deform has not absorbed energy, but transferred it to things that can absorb it, like the occupants. Energy that is not absorbed has to go someplace. A rigid vehicle would rebound from hitting a rigid obstacle, increasing the acceleration the occupants must endure. One that crumples, will stop.
It's simple physics that a lighter vehicle will take the brunt of the impact in an accident, but I choose to not haul around 5000 pounds because I could hit something. Aside from the fuel cost, that weight makes the vehicle far less maneuverable and less able to avoid an accident. One isn't better than the other, it's a personal preference.

I am not going to say anything that has not been said in previous posts, but it seems people would rather blab than go back and read.

I think I read it 3 times already, but stop acting like these are plastics that your kids toys are made of. Take a hammer to that GLX Resin window and see how far you get. These are high quality materials that aren?t going to shatter easily.

Second, crumple zones are simple physics. The more energy your car absorbs the less there is for your body to absorb, the longer it takes your car to stop (or speed up if you are being hit) the less acceleration your body has to take. Yes at low mileage collisions it would be nice if your bumper was not ruined, but when is the last time anyone died from backing into a light pole. And I am sure you have a story about an old 3 ton car that someone walked away from after a horrible crash, but there are incalculable variables in a car accident so you really have to look at the big picture.

Third, if making these plastics will be more expensive than steel, why are they doing it. I think we have a consensus that their major goal is to make money. I have no idea what the cost of doing this is, but if it actually costs more than they must have some strong evidence that it will make their cars better in some other way, perhaps safety?

Give us a break, no car ever had 1/4 inch panels.

Why plastic? The material uses more oil to make in that quantity than is required to change the oil in a car. And it's very old technology. Flammable, brittle when cold, or when it gets a little old. Need I say more? What it is is cheap, that's why the auto makers love it. But there are far better materials available today. Try epoxy resins for example. So strong that it's possible to make an airplane from them and not even use a frame. Ceramics are getting really advanced as well. If you do the research, you will find engines have been made out of ceramics. Why plastic? Cheap is the name of the game here, make no mistake about it.

Plastic body? YES! Did you see the Formula 1 wreck where the car went into the wall at almost 90 degrees at 170MPH? The driver in the composite (plastic carbon fiber) capsule WALKED out of the hospital a few hours later!!
Great mileage; Increased performance from smaller engines; Better braking, less tire wear due to light weight; No corrosion; easy to repair; can be made from petroleum, soy, peanuts or many other sources, can be recycled; styling is far easier and virtuall unlimited (common platform and variable bodies or even multiple bodies.
Plastic bodies - can't wait!! Waited on someone to build a Prius type of car - it was well worth the wait!!

with plastic, they wont rust which is good in the winters but for safety I rather have that steel box. Just the other day I seen a grand-am which is constructed of plastic run right in to another car in a parking lot no both cars are totaled. Bring the steel box back, it might hit you over the head at the pump but I'll be safe if i get hit.

I don't care what they make them out of . . . . as long as they are safe
and reliable.

I am sure that if the right people get together to construct a "car shell" composed of plastic, I'm sure they can come up with a strong (plastic) material capable of withstanding high impacts, or high heat, and/or even throw in one of our most amazing products, Kevlar, and make said vehicle bulletproof!
If memory serves me right, I believe the government (or the powers that be) make the helmets for U.S. soldiers out of a bullet-proof plastic.

Unfortunately, in my years of living in this country, I know for sure that once the public chooses to swallow this concept whole, and plastic vehicles become the norm, "said autobody plastic manufacturers" will change their recipes and begin to make lower quality plastic bodies, to screw the consumers, and stuff their pockets with the profits!
(As in the previous posting regarding the '82 Riviera..., "a small legal civilian tank." They just don't make 'em like they used to!)