Are Porsche's new carbon wheels worth over £10,000?
Carbon fibre wheels are the coming thing, but do you know how they are made? Reinventing the wheel can’t be easy, after all. Helpfully Porsche – which is now offering carbon wheels as an option in the UK on its top 911 Turbo S Exclusive – has made a video explaining things…
Porsche’s wheels are made from braided carbon-fibre reinforced polymer – 11 miles of the stuff goes into each wheel. The fibres are braided on what Porsche says is the world’s largest carbon braiding machine (9m in diameter!) to form the rim base of each wheel.
The wheel centres are made from carbon-fibre fabric cut into 200 individual pieces per wheel. Once it’s all assembled, each wheel is impregnated with resin and pre-hardened at high pressure. Then it is hardened at high temperatures followed by a long cooling process before getting its protective coat of clear lacquer.
Why bother? Weight and strength of course. Porsche says that the wheels weigh 8.5kg less than the Turbo’s forged alloy wheels, for an overall reduction in unsprung wheel weight of 20 per cent – along with 20 per cent more wheel rigidity.
Porsche says the complex braiding procedure is a first in the industry and makes the wheel denser and more compact than the more conventional method of manufacturing pre-impregnated carbon-fibre fabric.
For now, you can only get them as 20-inch wheels for your 911 Turbo S Exclusive, 9J up front and 11.5J behind. It’s likely other sizes for other Porsche models will follow.
Which leaves just the small matter of price: £10,773.
Porsche
