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I own a aerospace prototyping company that speciallizes in building composite replacement parts to replace metal ones (sound interesting yet?)
I just talked to our chief composites guru, and I think we can make carbon fiber (I'm talking REAL carbon here, not just a carbon-look) body panels for not that much $.
On a preliminary estimate, we can do a CF hood (with reinforcements, mounting brackets, etc) that will be (accurate to within much less than a mm) a true replacement for the E46M3 hood. Trunk lid should be just as easy...
side panels are a little tougher, as are outer door panels, but do-able (according to our guy).
To put this in perspective, the M3 hood (made out of aluminum for the E46) weighs at least 15kg (that is a conservative guess based on a 2mm thick sheet of aluminum alloy the size of the hood), with the reinforcements on the back, probably closer to 20kg. The CF replacement would drop about 10+kg off of that, and would be 2-5 times stiffer (you couldn't bend it, even if you tried)
Cost would be ~$500 for a hood or trunk lid, 6-700 for doors or fenders.
Replacing doors, fenders, hood and trunk would run you about $3000 and would drop 100kg or so.
Now, think about it this way. Decreasing the dry weight of the car by 100kg (or more, this is conservative) is the same as increasing the accelerative force by 7-10% at any rpm. For an E36M3, that would involve (using Dinan for example), adding the Stg 4 Dinan setup for ~2400 (with labor, roughly). so the two are pretty close in terms of price.
Not to mention the handling improvement.
Even better, think about it this way if you did a stg 4 Dinan setup, AND the CF panels, that would give you the "equivalent" of a non-lightweighted M3 with ~290ft-lbs of peak torque, or only 4% different from the supercharged E36M3! (for $5500, so cheaper than the SC too....)
Just food for thought.
According to my people it won't be that hard, so I am going to guinea pig my E46 when it comes in, and we'll see what happens....
There would be a significant group discount for bimmer.org members!
We could do this for E36's right now, or any other model you want, the setup costs with our process aren't that great, so if 10 people wanted the same part, that would be enough for us to do it....Just to get your minds churning
-m
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