Steel driveshaft vs carbon fiber driveshaft, Which is stronger and by how much?

Most vehicles in this day and age come equipped with a steel driveshaft, in fact, a lot of components on your car are probably made out of good old fashioned steel.

Steel is used for good reason, obviously. The material is not only affordable and abundant, but it also proves to be strong enough to handle most reasonable applications. Not everyone is out there launching the life out of their car on the drag strip on a weekly basis. Well, unfortunately for us, a lot of the world that we look at isn’t exactly “reasonable” as far as manufacturers are concerned, so that’s where the upgrades come into play.

When you’re making a good amount of power in a high-performance application, steel can tend to twist and also bears the drawback of being quite the heavy material. To solve this problem, it’s time to beef up components like the driveshaft and to do that we take a look at materials like carbon fiber.

Carbon fiber might be a lot more expensive but with that expense comes a fraction of the weight and more than twice the strength of steel, at least in this situation. Check out the video below to see just how much further carbon fiber can go over its steel counterpart. Is this how you expected the test to play out?