Carbon Fiber® has long considered to be the eventual replacement for steel and even aluminum-bodied cars, offering high strength and low weight. The only bottleneck has been production and price, limiting the use of Carbon Fiber to only the most powerful and expensive vehicles on the planet. In the past decade, Carbon Fiber has begun to trickle down to lesser models, with Ford claiming to offer the world’s first instance of mass produced Carbon Fiber wheels on the new Shelby GT350R.

These lightweight wheels won’t be limited to just the high-powered, track focused Shelby however, as next year’s Ford GT supercar will also wear Carbon Fiber wheels, reports Australia’s CarGuide. Those wheels will be produced by a little-known outfit from Oz called Carbon Revolution, which won Ford’s multi-million dollar contract as the exclusive supplier of Carbon Fiber wheels.

The low rotating mass of carbon fiber wheels means more horsepower put directly to the street, and Ford began torture-testing Carbon Revolution’s wheels about two-and-a-half years ago. The difficulty of building Carbon Fiber wheels has been known for awhile now, with many prototypes failing after hitting sizable potholes, but Carbon Revolution claims to have cracked the code, impressing Ford enough to win the huge contract. The Geelong-based wheel company recently doubled its number of hires to keep pace with anticipated production.

Each carbon fiber wheel weighs about 15 pounds less compared to a standard alloy wheel, and is actually stronger than its metal-based counterparts. Nobody is talking about how much each wheel costs, saying only that they are “several times” more expensive than conventional alloys, though Carbon Revolution still hopes to build as many as 50,000 carbon fiber wheels in the next 2 years.

That translates to 12,500 sets of four wheels, some of which are doubtlessly planned for aftermarket sale. Still, that seems like way more wheels needed for the limited production Shelby GT350R and Ford GT. Could another Blue Oval vehicle be preparing to slip on some carbon fiber shoes?