The luxury car market is moving toward the light—as in, light weight.
One auto trend emerging from this year's Paris auto show is a strong push to make luxury cars more lightweight than ever. WSJ's Joe White takes a look at Lamborghini's Sesto Elemento prototype and Jaguar's C-X75 aluminum-bodied hybrid.
Auto makers are showcasing some svelte creations at the Paris auto show, a biennial festival where new models are unveiled to try to win over dealers.
Consider the Lamborghini Sesto Elemento, a prototype supercar in menacing dark gray with red trim. If Mephistopheles needed a car, this would be it.
The most extraordinary thing about this Lambo isn't the 570 horsepower, V10 engine—that beast is already available in other Lamborghinis. What makes the Sesto Elemento remarkable is its lightness. The car weighs just 2,202 pounds, or 999 kilograms. The current production Lamborghini Gallardo is comparatively portly at 2,948 pounds.
Deftly trimming the weight from cars—reversing a two-decade trend of larding vehicles with ever more safety and comfort features—will be vital to the competitiveness of every auto maker in the years ahead.
From Beijing to Brussels to Washington, D.C., governments are demanding that cars burn less petroleum or ideally none at all. Consumers, however, don't want to sacrifice comfort or performance the way they had to in the early 1980s, the last time car makers were compelled to dramatically downsize their cars. Especially for producers of luxury vehicles, making cars light and efficient by making them ugly and uncomfortable is not an option. The cars have to be gorgeous and fast and still efficient.
Jaguar
Jaguar pairs twin gas turbines of about 77 pounds apiece with lithium-ion batteries in its C-X75.
To accomplish its slim-down, Lamborghini fashioned the Sesto Elemento's front frame, exterior panels and the crash box surrounding the driver from carbon fiber-reinforced plastic. Much of the suspension and wheel rims are made of carbon fiber compounds. Not even the tailpipe is made of steel. It's a lightweight material called Pyrosic that Lamborghini describes as a glass-ceramic composite able to withstand temperatures of more than 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit.
The result is a car that asks each of its 570 horses to pull just 3.8 pounds. By comparison, each of the 500 horses available in the V10 engine of a BMW M5 has to haul about 10 pounds of body weight. The lopsided power-to-weight ratio means the Sesto Elemento can roar from a standstill to 60 miles per hour in just 2.5 seconds, Lamborghini says. Go much quicker than that, and you'd be on the brink of time travel, or of doing time.
"We see the future as not so focused on increasing power, as there is a limit to power increase due to emission regulations, but in reducing weight," says Lamborghini Chief Executive Stephan Winkelmann in an email. Carbon fiber technology will be central to this strategy, he writes.
The Lamborghini takes the high-tech pursuit of light weight toward fantasy. At the more practical end of the spectrum is the Range Rover Evoque, scheduled to go on sale next summer.
Land Rover is best known for its imposing, gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles. The 2010 Range Rover HSE Lux model, which starts at $84,285, has a curb weight of 5,697 pounds, and has combined city/highway fuel efficiency rating of 14 miles per gallon.
The Evoque weighs more than a ton less, tipping the scales at just over 3,500 pounds. Some of the difference from the big Range Rover is simply that the Evoque is smaller. But the Evoque also has an aluminum hood and roof panels, aluminum suspension parts, plastic front fenders and tailgate—even a thinner windshield and lighter weight sound-deadening materials.
The payoff for all this effort to sweat the flab out of the Range Rover concept is that the Evoque can manage with a four-cylinder engine. In the U.S., the Evoque will be equipped with a 240 horsepower, 2.0 liter four-cylinder, aluminum engine that's 88 pounds lighter and about 20% more fuel efficient than Land Rover's current 230 horsepower, 3.2 liter six-cylinder.
Lamborghini
Lamborghini keeps its Sesto Elemento prototype's weight down by using carbon fiber-reinforced plastic.
In Europe, Range Rover plans to offer the Evoque with a 2.2 liter turbodiesel expected to deliver nearly 43 miles per gallon.
Other auto makers had lightweight show cars on display in Paris. Audi unveiled a 3,197-lb. diesel-electric hybrid sports car called the e-tron Spyder.
Jaguar unveiled an aluminum-body, hybrid show car called the C-X75 that offers an innovative take on the idea of a hybrid. The C-X75's electric motors are powered by lithium-ion batteries charged by two small gasoline turbines, each weighing just 35kg each. It's like having two very tiny jet engines under the hood. The C-X75 weighs just 2,970 pounds, even though it's carrying a 500 pound battery pack. Battery weight is a major concern behind efforts to make cars lighter, says Mark White, Jaguar's chief technical specialist for body engineering.
"If you just put a lot of battery technology and motors into a conventional car, you end up making the car heavier than a conventional high-efficiency petrol or diesel engine," he says. That could result in putting out more carbon dioxide per mile.
To skinny down the body weight of the C-X75, Mr. White says Jaguar engineers and designers made the car's shiny skin from aluminum with a thickness of just 0.88 millimeters, or just over .03 of an inch, compared with the average gauge of aluminum skin panels in current European production cars of about 1 to 1.2 mm thick. That saves about 20 pounds.
Not all efforts at cutting weight are visible or as large-scale. BMW AG, for example, announced a new eight-speed automatic transmission for its X3 sport utility vehicle that has two more gears than the previous transmission (for better fuel efficiency) but doesn't add any weight.
Lightweight designs and exotic materials aren't necessarily cheap. But for luxury-car brands the risk of not pushing the boundaries of technology are greater. Governments in the world's major luxury car markets are stepping up pressure. The U.S. government just proposed that car makers field fleets by 2025 that average 62 miles per gallon, and China is intent on becoming the world's leading market for electric vehicles.
Decades ago, luxury car makers could sell a simple equation of Size+Power = Prestige. Soon, a luxury car made only of steel and plastic could be as déclassé as a cinder-block sized cellphone.