I know this is a place for software/web developers but good god, really? It was at best a minor tech article in a car magazine in the Wal-Mart magazine stands.
What exactly did you learn?
He kept saying the i3 "life module" (agile! AGILE!) was some magical achievement. Yeah, carbon fiber is neat. They also choose the grain direction of panels for optimum efficiency.
- We've been using grain direction on wood for what, thousands of years?
- We've been made cars "strong" for century. It's called a tube frame. And it's one of the main reasons dragsters/NASCAR drivers don't die on impacts that will kill most people in consumer cars.
What's actually important these days is not how "strong" a frame is. It's how it deforms to absorb maximum energy on impact so the passengers experience the least acceleration possible. "Strong" has been solved. And crush areas have been common for decades upon decades. The only new thing here is they're using carbon fiber. And the only reason they're doing that... is 1) "marketing" and 2) weight reduction because battery cars are very heavy AND very sensitive to weight for mileage.
Automotive companies aren't on the frontline of technology. They're on the frontline of CHEAP/mass-producible technology.
Simply putting some carbon fiber on a body is not magical to us practicing mechanical engineers. But I guess it may seem like "magic" to software people, the way mechanical people see IT/software as magic.
What's actually "Cool" about this company/video is how they can tear down entire vehicles and come up with accurate cost estimates, as well as the construction order. That takes a _lot_ of work and industry experience. But the technology in those cars? It's not even remotely new.