Carbon fiber—stiffer and stronger than steel but a third its density—embedded in plastic resin forms very light and strong "advanced composite" material, analogous to wood (cellulose fibers embedded in lignin) or concrete (steel rebar embedded in cement and aggregate). Advanced composites, increasingly familiar in sporting goods, have long been used in military and aerospace structures, but to compete in automaking their production must become about a thousandfold cheaper and faster. The handicraft process for placing the carbon fibers in the proper positions, impregnating them with liquid resin, and slowly baking the combination to "cure" it by a chemical reaction is far too slow and costly for making auto bodies: Specialty cars made in this way, like the Formula One-inspired Mercedes SLR McLaren, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Some automakers are making encouraging progress in bridging this cost gap. BMW has 60 specialists perfecting its proprietary process, which uses the world's biggest resin-transfer-molding press and is already making more than a thousand carbon-fiber roofs and hoods per year for high-end models. Toyota and Honda are widely believed to want to migrate advanced manufacturing technique from their carbon-fiber airplane divisions back to automaking.

Meanwhile, higher-volume production, especially for aerospace (over half the weight of Boeing's new 787 is advanced composites), is making composite materials better and cheaper, and innovators outside the auto industry are developing new manufacturing processes.

For example, a small private Colorado firm, Fiberforge, a firm this writer chairs and owns stock in, is working with automakers, their suppliers, and other industries to commercialize a novel process that appears able at scale to achieve 80 to 100 percent of the performance of hand-layup aerospace composites at 10 to 20 percent of their cost. This process first makes a flat "tailored blank"—super-strong polymer "plywood" with variously oriented layers of carbon fiber and thermoplastic—automatically and precisely formed by a digitally controlled machine akin to an inkjet printer. The tailored blank is then heated until the thermoplastic softens, and stamped on a hot die in a conventional thermoforming press to mold it into the desired complex shape. One minute later, the cooled part is ready to trim and use.

Further information is available at http://www.fiberforge.com/ and in the trade press articles and technical papers linked to that site.

Amory B. Lovins is co-founder and chief executive officer of Rocky Mountain Institute.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.