Carbon fiber cost is spread across material, labor, machine time, curing, QA, and scrap risk. The biggest cost areas: material, manual layup, curing, QA, machining, and scrap.
Manual labor is one of the largest controllable cost and time drivers. From the analysis: manual steps are 50–75% of production time and 30–50% of final part cost. Fully removed, final part cost could theoretically fall by 30–50%, before robotics, R&D, facilities, maintenance, and automation overhead.
If machines perform manual steps 5× faster than humans, and manual labor is roughly 60% of total production time, total cycle time falls by about 48–50%, roughly 1.9× higher throughput.
Glass fiber is cheaper and good enough for many applications. Carbon fiber is more expensive, but wins when weight, stiffness, strength-to-weight, fatigue, or dimensional stability matter. We can consider starting with glass fiber, and move to carbon where the performance justifies the cost.