Tesla Reinvents Carmaking With Quiet Breakthrough (reuters.com) 248
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Tesla has combined a series of innovations to make a technological breakthrough that could transform the way it makes electric vehicles and help Elon Musk achieve his aim of halving production costs, five people familiar with the move said. The company pioneered the use of huge presses with 6,000 to 9,000 tons of clamping pressure to mold the front and rear structures of its Model Y in a "gigacasting" process that slashed production costs and left rivals scrambling to catch up. In a bid to extend its lead, Tesla is closing in on an innovation that would allow it to die cast nearly all the complex underbody of an EV in one piece, rather than about 400 parts in a conventional car, the people said.
The know-how is core to Tesla's "unboxed" manufacturing strategy unveiled by Chief Executive Musk in March, a linchpin of his plan to churn out tens of millions of cheaper EVs in the coming decade, and still make a profit, the sources said. While Tesla has said its unboxed model involves producing large sub-assemblies of a car at the same time and then snapping them together, the size and make-up of the modular blocks is still the subject of speculation. Two of the sources said Tesla's previously unreported new design and manufacturing techniques meant the company could develop a car from the ground up in 18 to 24 months, while most rivals can currently take anywhere from three to four years.
The five people said a single large frame -- combining the front and rear sections with the middle underbody where the battery is housed -- could be used in Tesla's small EV which it aims to launch with a price tag of $25,000 by the middle of the decade. Tesla was expected to make a decision on whether to die cast the platform in one piece as soon as this month, three of the sources said, though even if they do press ahead the end product could change during the design validation process. The breakthrough Tesla has made centers on the how the giant molds for such a large part are designed and tested for mass production, and how casts can incorporate hollow subframes with internal ribs to cut weight and boost crashworthiness. To overcome the obstacles associated with this manufacturing technique, Tesla is collaborating with firms that use 3D printing technology to create sand molds for casting, which is cost-effective and allows for rapid design iterations. The sand casting process significantly reduces design cycle times compared to traditional metal mold prototypes.
Tesla also plans to use solid sand cores within the molds to create hollow subframes, addressing weight and crashworthiness concerns. However, there is still a decision to be made regarding the type of press to use for casting large body parts, with trade-offs between productivity and quality.
The know-how is core to Tesla's "unboxed" manufacturing strategy unveiled by Chief Executive Musk in March, a linchpin of his plan to churn out tens of millions of cheaper EVs in the coming decade, and still make a profit, the sources said. While Tesla has said its unboxed model involves producing large sub-assemblies of a car at the same time and then snapping them together, the size and make-up of the modular blocks is still the subject of speculation. Two of the sources said Tesla's previously unreported new design and manufacturing techniques meant the company could develop a car from the ground up in 18 to 24 months, while most rivals can currently take anywhere from three to four years.
The five people said a single large frame -- combining the front and rear sections with the middle underbody where the battery is housed -- could be used in Tesla's small EV which it aims to launch with a price tag of $25,000 by the middle of the decade. Tesla was expected to make a decision on whether to die cast the platform in one piece as soon as this month, three of the sources said, though even if they do press ahead the end product could change during the design validation process. The breakthrough Tesla has made centers on the how the giant molds for such a large part are designed and tested for mass production, and how casts can incorporate hollow subframes with internal ribs to cut weight and boost crashworthiness. To overcome the obstacles associated with this manufacturing technique, Tesla is collaborating with firms that use 3D printing technology to create sand molds for casting, which is cost-effective and allows for rapid design iterations. The sand casting process significantly reduces design cycle times compared to traditional metal mold prototypes.
Tesla also plans to use solid sand cores within the molds to create hollow subframes, addressing weight and crashworthiness concerns. However, there is still a decision to be made regarding the type of press to use for casting large body parts, with trade-offs between productivity and quality.
The economics don't seem right (Score:3, Informative)
Over $20k of the sticker price is the battery pack, that's why no full-sized EVs are under $40k. I do not see Tesla finding enough 'innovation' to get the non-battery manufacturing costs under $5k.
And then there's still markup to consider... they have to make a profit.
Re:The economics don't seem right (Score:5, Insightful)
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You can buy a brand new 50kWh pack from China to fit as a replacement to a Leaf, for around $7,000 shipped.
China makes the best automotive batteries, by the way. These are high quality packs. Tesla already uses them, and they out-perform the packs made in the US by a significant margin. Check Bjorn Nyland's tests for details if you are interested.
Anyway, given that's $7000 at retail, manufacturers will be paying a lot less. So a $20k battery is probably around 200kWh, bigger than any current cars or light t
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Try Alibaba and AliExpress as your starting point. Find some manufacturers and contact them directly.
Alternatively, there will be suppliers in your country who import from China and add their mark-up, if you want to avoid the hassle of importing and want a better warranty.
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Yes, find reviews and ideally use one of the known good suppliers.
Re: The economics don't seem right (Score:2)
It might run on 16 D Cells
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I'm not sure whether Baron_Yam actually believes that modern EV battery packs cost $20k to produce or whether they're just trolling.
Maybe they're confusing the cost to the company to produce a pack (~$6-11k) with the cost to the user to replace an old pack with a brand new one in a preexisting vehicle, including markup, taxes and labour? The latter still isn't $20k - it's like $13-17k** if you were to have Tesla itself do it off warranty (the warranty is 8 years) - but cheaper if you got a third-party cert
Re:The economics don't seem right (Score:5, Insightful)
I think their calculation depends on a significant reduction in the cost of battery packs.
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Re:The economics don't seem right (Score:4, Insightful)
Correct - we have been around the block several times with Musk distracting from current difficulties by making fanciful promises.
Full self driving, the whole boring machine breakthrough BS, his robotic Tesla factory boondoggle, Hyperloop, supposed missions to the Moon and Mars which were supposed to have already happened, literally any of his announced business forecasts, I am sure I am missing several - it is hard to keep up with his mountain of BS.
Without an actual technologist inspecting the claimed process this should be regarded as hot air. Especially since none of this actually exists! Let that sink in. This is likely the fantasy boring technology or the Hyperloop which existed only as press releases and Musk's pronouncments.
Read carefully! They are talking about how they are going to make this miracle press machine that does not exist, and has not shown it can make the parts as claimed.
Re:The economics don't seem right (Score:5, Informative)
Tesla already is using it:
https://insideevs.com/news/673... [insideevs.com]
It is part of why Tesla has already been able to repeatedly slash prices and still produce EVs at a profit, putting pricing pressure on competitors like Ford were already losing money on theirs.
https://electrek.co/2023/09/12... [electrek.co]
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So, most of the claims in the article are speculation, as is the prevalence, reliability and cost-effectiveness of giga casting in Tesla's current production.
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That insideevs article says that giga casting may have been used to make the model Y
Read a bit closer -
Tesla is believed to have first used it on the Model Y, reportedly replacing assemblies consisting of 70 parts, with just two to three huge castings.
There is no doubt that it's used to make the model Y. The quote is one what Tesla first used it for.
I mean, you can watch video [youtube.com] where they actually tear the gigacast parts out of a vehicle.
You can literally see that the structures are huge and mostly one piece. From the video of the teardown, it's 187.4 pounds, with a few small brackets connected later - bolted and welded. But mostly 1 piece.
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"These marketing "teardown" videos are not the gospel truth"
Those teardown vehicles are purchased by Munro or provided by the customers who are paying for the work.
Munro has uncovered things that weren't previously known, that weren't confirmed by Tesla until later & in a few cases, not confirmed at all.
Re:The economics don't seem right (Score:5, Informative)
What would you count as confirmation from Tesla? What are we trying to confirm? Why do we need confirmation from them?
The video I linked is a literal teardown by an independent group. It's isn't marketing, at least not for Tesla. The same group has teardowns for Rivian, Hyundai, Toyota, and more. The guy also does less destructive reviews.
Why do I need to address something in the Reuters article? I was addressing your claim that the insideevs article was claiming that the gigapress being used for the model Y is in question. It really isn't.
Reuters confirms gigapress basically - "The company pioneered the use of huge presses".
Currently, Gigapress can do the front and back sections as separate casts. I'm not quite sure about the middle. Being able to do the whole thing in one cast would indeed be a game changer, but there's a lot of development necessary, of course. I was even reading that Tesla had to develop a special aluminum alloy to handle the casting properly.
Doing it with a smaller EV would indeed be easier, and help reduce cost more to meet the $25k goal.
The article covers a lot of gigapress technology, which is full of relatively new technology like 3D printing sand castings, in order to increase the possible complexity while reducing cost.
But yeah, the reuter's article is full of future stuff. But that's mostly on how the details of how Tesla will move in the future will change. Not that change won't happen. It still has a good bit of history that is already disrupting traditional car makers. There's a lot of articles about them moving towards gigapresses too. Like Toyota making a monolithic rear for a future vehicle.
Re:The economics don't seem right (Score:5, Informative)
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"The problem with casting is how to make crumple zones, a solid piece of metal is just that - Solid. Tesla is looking at if they can introduce Sandcores to create hollow castings to introduce weak spots that crumple in a crash. That is a difficult task and noone has solved it yet. and that part is speculation."
+1 Informative
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Both of you are correct.
Just like when someone says "Elon Musk has made fantastic things" and another one says "He is an asshole".
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Are you shorting Tesla or something? Sure, his time frames on Mars have been hopelessly unrealistic, but who cares? He's still doing huge things at both Tesla and SpaceX and is way ahead of other carmakers on EVs in most ways.
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"Oh yes those engineers volunteered and made a rocket with parts they found on the side of the road, then Musk took the credit"
Tom Mueller was the OG rocket genius at SpaceX, the principal architect of the Merlin engine, and in between his work there, from founding in 2002 to his departure in Nov 2020, and his previous work at TRW, he was building his own designs & testing them in the desert.
I can't claim to have seen or read every SpaceX presentation but I've never heard Elon Musk or Gwynne Shotwell s
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"the whole boring machine breakthrough BS"
Was the Austin GF built using Boring bricks? If not then why not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I'm reminded that Elon promised the Nevada Gigafactory would be powered by renewables including ground-mounted solar & onsite wind turbines.
I believe geothermal was also mentioned & 7 years since the grand opening event, only rooftop solar has been installed & even that has been fitful, at best.
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That's precisely why Tesla (and every other automaker) is throwing billions at building out battery capacity. Tesla itself is expanding out their Nevada factory with more capacity, doing cell production at their new Austin facility and even investing in their own lithium processing plant.
A not-insignificant price of the batteries today isn't just the manufacturing and materials cost but the demand drive behind it. If every Tesla cell is accounted for as soon as it rolls off the line prices can remain high
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Some car manufacturers go for lighter cars that can use a smaller battery pack.
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"I do not see Tesla finding enough 'innovation' to get the non-battery manufacturing costs under $5k."
Nor Tesla ever selling a car for $25K. The 25K price is for the car you can never order and will never ship, just as was done with the Model 3.
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Last week took me 36 hrs from deposit to uploading paperwork to phone call to schedule pickup. Granted I deliberately chose what was available but there were plenty of grays available which I like. Basic M3 was just under 38k (minus the typical tax and reg costs). Then 3 levels of California and Fed rebates to get the net cost down.
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Model 3 was promised to start at 35k, and it’s around that. Not seeing the problem. Tesla is 100% right that manufacturing is key. Get the cost of the chassis as close to the price of the metal used to build the vehicle. So if the 2 tons of metal costs 4k the chassis build cost should be like 5k.Design everything for robotic manufacture in mind first. Robotic manufacturability over function and form. That’s what he wants Tesla engineers thinking about day and night. Make cars like coca cola make
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Car manufacturing was one of the last places where you could get a middle class salary with a high school education. Tesla is doing their best to eliminate these jobs so that if you want to be in car manufacturing you will need a college degree. Anything simpler will be done by robots.
If the dreams of A.I. come through in the near term, those non-robot jobs may be done by cheaper workers / engineers in low-wage countries with the assistance of ChatGPT et al.
Re: The economics don't seem right (Score:3)
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Last I looked i could get the entry level Model 3 for $24k after federal and co incentives.
You can if you pay at least $7.5k in federal income taxes, but a lot of people don't (either through deductions or simply not earning enough, not because they're tax cheats). One could reasonably argue though that if your income isn't high enough to be paying $7.5k in federal income tax, you probably shouldn't be buying such an expensive car in the first place.
Next year the credit will supposedly be fully available at the time of purchase, but there will also be a whole lot of new caveats regarding materia
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Hasn't it always been possible to get take full advantage of the tax credits by leasing, instead of buying?
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Over $20k of the sticker price is the battery pack, that's why no full-sized EVs are under $40k. I do not see Tesla finding enough 'innovation' to get the non-battery manufacturing costs under $5k.
And then there's still markup to consider... they have to make a profit.
There are other incentives to seek when selling something that clean, as drunk as Government is on Green initiatives. We've put plenty of solar panels on rooftops in the US offering a sizeable tax incentive. We're already doing the same for certain EV sales (considerable breaks for corporate use). Only a matter of time before that's extended to allow companies like Tesla to sell a $40K Model 1 Plain and get the sales due to the incentives.
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You seem to be operating off of old information. EV battery prices have been dropping rapidly. I'm seeing some quotes as low as $13k.
If you're making a cheaper car, that cheaper battery can help a lot. Even/especially if you're willing to reduce the range a bit.
Earlier cars HAD to reduce the battery for affordability, but we're at the point where a 300 mile EV isn't that much more expensive than a ICE version.
False (Score:2)
Re: The economics don't seem right (Score:2)
Re:The economics don't seem right (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know where you got $20k from, but high end automotive battery packs manufactured in Korea and China are currently about $10k for 50kWh at retail, and the manufacturers are probably paying half that.
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If your car was in an accident so severe that it did irreperable structural damage to the underbody that unites all major parts of a unibody car and forms the lower half of the passenger safety cell, the car is a writeoff. It doesn't matter what model it is or how many pieces the manufactur
Tesla hasn't "reinvented" anything (Score:3, Insightful)
Take away the novelty of owning a Tesla and nobody would buy the things. They'd take one look at the shoddy fit & finish and head off somewhere's else to buy a nicer looking car.
It's just like Hyperloop, where there were good reasons why nobody did a thing and Musk told everyone "do it". That's the problem with a dictatorship and why most companies aren't run like one.
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I was thinking more of damage when hitting something. Let's say the auto pilot malfunctions (I know, truly hypothetical, but go with it). It decides for whatever reason to plunk into a light pole in a parking. Similar to how those vehicles plunk into emergency vehicles when the lights are flashing.
So now you have a damaged front end (or back end if the software decides so). How will the repair be done? Does that back end part get pulled off and a new back end snapped into place? Do you have to cut the
Damage (Score:5, Informative)
This is a good question, and there's a decent video discussing this [youtube.com].
In sort:
If it's a low-speed crash, the front/rear bumper system would absorb it. Tesla has outfitted crash absorption rails to the front and rear, so any front/rear impact would hit those before the casting.
For a higher speed crash, if it's severe enough to crack a casting, that would be a pain to fix. But that the same crash would bend the longitudinals in a traditionally-constructed vehicle. Either way, the vehicle would be considered totaled.
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" But that the same crash would bend the longitudinals in a traditionally-constructed vehicle. Either way, the vehicle would be considered totaled"
Really? That happened to a 2004 Golf owned by a friend of mine less than a year after purchase & it was repaired in a frame-stretcher, not scrapped.
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there's good reason other car companies don't do "gigacasting" (lord what a dumb name). It's because the cast doesn't come out perfectly and you end up with gaps where parts connect. That's why when you get close to a Tesla you can see the flaws in a way you won't with a Honda Civic much less the BMWs and Lexus' it competes with on price.
Take away the novelty of owning a Tesla and nobody would buy the things. They'd take one look at the shoddy fit & finish and head off somewhere's else to buy a nicer looking car.
It's just like Hyperloop, where there were good reasons why nobody did a thing and Musk told everyone "do it". That's the problem with a dictatorship and why most companies aren't run like one.
It kinda sounds like the old VW Beetle though
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In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Which, nowadays, is government run.
I don't think that governments in the Western world could organise a piss up in a brewery or their way out of paper bags. They are basically prey to better organised corporations.
Re:Tesla hasn't "reinvented" anything (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, and car buyers don't care whether a hidden structure is made as one piece or is assembled from several or many. What they care about is the quality of the final result. No one should find manufacturing inspiration from the builder of the worst quality cars in the industry.
The idea that large castings have never been considered before is an insult to the engineering profession, just what Elon Musk does every single day.
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What they care about is the quality of the final result.
My only addition, the other thing buyers care about is cost. There's a reason Lexus and Hyundai co-exist. If this process can lower the cost by a meaningful amount, whilst maintaining the same level of quality, I'd say it's a win.
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"No one should find manufacturing inspiration from the builder of the worst quality cars in the industry."
According to Sandy Munro they are now the best quality in the industry, but yes they did start with pretty bad quality cars.
Here is the thing... Ford needs 12-18 months to improve a specific manufacturing process. Tesla require 12-18 hours to improve something. Ford improves a lot of things and release a new revision after 18 months. Tesla release new revisions on a weekly basis, without ever needing to
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No one should find manufacturing inspiration from the builder of the worst quality cars in the industry.
They absolutely should. What you read as quality and what people market as quality has zero at all to do with underlying structure of the car. Tesla's structural components have no quality control issues, it's largely their fit and finish that is horrible.
You'd be incredibly dumb if you were in the car industry to ignore what Tesla is doing just because some end users are complaining about the quality of the car.
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there's good reason other car companies don't do "gigacasting" (lord what a dumb name). It's because the cast doesn't come out perfectly and you end up with gaps where parts connect. That's why when you get close to a Tesla you can see the flaws in a way you won't with a Honda Civic much less the BMWs and Lexus' it competes with on price.
It sounds like they're considering it [autonews.com].
It seems like something really hard to set up and get right, but very efficient once it's going.
I think it's an idea that works better for Tesla, who only makes a handful of vehicles, than other manufacturers who sell a ton of different cars.
Then again, if the the components are shared they can save a lot of cash.
Take away the novelty of owning a Tesla and nobody would buy the things. They'd take one look at the shoddy fit & finish and head off somewhere's else to buy a nicer looking car.
I think the non-cybertruck Teslas look fine (though the door handles are a bad idea).
Though the reputation of poor build quality does seem to be well earned [jdpower.com].
It's just like Hyperloop, where there were good reasons why nobody did a thing and Musk told everyone "do it".
H
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I think it's an idea that works better for Tesla, who only makes a handful of vehicles, than other manufacturers who sell a ton of different cars.
They might sell a ton of different models, but once you start stripping the exterior off, you find a LOT of commonality between different vehicles in frames and parts.
For example, GM's C1XX platform, apparently. [motorbiscuit.com]
That said, traditional car manufacturers are a lot more traditional. Tesla could be in the sweet spot where they have the volume for mass manufacturing, but are still small enough that they can take the risk of trying to do large casting. They're less risk adverse than the big ones.
Also, the compan
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there's good reason other car companies don't do "gigacasting" (lord what a dumb name). It's because the cast doesn't come out perfectly and you end up with gaps where parts connect
It's just like Hyperloop, where there were good reasons why nobody did a thing and Musk told everyone "do it". That's the problem with a dictatorship and why most companies aren't run like one.
Precisely. It is Hyperloop. This process, this "gigapress" does not exist, they are talking about how they are going to attempt to build this Wonder Press. So evidence at all that it can produce an acceptable product. If this is every actually built it will move out of Hyperloop land and enter Tesla Robotic Factory land which almost brought the company down.
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This process, this "gigapress" does not exist, they are talking about how they are going to attempt to build this Wonder Press.
They seem rather solid for something that doesn't exist. They aren't attempting to build it, they bought it and have been using it since 2020, three years ago.
There's a wiki page on them [wikipedia.org], that identifies that they were listed for sale in 2018 by Idra, the company making them. Tesla started using one in 2020. They then proceeded to install a half dozen more at various factories around the world, and are continuing to buy more of them.
Toyota [insideevs.com] looks to be imitating them. They even show a picture of the "Bef
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I think that his purchase of X is the result of insanity, temporary or not. Especially the price he paid for it.
But time will tell. I was sticking to less controversial moves.
Still, keep in mind that the average business owner fails 3 times before succeeding. Musk being 3 of 5 puts him still at a good rate.
Successes - the original X (he made a lot of money off it), Tesla, SpaceX
Yet to be seen - X formerly known as Twitter. Boring Company(keeping in mind that the company was started as a joke)
He's had som
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You forgot to mention X where instead of hiring tons of Arts majors to spend their days moderating (and bringing their biases into it), you can now just use an unbiased AI to do the work that 5000 people earning 6 figure salaries were doing. Musk recognized an opportunity - X could be run with 5000 engineers instead of 5000 engineers, 5000 moderators and another 5000 middle managers to interface between the engineers and the arts majors.
A huge amount of Twitter codebase has always been open source - https://opensource.twitter.dev... [twitter.dev]
For perhaps 6 months effort & a few million dollars, Elon's serfs could have built a Free Speech platform to function as the "town square" & invited his 100 million fluffers to follow him to paradise.
Instead he spent the GDP of Serbia to acquire a company that has always lost & still is, losing money.
Why? Likely because what he wanted was something he couldn't obtain by any other means - Twitter's DA
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https://electrek.co/2023/09/12... [electrek.co]
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Panel gaps not attributable to castings (Score:2, Interesting)
there's good reason other car companies don't do "gigacasting" (lord what a dumb name). It's because the cast doesn't come out perfectly and you end up with gaps where parts connect. That's why when you get close to a Tesla you can see the flaws in a way you won't with a Honda Civic
Castings make panel gaps less likely. Welding together hundreds of stamped parts is what causes alignment issues, and thereby gaps.
In the US, Tesla didn't start using gigacastings until 2022, for the Model Y. So many Teslas on the road now were not constructed around gigacastings, so any panel gaps on those shouldn't be attributed to the casting process.
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there's good reason other car companies don't do "gigacasting" (lord what a dumb name).
The article is stupid and missuses the term "die cast". Die casting involves injecting molten metal into a die. More info here [wikipedia.org]. What Tesla is doing a a die press - which is very different.
There is no reason why companies can not create huge casts today. The technology has been around forever. Problem is that a traditional frame is stronger and results in a much better strength to weight ratio. Forged parts are simply better then cast.
The casting Tesla is doing is to create rapid prototypes. 3D
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"there's good reason other car companies don't do "gigacasting" (lord what a dumb name). It's because the cast doesn't come out perfectly and you end up with gaps where parts connect"
But some are now considering it, e.g. Hyundai and if they make the switch that'll be a very big deal & make Elon look, once again, like he's the driving force (sorry) of modern automaking, even more than the adoption of the Tesla connector for fast charging by all the major incumbents
https://www.carexpert.com.au/c... [carexpert.com.au]
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Gigapress is a product of IRDA, not Tesla. IRDA saw sales increase by over 40% last year. Tesla was the first buyer, not the only one. IRDA doesn't broadcast the list of all of its customers, but it's known that at least one non-Tesla Chinese automaker is a buyer.
And as for any "good reasons", FYI, most automakers have minimal, zero, or negative profit margins on their EVs, while Tesla has superb margins, by far the best in the EV industry. And is also by a good degree the world's largest BEV producer (
regurgitating old news in new paid ad (Score:5, Interesting)
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Tesla's doing thing different just because they can, it doesn't matter if it's irreparable or costs more. It's the Silicon Valley way.
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Everybody's scrambling to catch up (Score:2)
And that's a good thing.
Who would have thought Tesla would be undercutting the price of competitors like Ford and GM today. Competition is a wonderful thing!
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Who would have thought Tesla would be undercutting the price of competitors like Ford and GM today.
Well, let's wait until it actually happens, shall we? Musk isn't exactly known for projecting release dates accurately... just look at the Cybertruck.
Of course, I guess he did leave himself some wiggle room. He said "middle of the decade", but didn't specify *which* decade.
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It has actually already happened. Tesla's price cuts have lowered EV prices to the point that Ford and GM can't make money and also compete.
https://wolfstreet.com/2023/09... [wolfstreet.com]
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Yep, it has happened, cracks and all https://www.autoevolution.com/... [autoevolution.com]
One Problem with Gigacasting (Score:5, Interesting)
My neighbor's Tesla Y was rear ended at a traffic light. It didn't look like much damage in the pictures he showed me but the car was totaled. The insurance company's estimator told him that the whole rear end had to be replaced because it was cast in one piece.
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I have wondered about that, as well as battery replacement. Batteries die eventually, so when a model Y's battery bank is dead, is it even able to be replaced, or does the entire vehicle have to be scrapped and recycled? How badly does this gigacasting make it for recycling, because if the batteries cannot easily be separated from the vehicle, then this will take up a lot of space. at junkyards.
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Tesla's specifically could and probably will have this issue as Musk said in a talk a few years back that one of the design factors they're working on along with giga-casting was incorporating the battery pack as not just a pack mounted underneath the car but integrating it as a structural element of the car itself, so implying that the battery pack will functionally be only replaceable with a replacement of the main body frame itself. This was said as a way to save weight as well add rigidity to the car.
T
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It being structural doesn't mean that you wouldn't be able to remove it relatively easily. It's just that it wouldn't be safe to drive without the battery pack in place, which to be fair, you shouldn't be able to drive without the battery.
The thing with making manufacturing cheaper while switching to harder to maintain structures does make it easier to hit "totaled", but then, all cars have been deceptively easy to total for decades now. If the airbags pop, the vehicle can almost certainly be considered t
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It seems like if Tesla is going to have such a large piece that can be damaged so easily, they should make it quick and easy to disassemble and reassemble the whole thing, assuming that casting can really be as cheap as they make it out to be. That sounds nuts, but with EVs being simpler in some ways than ICE I think it's possible. Fond memories of seeing some dudes disassemble, reassemble, start up and drive their Model-T at a small car show one weekend back in the 90s. Of course they didn't take apart
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Why don't they concentrate on automating the joining of smaller sections rather than seek casting home-runs?
Automated joining... (Score:2)
That was actually Musk's first answer - a huge army of robots to do all the assembly work. But he discovered the limits on that - tear downs showing the flaws of his cars then.
1:35 or so [youtube.com].
At which point Musk did an amazing thing(especially for him), he listened. You get problems with fitting dozens, hundreds of parts together? Do the same thing seen with electronics - reduce part counts.
I think it's a bit like back in Ford's day and 8 cylinder engines. Originally they had to cast the cylinders individual
Robots can be improved, but not enough? (Score:2)
Who says they aren't? But 300 robots replaced by a single gigapress means that the improvements you'd need with the robots would be extreme to keep up.
300 robots also equals a lot of moving parts that all need maintenance. While the press might be twitchier than a single robot, with it replacing 300, and creating an arguably superior product to boot, it's the better solution, at least for now.
Reducing part count is one of Musk's ideologies. The gigapress does that in many ways - it reduces the part count
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My neighbor's Tesla Y was rear ended at a traffic light. It didn't look like much damage in the pictures he showed me but the car was totaled. The insurance company's estimator told him that the whole rear end had to be replaced because it was cast in one piece.
If casting parts becomes that much of a game changer in automotive design, we will quickly see every car maker wanting to adopt it, so insurance will eventually have to become the ones adjusting to a market.
Glock was mocked as 'tactical tupperware' when it first came onto the gun scene. Nobody was making guns like that. Then everyone saw how reliable that KISS-simple design was, and still is. Today you would struggle to find a vendor who isn't making a striker-fired polymer-based pistol, copying the very
Sued by... (Score:2)
Tesla may end up being sued by Matchbox.
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Rest assured, there's prior art for everything [wikipedia.org].
Casting may not be... (Score:2)
Reinventors (Score:2)
Up next, Elon Musk reinvents the wheel; It's now square!
Linchpin? (Score:2)
They already started (Score:2)
They started by getting customers used to a low bar for assembly quality.
Paint defects, poor panel gaps, loose fasteners.
They also lowered production costs by using consumer grade components, like their LCD screens, that aren't made to withstand the direct sunlight and hot environment of a car parked in the sun all day.
Tesla and Space-X make foo entrenched competitors (Score:4, Informative)
Whatever else you say about Musk, Tesla and Space-X have made fools of the entrenched competitors. I am close to the heavy-launch space industry. The crap that NASA is still funding will never be cost effective. Space-X has shown how incompetent both government and entrenched contractors really are. Space-X has completed 260 full missions for less that the cost to complete the first Space Shuttle mission. That's right: 260 times more cost effective! Space-X has also delivered more cargo into orbit than all of the Space Shuttle missions combined (all for less than the cost of the first Space Shuttle launch).
SpaceX Starship flight tests include 10 launches of prototypes of the Starship spacecraft, and the total cost inception to date is less than the cost of ONE disposable "NASA’s Space Launch System". If you want something done well, don't ask the USA government to do it! And to think people want USA government provided health care... Want to see whi\at it would be like? Look no further that the VA Medical system.
Tesla makes more EVs than all of its USA competitors combined. Tesla is the only USA corp. that has ever made a profit selling EVs. Why didn't Ford, or GM or even Fiat/Chrysler do it before Tesla? Why didn't they invest to out compete and catch up to Tesla? Tesla has been selling EVs to the public since 2009. GM says they might start selling large numbers of EVs by 2026! Really, it takes 17 years to catch up to a tiny competitor? And that's if GM doesn't slip their dates AGAIN.
Share holders should have demanded that GM sell itself to Tesla. Too bad Tesla doesn't want it.
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GM was once the USA's second largest corporation and almost synonymous with USA manufacturing.
GM now has a market capitalization of $46.3B
Tesla has a market cap of $865B. Tesla could buy every share of GM, shut GM down making the investment worthless, and it wouldn't harm Tesla's market cap by more than 5%.
Apple has 50B is cash and a market cap of $2.75T.
Why is GM such a turd of a company? 70 years of incompetent management, inferior engineering, crippling labor relations, poor understanding of markets, poo
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"Tesla has a market cap of $865B. Tesla could buy every share of GM, shut GM down making the investment worthless, and it wouldn't harm Tesla's market cap by more than 5%."
Tell us without telling us you've never heard of antitrust
Oops, I broke this little tab, is that OK? (Score:2)
So what happens when a little tab breaks...
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About as carefully as they tested those windows before sledgehammering them in front of an audience.
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Sorry about your dad, did you inherit his Tesla shares?
Re: Musk bad (Score:2)