Speculation has been growing that the next SVT vehicle, the Mustang GT350 may get a dose of carbon fiber and other weight saving materials. Hints of carbon fiber wheels have shown up in Ford’s own parts website, which we reported on earlier this month.
In this latest video interview regarding Australian company Carbon Revolution’s wheels, Ford’s Senior Technical Leader, Matthew Zaluzec, again alludes to the potential use of carbon fiber wheels on a Special Vehicle Team vehicle.
When asked which class of vehicle could see the use of carbon fiber wheels first, Mr. Zaluzec replied:
“You look for a low volume vehicle first. Our Mustang program, it could be a Special Vehicle Team, it could be a Raptor, a Mustang Cobra type vehicle, those are really good test beds for several reasons.
The consumer that buys those cars are really looking for the advanced technology whether it’s a bell or a whistle or some lightweighting technology. Plus they also give us a lot of really good feedback. If there’s a problem, they are going to be the first one to tell us.
So we would look to test it on a specialty vehicle first and if we’re successful then we would look to make the natural migration, maybe you go to a low-volume 100,000 unit production per year, then maybe you scale it to 250,000 a year…”