BMW Motorrad now working on carbon fibre chassis technology

BMW has officially confirmed that work is underway at the Bavarian firm to investigate the use of carbon fibre in motorcycle applications.

Karl Viktor Schaller, who is in charge of bike research and development at BMW confirmed this. Moreover, BMW have invested millions of pounds into not only developing the technology for use in road cars, but have also even bought a carbon-fibre manufacturing company in order to meet demands for their new cars, including the i3, i8 and latest 7 Series.

Schaller said, “There may well be a number of bikes where carbon-fibre technology can be introduced. We have seen this technology on our cars and these are at a top level. I think this would be the same for bikes. I do not see wide use of carbon-fibre but there are functional designs in carbon that you cannot do in aluminium. At the moment BMW is doing a lot of research in carbon-fibre for motorcycles.

“In terms of the way carbon-fibre might be used it’s not a case of simply replacing aluminium castings for the same shape of component built from carbon-fibre. The material works very differently and would need for a complete rethink of how the motorcycle was designed from the start. This has been one of the most surprising elements of the testing and evaluation we have been doing so far. We have found that in certain circumstances carbon-fibre is a lot stronger and better at withstanding crash damage that we thought possible.”

This means we could see carbon fibre being used in the chassis of future motorcycles from BMW, it could be as soon as the next generation S1000RR.

Source - MCN