Jaguar Land Rover unveils project to develop cheap carbon-fibre

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is on a mission to develop new lightweight materials to replace traditional steel and aluminium in a bid for greater efficiency.

Announcing it is forging a consortium of academics and industry partners under the Tucana umbrella, JLR says that within just four years it hopes to help the UK become a world leader in low-carbon tech, preventing 4.5 million tons of CO2 emissions between 2023 and 2032.

Key to boosting efficiency is JLR's pledge that it will increase stiffness levels of its cars by 30 per cent while reducing total body weight by 35kg thanks to the advanced composites it's developing.

Despite only being at the beginning of its engineering journey, JLR says it will have a fleet of Tucana prototypes on the road as soon as 2022.

Explaining how project Tucana will work, Ian Risk, chief tech officer of CCP Gransfen and The Centre for Modelling & Simulation, one of the companies participating, said: "Tucana shows how new technology development can be optimised and accelerated with digital engineering.

"Using new digital design, development and manufacturing tools helps to deliver emissions reduction faster so the UK economy can reach zero emissions quicker," he said.

The Tucana project will run alongside JLR's existing two-year experimentation with new materials that the car-maker announced late last year.

That project is investigating how innovative composites cope with harsh or corrosive environments, with materials enduring a 400,000km evaluation on roads in North America.