Don't Worry, Your Carbon-Fiber Wheels Won't Shatter

Carbon-fiber wheels aren’t new. Honda ran them on its 1984 grand-prix bike, yet only in the last decade have carbon-fiber wheels really started to impact the production-car world.

It’s almost entirely thanks to Australian company Carbon Revolution. It started making carbon-fiber wheels for the aftermarket, but a contract with Ford for the 2016 Shelby GT350R turned them into a volume manufacturer. 

Carbon Revolution now has more than 80,000 wheels on the road and supply contracts with Chevrolet, Ferrari, Land Rover, and Ford. (Koenigsegg also has carbon-fiber wheels, though obviously in very low volumes. Porsche also built them in-house for the previous-generation 911 Turbo, though hasn’t offered them for a few years.)

Despite the opaque finish, the GT350R's wheels are, indeed, carbon fiber.

The potential upsides of carbon-fiber wheels are huge. Carbon fiber is both very light and very strong. Any automotive engineer will try to save weight, but some weight savings are more impactful than others. 

”The basic physics lesson that I like to give everyone is that the wheels are the second most important weight in the car,” says Dr. Ashley Denmead, founder and CTO of Carbon Revolution. (The most important being the chassis.) 

A car's wheels are unsprung and rotating masses. Reducing unsprung mass means less work for the suspension to do, improving ride quality. Reduced rotating mass cuts down on inertia, bringing small improvements in acceleration, cornering, and braking. And compared with all of a car’s unsprung and/or rotating masses, it’s easiest to save weight with wheels.

This is why we have aluminum-alloy wheels—they’re more expensive than steel wheels, but the benefits from their weight savings are generally worth the tradeoff in added cost. While currently far more expensive than aluminum units, carbon-fiber wheels promise to extend the benefits of lighter wheels. 

It’s difficult to find exact figures for wheel weights, but we do know that Carbon Revolution’s C8 Corvette Z06 wheels are 41 pounds lighter in total than the car’s standard forged-aluminum wheels, a significant amount of weight.

To the casual observer, carbon fiber might seem an odd wheel material. It’s