Gigapresses – the die casts reshaping car manufacturing | Hacker News Reader

Gigapresses – the die casts reshaping car manufacturing

reuters.com

134 pointslxm222 comments

One things this means is that cars are going to become as disposable as cell phones and laptops. As cars get assembled from larger components, damage to one area of the car will have larger effects. This will increase repair costs, more often pushing them over the limit to declare the car a total loss.

I can’t quickly find the numbers, but I know that car repair costs are going up and repair rates are going down, and have been for decades. The reason is obvious: the benefits of a modern car come at a cost. E.g., cars are much safer now, partly thanks to airbags; those are expensive to replace. My car has 11 airbags, and if they all popped off at once that alone would probably total it.

Years ago I was in a collision which bent that frame of my car. That’s usually game-ending, but this car has a modular frame, so they just bolted on a new frame component. Now, Mercedes have always (until lately, perhaps) been known as highly-repairable; it’s one reason they last so long.

So it’s good that the right-to-repair movement is getting traction. We’re going to need to point it at cars soon, and for mechanical reasons.

The reason that your Mercedes was worth repairing was because it was so expensive. Most cars get written off with $15,000 worth of damage simply because most cars aren't worth $15,000.

Actually, I got it used for about that amount, and many years before the collision. You may not know -- forgive me if I'm wrong -- but damage to a car frame totals the car. Frames have crumple zones, the activation of which destroys that part of the frame. No insurance company will sanction repair of it.

This only worked because the frame was modular to begin with, a rarity, so they could replace only the damaged part. IOW the car was built to be repairable. This increased its final cost, but means that it's still on the road today, rather than in a scrapyard.

>You may not know -- forgive me if I'm wrong -- but damage to a car frame totals the car.

This is a pretty safe general rule, but it is not absolute. I had a brand new truck < 6 months old where I was hit from behind in stop-n-go traffic. The insurance company did not want to total it because the repair could be made for less than the value of the total. I asked how a frame could be repaired, and they just said it can be done. My counter was that the vehicle would now show frame repair and would have no value for trade-in nor would someone other than less than reputable dealers offer a car with repaired frame damage.

So, depending on the insurance company (Progressive was pushing for the repair. I hate Flo), some will argue against frame damage being an automatic total.

I've had a car in a crash that should've been totaled. I was rear-ended by a truck while stopped about two months after my previous car was totaled (t-boned by an drunk driver). The insurance company balked at a 2nd total in that time period and demanded it be repaired. The total repair cost came to almost $5,000 over the KBB value. The rear end had been accordioned and the repair company straightened it out (you can indeed straighten frames with the proper alignment tooling) having to replace all the panels past the doors. They claimed it was back to spec, but it never tracked correctly in turns after the repair job. I sold it shortly after for about what I paid.

> I sold it shortly after for about what I paid.

How did you manage to do that? Was that in USA? I presume damage was on record with CarFax, etc. Did you tell new owner what happened to the car?

Finally - if you were able to show the car does not track correctly, wouldn't that be enough to re-open the claim and go back to your insurance company to properly fix it (most likely replace it at this point?)

Once cars hit a certain price people know they’re all sorts of messed up but don’t care.

You can find things on salvage titles that are literally two or three cars welded together.

I'm kind of in the market for that kind of car myself. I need a car to just run errands in. I don't need it for commuting to working and back. I don't want a monthly car payment either for that kind of car.

The only thing that keeps me from doing that is not know what to do with that car when I do finally want to get a better car. It will have no value as a trade in, and I wouldn't want to have 2 insurance payments. Are they even worth anything as a donation?

You can always get rid of a working vehicle.

But to answer the question, yes, even a dead vehicle will have some residual donation value (or you can sell it to a junkyard for $200-500 scrap value).

Yes, USA. Damage and behavior was disclosed. I was told by my insurance company that the problem was "in my head" as the vehicle's body and alignment were within specifications and their road test found no issues. This was a sports car and the behavior evidenced itself on more "spirited" turns.

Frame is a very different concept between a pickup truck and a Benz. Nearly all pickups are built as body-on-frame, where there's a separate chassis that mounts all the mechanical bits, and then the body goes on that. Nearly all sedans, wagons, and things that most people would consider "not trucks" are unibody. The body and frame are one and the same. The Benz in question likely had a detachable subframe at the front or rear where the mechanical bits are attached. It's pretty common to have bolt-on frame members (cross members especially), a fully detachable subframe forward of the firewall is less commmon.

All that to say, they can sometimes straighten a body on frame vehicle. Whether this is a good idea or not obviously depends on the severity of the damage. If a frame rail is bent into a banana shape, probably not. If there's been some light shearing or twisting movement of one rail to the other, they can probably do it safely within limits. Remaining imperfections get taken up in the suspension (it's adjustable). If you wonder how they put race cars back on the track so fast, it's because they'll tolerate a lot of frame geometry out of spec if they can make it up in the suspension without otherwise compromising safety and handling.

All that said, all of your points about the reduced value of the truck are certainly true.

Munroe addressed this complaint and his point was: if the collision is bad enough that it damages that cast, it would total a non-cast car as well.

Plus you have to reason on the level of systems, not components.

Single-piece rear casting replaces 70+ parts.

Those parts have to be welded together by robots.

Each weld is a potential failure point.

Casting produces more reliable car with less variances which ends up lowering repair costs on global (system) level.

https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1513886756923445254

Munroe addressed this complaint and his point was: if the collision is bad enough that it damages that cast, it would total a non-cast car as well.

I don't see how that's possible. Grain structure and alignment make forged parts much stronger than cast for a given weight.

http://www.expansion-parts.com.tw/upload/web/MetalPowderPart...

Should this not be a comparison to stamped /welded metal since that’s what car manufacturing generally uses?

The structural part of cars, at least any in the under $100k range, are not made of forged parts.

Sure various high stress suspension pieces are forged, but those aren't the ones being replaced by die cast assemblies.

That's not at all true. Critical structural parts, such as B-pillars, are almost always made of forged or hot-stamped high-strength steels. And this is true even in cheap vehicles like the 2007 Dodge Caliber. See, e.g.: https://i.imgur.com/N399WLV.png

I think that the casting technique mentioned in the article is primarily, or entirely, for non-structural parts that would otherwise be made of something akin to mild steel.

No, the aluminum injection castings are structural. Using high pressure injection helps keep the voids low or non-existent compared to atmospheric pressure sand casting, for instance, which significantly improves performance (improving strength and toughness).

No part of significant size will be forged in a sub $100k car. As another user mentioned, even the cheapest forged wheels are >>$1k each.

Very few parts of any automobile are forged. Even then it's usually high performance variants of ICE vehicles, limited to the engine internals, and transmission/differential internals.

Having said that though, the sheet metal used in unibody construction is far more ductile than usually brittle castings. If they've developed new alloys making the large castings more ductile than previous castings, it might not be a problem.

It's mostly going to be internal engine/gearbox parts that are forged, and possibly wheels.

Forged wheels. Pretty damn expensive. Posh race cars use them. A cheapest set I was looking at some years ago was €6.5k.

IIRC RAYS / Volk Racing produced forged alloy aftermarket wheels at an affordable price. The TE-37 was a model back when I was modding RX7s and MX5s...

No one uses forged wheels for regular production cars, unless they're extremely high-end. All those alloy wheels you see on sub-$50k cars are all cast.

All those Alcoa style rims Ford used in the 80s and 90s were forged. It has only gotten more prevalent since.

Forged suspension arms are uncommon but not unheard of. They are becoming more common as cars get bigger and heavier, though most manufacturers are going to extruded aluminum since it keeps costs down.

Can one align the grains by magnetizing the cast (aluminum is para magnetic)

>if the collision is bad enough that it damages that cast, it would total a non-cast car as well.

This is just lunacy.

It's absolutely possible to locally damage a cast item in a manner in which a welded/bolted steel assembly would also be locally damaged. And the cast is going to be harder to repair.

Who's going to do that weld and then take liability for the safety of the car after?

Lots of older cars are rolling around with suspect welds today, often times performed by amateur welders. Everyone understands a repaired car might be be exactly same as new.

The people performing their work and their insurer, just like literally every other case where skilled labor is bought.

Contrary to internet screeching welding the kind of cast alloys used on cars isn't really a big deal especially the aluminum ones (iron is harder). If the business case materializes I'm it will become common just like aluminum body repair.

But almost nobody does it and insurance companies just total cars that have this kind of damage. Yes, in theory, it can be repaired but it's too expensive and because it's hard to guarantee the correctness of the repair, insurance companies don't do it and most consumers wouldn't stand for it.

It's the labor cost that makes it non-viable in most cases. If it penciled out economically then all the people who are outsourcing their thinking to their insurance company would automatically become fine with it.

There is nothing about it harder to guarantee than anything else in the autobody business. How do you know they're applying panel bonding adhesive properly? You don't.

It’s pretty funny seeing a post from Tesla right after a line about „less variances“. It’s a common knowledge by now, posted many times here, that Tesla build quality and parts passing depend on the phase of the Moon and the menu at the factory.

All of the comparisons involved will probably be for unibody / monocoque vehicles, but comparisons to body on frame (Crown Vic) would be interesting.

My Honda accord was $35,000. If the front is damaged just the headlights are $900 a piece. Ignoring structural issues with the unibody, the damage multiplier for new cars isn't the frame, but everything else. Headlights, fog, lights, sensors for adaptive cruise, calibrating the new sensor, bumper, paint, etc.

It’s insane. One of the stories about Chevrolet—when they were first designing the C5 Corvette—was that they took input from the insurance industry regarding repair costs.

One example of this is the hood. The previous generation had a beautiful clamshell hood that wrapped down around the sides. Opening the hood made the front end almost look like an open-wheel car. But it was expensive to make in one piece, and the entire piece had to be replaced if any part of it was damaged.

The C5 has a more conventional hood, with seams running along between the fenders and the hood panel. Not as pretty, but substantially cheaper to repair.

So, $900 for a headlight? We need to strengthen (or better align) the incentives for carmakers to reduce component costs.

There is a huge incentive misalignment. The customer pays monthly for “insurance” and the moral hazard, the insurance company then pays a repair company, who then pays the OEM for the headlight.

The games all go away when the manufacturer sells the insurance, estimates how safe the driver is with data, and then handles the repairs.

Tesla understands this and sees it as a way to beat the competition on total operating cost for the customer.

I don't understand why more people don't check insurance rates before buying a car.

Insurance rates will eventually be reflected in the way the market prices the car. It would be more efficient if people checked, but the current process is close enough.

Because the difference from model to model is a) not that high when cross-shopping models of the same form factor b) outweighed by demographic correlation factors.

People do cross shop different classes of vehicle, but even within a particular vehicle class, the differences can be easily be more than enough to be an important factor in purchasing. If you're comparing two vehicles, and one is $1000 cheaper to purchase, but costs 20% more on insurance... it likely isn't cheaper by the time your loan is paid off.

Tesla wants more to insure my Model 3 than USAA does, and that’s with lower coverage limits. Perfect safety score.

That’s without getting into how much better USAA’s service is compared to Tesla.

And if you have other non-Tesla cars you probably will benefit from having them on the same policy.

Must I explain why people who serve in the US military are much better drivers on average? I’m going to go out on a limb and guess in addition to your perfect driving score, your Tesla is clean as well. I bet you probably agree with a statement like “there is no such thing as an accident”.

Enjoy your cheap car insurance. :)

Do we though? What percentage of cars are ever in an accident? If the choice is between better functioning while working versus lower repair costs, it's not obvious why we would prioritize lower repair costs. People on here always have this idea that repair must be prioritized above all without considering the tradeoffs.

This was Saturn’s big value proposition: GM used plastic for external body panels as they were more resilient to light damage and were pre-finished for cheaper replacement.

Expensive insurance will also kill cars, so insurance companies are definitely consulted stakeholders in vehicle manufacturing.

Tesla sells insurance, so has a direct incentive to make its cars easier and faster to repair. Previously Tesla is notorious for how long it takes to get parts, but that is improving, partly because of the insurance incentive.

Elon Musk has mentioned one reason Tesla started doing insurance was to get more insight into repair costs and processes to help improve both vehicle design and the repair experience.

The first-gen Dodge Viper was notoriously expensive to repair for the same reason: the clamshell hood.

On a BMW 760i (V12) the driver’s side LED/laserlight headlight lens was badly fogged. These are sealed units and not repairable. Cost to replace? $9,600. It was covered under factory warranty but… whoa.

That's just BMW cheating customers. Or you might argue that they are cheating insurance companies, since most crunched headlights are replaced under insurance.

Yep. You may not be able to get it to Brand New Out of the box OEM shine but I bet there are a dozen acetone/sandpaper/lacquer/toothpaste/hydrogen peroxide something or anothers that could get you to 99% of new quality for less than $20.

Headlights are considered safety critical. None of the manufacturers will (and should!) allow a certified mechanic to rejuvenate and reseal a headlight unit under factory warranty. A manufacturer will always replace the unit, just to be able to warrant the repair.

You can DIY it of course, but no BMW 760i owner is ever expected to do that.

Under warranty? Sure, let the manufacturer handle it.

Outside of warranty? Don't give a company 10 grand for 74 cents worth of plastic and chrome.

I wouldn’t go that far. Their light output and the steerability of their output is fairly stunning. They can’t be very cheap to make, but not $9k either.

> These are sealed units and not repairable

Not repairable by a minimum effort flat rate tech in the US...

There's probably some guy in Latvia that has a Youtube instructional on how to re-seal it or something. $9600 is a hell of a motive to figure out how to repair it.

If you bend a frame rail in a composite structure, you have x new welds you have to perform, y rivets, z bolts, w plastic pins and spacers.

Some of those attachments were not designed to be removed and performed again, so you're looking at removing and replacing otherwise okay parts and then probably realizing that some other piece is slightly out of alignment and can't safely be reused...

If you bend a a unibody casting, firstly there is a larger chance that it is non-critical since there is so much added mass and structure. It is not a series of dominos like in a composite.

Secondly, all the attachment points are cast into the part. Replacement of one large piece is a significant reduction in effort, and results in more confidence in the ultimate repair.

That "one large peice" is literally the entire unibody. You going to re-shell a street car like a racecar?

>Some of those attachments were not designed to be removed and performed again

Just because the OEM didn't bother to figure it out doesn't mean nobody can. There's all sorts of trick specialty repair parts and procedures in the aftermarket autobody industry to fill the gaps the OEM couldn't be bothered to.

> I know that car repair costs are going up and repair rates are going down, and have been for decades. The reason is obvious:

Have you taken a car in for repair recently? I agree that the reason is obvious - parts labour costs make it no longer make sense. Just a brake job nowadays costs a thousand dollars or more (depending on car model etc), i.e. 3% of a brand new vehicle purchase price. There's no anti-features causing this, it's just labour charges increasing.

Yeah, but why is that? Consider: I can repair a 1980 Mercedes with one box of tools I can carry. Spend a couple years with your dad working on old cars and you could, too.

For a 2024 Mercedes I don’t think I’m even allowed to know what’s wrong with it. Hardly anything in modern cars is user-serviceable. Can I replace the airbags? Change their timing or velocity? Alter parameters of the antilock brakes, or emissions control? No way, never. Many of those systems have to be replaced wholesale by people specially trained.

The same argument holds, and for similar reasons, with phones. Anyone with a screwdriver could service an old Bell phone. Today it’s almost impossible to take most of them apart at all without destroying them, and the majority of their function is completely invisible and untouchable anyway (software).

We’ve added a huge amount of technology not just to vehicles, but to the tools we use to maintain them. Of course labor will be more expensive as it gets more specialized. Of course parts will be more expensive as they get more capable and more complex.

None of that gets to the question of why a brake job specifically costs so much, which is why I used it as an example. Brakes are no harder to do than 3 decades ago (at least for my car). They cost a lot because of the cost of labour, primarily. Other work has different costs.

The primary basis of your argument falls flat for me though. You don't need to repair new cars as much as you did 40 years ago. You never need to mess with your carburetor, spark plugs last a decade+, other stuff tends not to fail at nearly the rate it used to. My current car has 11 years and 250000 km on it, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to do any service aside from oil changes. (aside: why would I ever want to adjust airbag timing? And yes, if I somehow need to replace an airbag, I'll happily pay someone certified to do it. And if I buy a secondhand car, I'd really like to know that the person before me couldn't change airbag timing or velocity)

I do feel a sense of foreboding when it comes to choosing my next vehicle though. I want a BEV, but they all have so much electronic junk in that I fiind to be actively detrimental. I recently drove a friend's (2017) Toyota for a weekend, some ice built up on the sensor (in the badge on the front bumper). The following day, when roads were clear, it wouldn't let me use regular cruise control because the sensor was still iced over. A different toyota wouldn't let me cross the lane lines to avoid a pothole. They'll both slow me well below the speed limit on the highway based on the car ahead of me, with no notification. I would pay more for a car with these "features" removed.

I read an article, probably a decade or more ago, about how bad it would be for NYC cab companies that Ford was discontinuing the Crown Vic. The reasoning was that repair costs would increase because it was the last vehicle where individual body panels were easily replaceable. It was also the last body-on-frame sedan, so you could feasibly swap out an entire chassis.

I'd be curious what the long-term impact was, or whether Uber made all that irrelevant.

Probably still cheaper to operate a Corolla, especially when everyone on the planet knows how to fix them.

One could make the same argument about batteries in EVs making cars more disposable. The insurers are going to total any vehicle having the slightest damage to its battery module between the high risk of incorrectly assessing its safety, and its high cost of replacement...

Repairability for collision damage is a lost cause. Let's focus on collision prevention instead. The latest generation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems are already bringing collision rates down for newer cars and there is much room for improvement.

Most cars don't seem to fail because of structural damage. How relevant is repairability?

Is the expected material use and expected cost to the consumer more or less for repairable vs gigapress?

I was talking to a body shop about unibody construction in the context of some rust repair several years ago. Basically, for a lot of cars, if it isn't a bolt on part, it's already supplied as one big piece from the manufacturer. Like, the whole side of the car sized piece. Whether that's one stamping or several welded together (or bonded), it's a cut and weld job for a collision repair. A small enough rust repair can be made up from sheet metal, but not a serious collision.

Also: paint. It's never one panel. They usually have to feather in the color on the adjacent panels because getting a perfect match is tough despite computers, etc. You need one panel painted, and you're pretty quickly looking at getting 3 or 4 painted (or at least attended to). Even discounting airbags, it doesn't take much to total out even a five to seven year old car these days.

Also totalling is “back to how it was” - a single hail storm totaled my wife’s car because that many dents can’t be undented.

So we took that and bought the totaled car back and still use it.

Username checks out

If you look at the breakdown of the Model Y with the casted front end and back end by Munroe on Youtube it's fairly modular, with a front end cast and back end cast both bolted to the battery pack in the middle, and the top of the car lowered onto the base. If one of these casts were damaged in an accident but the rest of the car was OK, it might make more sense to just replace the entire front end or back end cast with a new one.

The average price of a new car in the US is now $50k. That’s not a disposable purchase.

I originally thought that too, but neither are laptops or mobile phones. However, it seems the OP is talking about disposable in the sense that they cannot be repaired, so must be disposed/replaced if they incur any damage.

Is it the William Gibson book where future cars are described as having a cardboard exterior?

The same issue happened when they moved from chassis + wagon to monocoque.

It's still an improvement.

The main reason why MB lasts so long is due to a single component in the engine, they still use a chain rather than a timing belt. This one little change has so much impact on the rest of the engine design that they tend to last very long compared to cars that have timing belts. Suddenly a whole pile of stuff is happening inside the engine enclosure instead of outside of it reducing the number of seals and in general reducing complexity outside of the engine core. It also reduces the need for complex service.

It's a bit old fashioned, timing belts result in an engine that runs a little bit more quiet and they make for a lighter package. So it's easy to see why many manufacturers would choose that option. But MB got that bit right (they also got plenty wrong, their software for instance absolutely sucks).

You are right that chains are superior to belts, but MB is hardly the only manufacturer using timing chains. Chains are actually becoming more popular, not less popular, especially as interference engines have also become more common.

My 2021 Mazda uses a timing chain. My 2004 BMW uses a timing chain. My old 1990 BMW had a chain. My folks' 2019 Lexus and 2016 Toyota both use chains.

Honda was a notorious holdout that still mostly used belts for a long time, but even they are coming around and some new models use chains now.

Interesting! So there is a kind of resurgence in this. Nice to see that other manufacturers take the longevity and service of their engines serious for personal transportation. There was a point in time where MB seemed to be the lone holdout and the only other manufacturers that used chains were mostly making trucks (and Porsche). To me it's a no brainer, especially with an engine where the pistons don't clear the valves when they are active. The kind of engine damage that a broken timing belt results in is usually enough to completely scrap the engine. I wonder if those other manufacturers chains are also rated for the life of the engine or rather not.

> I wonder if those other manufacturers chains are also rated for the life of the engine or rather not.

Mostly yes they are, which is wonderful compared to timing belts. It rubs my engineer brain intensely wrong to have such a critical engine component be designed as a wear item, especially when its failure can cause engine rebuild levels of damage.

However not all manufacturers' quality lives up to the intended design. VW/Audi have a spotty record with various well-known timing chain problems ranging from bad chain tensioners that fail and cause the chain to jump timing to plastic chain guides that break and wreak general havoc.

But for most cars a timing chain will last the life of the engine.

My '08 Civic Si had a timing chain, one of the few models that did at the time. Used to startle the service techs who weren't expecting it.

Yep, the N54 out of my 335i had timing chains. Replacing that during the engine build wasn't fun, but it was still solid at 130k.

As an amusing aside, my 1995 Saturn station wagon had a timing chain. Thanks to a combination of design flaws, at around 70k miles, the chain skipped a tooth and the engine disintegrated.

But it wasn't just a matter of the chain. All Saturns burned oil from the git-go, and as a bonus, a low oil level would cause the timing chain to lose lubrication, thus causing it to wear out. People who religiously topped off their oil, every time they re-fueled, kept their Saturns for a long time. I was not one of those people.

My next car was a Toyota, which I still drive. The Toyota engine is designed to make it easy to service the timing belt at the prescribed interval, and the car consumes no oil.

Keeping the oil topped up isn't really a luxury! That must have been quite the thing when it happened. Were you in traffic?

I was at a stoplight. It just started making a grinding noise (probably the cylinders slapping the valves). I was not far from my regular repair shop, and drove it there. Later on, I returned to gather my belongings from the car, and the shop made it go away.

I'm definitely more careful with my newer cars.

My first car didn't burn oil, but dripped. I'd just top off the oil whenever I started hearing the tappets clicking. It was quite a forgiving engine, a 1975 Dodge.

The Mini I had was very much like your Dodge. There is a joke in Mini owner circles: "How do you know your Mini is out of oil?" -> "There is no puddle under it when you drive off".

  The main reason why MB lasts so long is due to a single component in the engine,
  they still use a chain rather than a timing belt. This one little change has so
  much impact on the rest of the engine design that they tend to last very long
  compared to cars that have timing belts.

No.

Timing chain vs gear vs belt has little-to-no bearing on the longevity of an engine. You can, for instance, build an engine with a timing chain that's prone prone to catastrophic failure of the timing components. Mercedes has done it twice so far with the M116 and the M272/M273.

  Suddenly a whole pile of stuff is happening inside the engine enclosure
  instead of outside of it reducing the number of seals and in general reducing
  complexity outside of the engine core. It also reduces the need for complex
  service.

Tell that to anyone who's had a Ford with the Duratec or EcoBoost and an internal water pump.

So 'yes' except for some exceptions that prove the rule.

So, no. GM's put out a fair number of stinkers including the Ecotec and the High Feature V6. Chrysler actually recalled their late 00s Hemi engines over timing chain problems. The previous owner of my E39 had to tear the whole engine apart because the timing chain guides failed (as they pretty much all do). BMW's later N20, N47, and N57(N) engines are also well known for timing chain problems. VW/Audi had plenty of timing chain issues with both the 1.8T and 2.0T. Let's not forget Audi's famous rear mounted V8 monstrosity. Jaguar's AJ8 was legendary for timing chain problems in its first few years. Nissan's had trouble over the years with the chains on both the V6 and 4 bangers…

Meanwhile people put hundreds of thousands of miles on Volvo's old four cylinder with a… timing belt which takes all of thirty minutes to replace.

Chains vs gears vs belts has no bearing on longevity. The big difference is that chains are smaller and when you need to work on a chain it's generally far, far more complex than a belt drive. Don't forget that engines like the Ecotec, EcoBoost, M272, N20, and 2.0T are basically the bread and butter of those companies. They are high volume mass market engines.

Mercedes tend to last a long time because they're expensive, people pay to repair and maintain them, and nearly any Mercedes part for any Mercedes car can still be purchased new.

You're welcome to your opinion, of course. Volvo has an excellent reputation. BMW not so much regardless of how they are constructed, Chrysler (at least the ones that I've had when I was in Canada) never impressed me from a technological point of view and it was in the shop quite frequently. And MB fields cars year-after-year that clock up 300K+ to the point that it isn't even something exceptional and as a rule with the original engine.

As for repair and maintenance: that's a nice bit of circular reasoning, the reason those parts can still be bought new is because there is still demand for them: the cars are still running.

When you start looking for cars that are 15 years and older (which is my bracket in NL) there really are only two brands that stand out: Volvo and MB. The rest are lucky accidents and this is reflected in the state of the rest of the cars as well. But as a rule car engines will fail well before the body does and with MB (and Volvo) it tends to be the other way around.

Hasn't this been true since unibody construction prevailed?

Right to repair has nothing to do with how easy it is, only that access to parts, manuals etc isn't restricted and that the repair doesn't require authorisation.

lots of people talking about repair costs. Mat Armstrong's channel (https://www.youtube.com/@MatArmstrongbmx) is good for this. Pretty interesting to see him repair crashed cars on his drive and the prices of the parts. especially the newer lambo series. (edit - Englishing better)

Also interesting to consider the third or fourth act of cars. There are a lot of beaten up mercedes 190s and toyotas in poorer countries that people run for decades. Many of them were once used in richer countries before being shipped overseas. I wonder what happens when such vehicles cannot be economically repaired, since that is a key part of the value prop?

Fun fact: Musk says that when Tesla was thinking about doing gigacasting, they called 6 suppliers of those machines asking if they can make 6 gigaton machine (which didn't exist at the time).

5 out of 6 said "no" and 1 said "maybe". I'm guessing that "maybe" was IDRA and they made 6 gigaton, then 9 gigaton (already in Texas for making Cybertruck) and there are rumors of 12 gigaton machine in development.

Another fun fact: Tesla body line pre gigapress was 1000 robots.

Doing front casting removed 300 robots, rear casting another 300.

So Tesla saved 600 out of 1000 (60%) robots, so the line is shorter and faster.

Sandy Munro's teardown of one of the first Model 3s (circa 2019) and his advice to Tesla in ~200 initial manufacturing improvements was integral in shifting their manufacturing strategy (and also led to the termination of the person who designed the body). A more recent 2021 teardown has a lot of praise for the latest build quality.

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-sandy-munro-analyst-... ("Tesla and Munro have since communicated, with the auto veteran sending the electric car maker a list of over 200 pro bono suggestions that could improve the Model 3’s body, which he believed was over-engineered. Munro himself spoke with Elon Musk, who explained that the person responsible for the Model 3’s body design had been terminated. In response, Munro told the CEO that the response was “not fast enough,” since Tesla “never should have hired (the engineer)” in the first place.")

https://www.teslaoracle.com/2021/01/26/2021-tesla-model-3-sa... ("2021 Tesla Model 3 is as good as anything you could find out of Europe, says Sandy Munro")

Not really fair to blame the engineer. Musk is the one who hired the engineer to lead the design of the Model 3, knowing he had no experience with vehicle manufacturing design. They wanted to "move fast and break things" like a tech company. It was an expensive learning process for Musk. A mistake he seems to repeatedly make.

The engineer had no experience with vehicle manufacturing design?

https://electrek.co/2021/01/25/tesla-loses-best-engineering-...

https://www.engadget.com/2018-07-02-tesla-engineering-lead-d...

Two different engineers, I am assuming Sandy Munro was disparaging Mr. Field. From your own Engadget link, you can clearly see that he had no vehicle manufacturing experience. Neither Apple, nor Segway produce automobiles, if that was unclear.

"Field, who previously worked at Apple and Segway, joined Tesla in 2013 to develop the company's next-generation EVs. In that sense, his mark on the company is hard to escape. However, there's a potential source of conflict. Elon Musk asked Field to handle both manufacturing and production in 2017, right as the Model 3 was becoming a practical reality. You may know what happened next. Tesla struggled to boost Model 3 production levels after relying too heavily on robots, and Musk took charge of manufacturing to be sure his company met its 5,000-a-week Model 3 production target. Field effectively lost a large part of his role."

They may be gigapresses, but those forces are in kilotonnes, not gigatonnes.

Actually surprised no one is taking up the "gigagram" 9Gg moniker

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Telsa uses pretty much off the shelf die-casting machines from Idra Group in Italy. The "giga" part of it is just the same sort of parlance as "giga factory" to make batteries.

You can even buy your own "gigapress".

https://www.idragroup.com/en/gigapress

Idra made a new widget for Tesla that other widget makers thought was too risky to attempt.

Now these widgets are on the shelf. Giga is a marketing term related to doing something at a scale that has never been done before (& related to EVs).

>Giga is a marketing term related to doing something at a scale that has never been done before

So, it's 21st century tech then?

> Giga is a marketing term related to doing something at a scale that has never been done before

Eh, the Heavy Press Program produced 50000 ton press forges in the mid-1950'ies (granted EV's weren't a thing then).

Kind of amazing, a machine the size of a 4-story building that can bench press a battleship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program

Heavy press program was amazing.They actually had to worry about the seismic waves created by the press. About 10x larger than the "gigapress."

Important to remember that these aren't presses, they're die-cast machines. Totally different technology.

What a misleading name! Apparently, it's kind of both a press and a diecast machine. It does pressurized castings with really high clamp force.

In this case, crossing 1000 tons is crossing the Gg (Giga-gram) barrier, so there is some justification

Dirty robots - sold dirt cheap

Perhaps you mean kiloton! A gigaton is a lot (like, a cubic kilometer of water).

Maybe this suggests the mindset he had when he got to Twitter and started complaining about how many micro services they had. “Maybe I can call up IDRA and get them to replace all these microservices with one gigaservice…”

We will replace these millions of tweets with one tweet a million characters long!

So far, only Tesla is using giga-presses to reduce the number of parts that must be welded together in each vehicle and lower costs. Other car manufacturers have barely started exploring the possible use of these giga-presses, and seem reluctant to transition away from time-tested approaches to manufacturing. Quoting from the OP:

> After initially considering die casting for its upcoming Trinity model, Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) has backtracked, while BMW (BMWG.DE) has never expressed an interest. Ferrario said the auto industry tended to be conservative and that no one liked upending established processes, but he rejected idea that die casting posed a risk to jobs at carmakers, noting body-making was already highly automated.

Thanks in part to its use of these giga-presses, Tesla currently has the highest profit margins of any mainstream car company. It's not a coincidence.

Is it the gigapress that allows Tesla to have high margins?

Could it also be that EV cars are subsidized around the world by governments? Maybe Tesla's "self driving beta" addon adds to the profit more?

I genuinely don't know.

https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_business/1...

> The secret behind Tesla’s 30% gross margin

> The company's Q3 sales rose 58% year-on-year despite a 6% decrease in average selling price, allowing for high margins for the electric vehicle manufacturer

> Analysts point to another factor behind Tesla's high profit margin. Park Hyung-keun, a senior researcher at POSCO Research Institute, said, "Through vertical integration by directly being involved from floor design to parts supply and demand, production and service, Tesla has helped reduce costs by raising the degree of its parts integration and cutting overlapping costs."

> Tesla's unique structure of vertical integration, ranging from the development of semiconductor chips, software and batteries for electric vehicles, to charging, unmanned driving and insurance services, helps lower costs. Its “do-it-all” approach simplifies the automotive production process in a manner resembling that of electronic products. In contrast, other automakers actively utilize production outsourcing to diversify vehicle quality risks and raise output efficiency.

> A leading example is Tesla's “giga” aluminum die-casting process. A Giga Press weighing more than 1 giga pound (400 tonnes, or around 900,000 pounds) stamps the entire rear chassis of a car with a large aluminum alloy. About 70 metal plates can be welded to the chassis, but giga casting can simplify the process and slash production costs by about 40%. This is why Tesla electric vehicles have recently reduced panel gaps issues — defects caused by misaligned steel plate seams.

So instead of figuring out "precision" welding (maybe SpaceX could have helped out?), Musk used pounds instead of kg or tons in order to implement "Giga"presses? Well, at least the manufacturing inexperienced Tesla crowd has something new to rave about... Still no < 35k Model 3 so.

They found a cheaper, faster, more efficient way to make structural components. SpaceX already shared with Tesla how to friction stir weld [1] (and that technique is still used currently [2]), but that is not as fast as stamping out body components. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. There is no extra credit for making your manufacturing process more complex than necessary (if you want to show off, fire your EV into space). Tesla's manufacturing ramp rate is primarily a function of how fast the org can improve the speed and process at which atoms travel through the manufacturing process, feedstock to final product.

[1] https://electrek.co/2015/05/24/spacex-transferred-novel-weld...

[2] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-y-spacex-welding-techn...

Tesla tried full automation, which didn't work. Now they use pressed parts limiting the use of platform startegies, which enable all other manufacturers to produce a multitude of models, including loe cost ones, using the same tooling, parts and R&D. I guess we will see were that ends.

Why would, or should a business decide to make less money selling a cheaper version of a product when demand for the more expense (and hence more profitable) product shows no sign of waning? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to buy a $35,000 Model 3, but it makes no business sense, especially considering the fact that the average new car cost is something like $44k these days.

Just food for thought… $35k in Feb 2019 when Tesla announced the “$35k Model 3” is now just under $42k simply adjusted for inflation.

All auto manufacturers are subsidized in some sense. Remember that GM was straight up insolvent in 2009 and had to be bailed out with enormous federally-guaranteed loans.

But none of that discounts the value of talking about engineering activities involved in reducing the costs of production, because that stuff matters too. And yes, single-piece chassis are absolutely part of that, as is the minimalist interior (the cockpit BOM for a Tesla is a tiny fraction of what you see on competing EVs), the ongoing sensor fusion architecture (yes, everyone loves to scream about it here, but the upshot is that Tesla doesn't pay for the radar units everyone else uses), etc...

They're actually extremely trim vehicles from an assembly perspective. There's a Munroe video out somewhere where he estimates production costs for a Y vs. a Mach-E and figures there's something like a $10k advantage for Tesla.

It's one of the reasons, but not the only one.

That's why I wrote "Thanks in part to..."

All EVs are subsidized and pretty much all of them (except Tesla) are loosing money while Tesla has industry leading gross and operating profit margins.

So it's definitely not subsidies.

On a definitional level, gross profit is difference between price and cost.

Tesla has biggest difference which implies that it's a combination of charging higher prices and having lower production cost that other.

Only EVs assembled in the US can receive the full subsidy now, ever since the Inflation Reduction Act came into force.

I think the biggest reason for Tesla's gross margins is that millions of people want EVs for various reasons (gas prices, environmental concerns, fun, status) and Tesla is one of the only companies making them in large quantities. They don't have to be the best (even though they probably are on many metrics). They just have to be available and they can kind of set their price.

I think it's vertical integration in general that drives their profit margin. It's why Teslas are good but not great, and will rarely be the best at any particular thing. Brewing up your own rain-sensing wipers saves on component costs, but is inferior. Building your own seats saves on costs, but is inferior. They're playing for the middle. Not a bad strategy at all if you're going for profits, so it makes sense.

It'll be interesting to see how it all settles out compared to the legacy manufacturing style of subbing out components. Some people will pay extra for Recaros (me!) but a lot of people couldn't care less.

They're suspected of underallocating funds for warranty repairs. Those funds would normally eat into the profit margin, but at Tesla they're supposedly accounted as good will service, so it comes out of a different post.

Never seen a Tesla review claiming the seats were inferior. In a few they were claimed they claimed they were among the best, but most reviews don't mention the seats in particular.

The seats in my X and 3 are the only car seats I've tried that does not give me back pain after long trips.

They are one of the biggest reasons i drive tesla instead of the etron.

Everything is subsidized.

Telsa has been relentless in simplifying the part count of a tesla. Each part needs to designed, tracked, inventoried, installed, verified, made available for repairs, increases the size of the factory, and decreases the rate of production. Added parts also require space to install, clearance, sometimes custom tools, testing, might create vibration/wear/noise that requires mitigation, etc.

The front and rear chassis used to require 100s of robots and parts, and then alignment would have to be checked, more material used, more time, more robots, etc. Replacing the front and rear chassis removed 300 robots ... each, and of course the factory space for the robots, and the time for the assembly line to run past those robots.

The glass roof, which IMO isn't a big feature, can be installed after the chassis is built. Enabling robots to install the dashboard, central console, seats, etc before the roof is installed.

On most cars the dashboard is complex, multilayered, complex set of sensors, displays, spinning needles (speed, rpm, temp, fuel levels, etc). On a Tesla the dash is built on a big square straight piece of aluminum, a simple slot for airflow (no fancy/fiddly air flow controls), and a 15" display. Likely reducing 100s of parts.

The octovalve and related cooling system is a marvel as well, nicely integrating heating/cooling of the cabin, motors, and battery. Dramatically simpler than competing solutions, in particular the Ford Mach E and Lightning.

Most cars have an extremely complex set of CPUs, sensors, and control distributed all around the car. Chips in doors for locks/windows, a separate system for ABS (usually from bosche), networks of temperature/pressure/movement sensors, torque controls/monitoring for window motors, windshield wipers, airflow motors, etc. In the model 3 it's largely integrated into a single board at a level of integration Munroe claims they have seen in no other car, or even any product ... outside of a satellite.

This might sound like hand waving and marketing, but one metric that supports this is the cars products per square foot of factory per hour. Tesla is way ahead. It's also supported by high profit margins, even when compared to companies that have as high or higher prices.

So yes I'd say that the gigapress is a key part of reducing the part count, assembly time, and number of robots required to build a car. The result is a Tesla factory builds more cars than the competitions factory of the same size.

The underlying trick to this, in part, is the fact that Tesla's making exactly 4 models (S3XY). The models are long-lived. This lets them invest in specialized parts that reduce the cost (significantly!) of their vehicle. I read a stat somewhere that the Y takes 10 hours to build.

Disclaimer: I respect Tesla's manufacturing prowess, I despise the self driving claims, and think the vehicles are hideous.

Indeed. Much like Apple. Apple has 4 ish laptops, that generally don't change much year to year. Compared to Dell or HP who have MANY more models, often seems like 4 models or so per market (edu, business, consumer, gaming, etc.) and are refreshed often.

Agreed on the self driving. Not a big fan of the Tesla look, but after living with one I'm a fan. Then again I've had some ugly cars, early Acura GSR (with the tiny headlights), early Subaru WRX, and early Forester Turbo. None would win any beauty contests. Model 3 generally seems like the look is determined by a wind tunnel. At least the model S (at least in some trims) is pleasantly curvy and has some style.

Thats just standard manufacturing

> Most cars have an extremely complex set of CPUs, sensors, and control distributed all around the car. Chips in doors for locks/windows, a separate system for ABS (usually from bosche), networks of temperature/pressure/movement sensors, torque controls/monitoring for window motors, windshield wipers, airflow motors, etc. In the model 3 it's largely integrated into a single board

yeahnah, thats deffo not true.

tesla has a similar number of sensors, actuators and other junk. It even has an ABS pump too. How do they think they measure torque if there aren't any torque sensors?

Having everything wired directly to a single board makes the wireloom really really unwieldy. Telsa use the same automotive busses everyone else does. (it probably uses ALL THE BUSSES, because why not.)

the reason the reason tesla make a profit is that they've been value engineering the same three cars for close to ten years. however, they have only been making a profit since 2020.

The other key is producing a car to a standard of something retailing for less than half the price. The top end Kia EV 4 feels much more "posh" than a model y, which is much more expensive. The killer feature of the EV 4 is that its waterproof.

Yes and no. Automakers reluctance to new design methodologies is coming from a place of safety - the "traditional" engineering mindset. In civil and mechanical engineering, it takes a long time to be fully confident that you've found all the edge cases that might cause catastrophic failure - and catastrophic failure in certain industries (Automotive industry included) generally means death.

Tesla is coming from a "software" engineering mindset. Move fast, break things, etc, etc. This is far easier when dealing with bits and with code. The likelihood of death and dismemberment is also far lower if you make mistakes.

> Other car manufacturers have barely started exploring the possible use of these giga-presses

Lets be clear here, tesla are doing this for the rear subframe: https://electrek.co/2021/01/11/tesla-starts-production-model...

And they want to scale it up, from what I see to the whole bottom of the car. This seems like a big reaction from how they used to do things with a billion different fasteners.

Now, I think why the other companies don't immediately jump on this is that making a die that big is really expensive, and I imagine high maintenance. Tesla will probably get away with it because they don't really care all that much about tolerance, so will run the die a lot longer than a safe manufacturer.

Also, tesla don't actually make that many models so they only need a limited number of presses and dies to be effective.

They also do the front subframe for the Model Y at some factories.

https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/1037/a-peek-at-tesla-s-sin...

This youtube video seems related.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpgK51w6uhk

This is the story of America's massive forging presses built during the cold war used to build America's most advanced machinery - the Heavy Press Program. Modern airplanes, missiles, helicopters, turbines - all have parts made on these giant machines!

The Machine Thinking channel seems interesting.

It's unrelated, that's the thing.

IDRA's "press" is a casting machine, not press forging.

I am not an expert so I am confused by terminology here.

These machines are referred to as ‘presses’, but the technique is referred to as ‘die casting’.

my naive understanding is that pressing to form things would be more a form of ‘forging’ than ‘casting’. Doesn’t casting refer to molding things from molten metal?

Is the distinction that die casting done at higher pressure than some other form of casting, to produce results more akin to injection molding, and therefore requires ‘presses’ to hold the tool dies in place?

Or am I misunderstanding words completely?

The difference between casting and die casting, is that casting is done with a sacrificial mold at lower pressures, die casting is done at high pressure using a tool die that is reused multiple times. Die casting is essentially stamping out a part at high pressure from semi-molten material, vs liquefying material to be poured into a low pressure mold.

Die casting has a lot of advantages, but is generally much more expensive as a manufacturing process, and that expense scales exponentially with part size.

"Forging" is mostly a marketing term at this point, depending on the type of product you're talking about, but it generally refers to a combination of die casting and CNC machining.

Isn’t sheet metal ‘stamping’ a forging process? I’m not sure it only has a marketing meaning these days. But then the only time I see stuff marketed as ‘forged’ these days is typically ‘drop forged’ tools, and I realized I also have no sense of what process ‘drop forging’ might involve. I guess I vaguely assumed some sort of drop hammer?

Not sure about forging being a marketing term. Forging in my understanding referee to the raw steel bring red hot and then manipulated by pressing, rolling or hammering into a desired shape. This often requires multiple cycles of reheating and manipulation. This is then often followed by CNC machining.

I also recall that grain structure is different in forged materials compared to casting.

A casted part will often be machined but not reshaped by e.g. hammering.

Your comparison to inject molding is correct. The press is used to hold the die mold halves together. I enjoyed this video that explained the process https://youtu.be/FUsicN-wKoY?t=234

I’m confused why the machine needs to apply a ‘pressing’ force to hold the dies together. Once the die is closed, can’t you just slide rigid clamps into place to hold it in position?

I don't think the metal is fully molten. That's why you need the huge pressures to bring it to shape

I don't understand this either.

The mould could have simple locking pins that lock it closed for the actual casting operation, and then unlock to remove the part.

Looks like in the case of minor body damage you will have to cut and flush weld patches in the body instead of bolting on a new panel like they currently do. Aftermarket modular body panels are extremely cheap, and repairs consist of spraying a new panel and removing and installing a couple bolts and clips. This new method will make car manufacturers more money but will inevitably drive insurance and repair costs higher. This is a negative for car buyers, and the cheaper manufacturer costs won't necessarily be reflected in sales prices. There have been tons of manufacturing breakthroughs in the last few decades that have made vehicles cheaper and easier to produce and prices just keep getting higher and higher.

Bent structural components are almost invariably a write-off no matter what kind of car you have.

It depends.

I did Au$10,000 to a car valued at $12,000, almost all of the damage was non-visible suspension and structural.

The quoting repairer had high confidence in the repairs before starting, so the insurer went ahead.

The car drove like new after the repairs, dead straight, smooth af.

If even a small fraction of that damage had been on, say, the pillars it'd had been a write off.

"Minor body damage" usually means paneling and brackets. Chassis damage to aluminum frames almost always means replacement AFAICT, which for all but the newest cars is more than the cost of replacement anyway. Remember also that modern crumple zone design deliberately sacrifices the frame as part of the collision for safety reasons.

Basically, this doesn't seem right to me. If you're hit hard enough to bend the frame, your car is totalled anyway. And that's the way we want it.

> Basically, this doesn't seem right to me. If you're hit hard enough to bend the frame, your car is totalled anyway. And that's the way we want it.

It's horribly wasteful from a resource usage perspective, because now you have to throw away the rest of the car - you can't even, say, splice together a new car out of one that has a bent front and one that has a bent back.

Everything in society moves towards easier and cheaper manufacture, but at the same time to dramatically lower repairability, and that's just Not Good At All.

To keep you from dying, though. This isn't a phone. If you want to make an efficiency-based argument against personal automobiles from first principles, I'm right behind you. But given that we're going to drive them around, I'd rather drive ones that kill fewer people; even if it means having to recycle a bunch of frames.

> you can't even, say, splice together a new car out of one that has a bent front and one that has a bent back

Nobody was doing this anyway.

I mean I once saw an episode of Pimp My Ride where a guy was driving together a car made from 2 cars welded together, but it's definitely not standard practice

Ok not nobody. But effectively nobody.

There used to be shops that would "weld on a new front clip". I know someone who had insurance pay for this type of repair on a unibody car in the late 80s. Not as common in the US anymore, but if you peruse youtube autobody videos you can find shops in asia and the middle east doing these repairs on late model vehicles.

> now you have to throw away the rest of the car

You ever been to an auto wrecker?

Not much gets thrown away.

Eventually whatever's left will go to a metal recycler. Steel, aluminium, copper, it's all extremely recyclable.

There'll be some plastic waste, sure, but we can just bury that if there's no good recycling option.

> wasteful from a resource usage perspective

The materials in a car are pretty recyclable. Aluminium and steel especially so.

The biggest environmental cost of a car is arguably the people who put it together. Ie. the emissions of the person who put it together, and his house and family.

If you use fewer people to assemble a thing, the environmental emissions go down (if you count human labor as having associated emissions).

> The materials in a car are pretty recyclable. Aluminium and steel especially so.

Yes, but melting down metals costs a lot of energy and emits a ton of nasty stuff into the air. That's the reason why so many smelters moved to Asia, cheap energy from burning coal and next to zero emissions regulations there.

It’s more wasteful if someone dies driving a ‘repaired’ vehicle that shouldn’t have been repaired in the first place.

These giga-pressed components are distinct from the body panels.

They aren’t casting the body panels, rather the subframe that the body panels are attached to.

9,000 tons is a lot of force... but we've done much bigger presses[1]

I fail to see how the prefix "Giga" - 10^9 applies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoa_50,000_ton_forging_press

9,000 tonnes is 9 Gigagrams.

Everything is giga-something.

Right. But to their defense, gram is the unit without prefix.

so, 9 Kilotons they should call it the KiloPress

1000 tons = 10^9 grams

I don't think those presses would be suitable for car manufacturing because they weren't fast... Ie. rather than a cycle time of ~50 seconds, they had a cycle time of many hours.

What makes you think they had such a slow cycle time? I can't find any hint of that, there are videos showing cycle times with a part only taking a minute or so.

A lot of the cycle time involves thermal management of the casting and the press.

The encompassing "heavy press program" is an interesting bit of history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program

Several of these presses have been designated by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers as historic landmarks and I suspect the HN audience may be interested in the other landmarks:

https://www.asme.org/about-asme/engineering-history/landmark...

I've been trying to visit as many of these in person as I can and it's been a very satisfying hobby. Some portion of them are on private land or don't have standard visitor hours, but my tip is group tours are easiest to arrange for the most reticent property owners, and there's almost always an ASME chapter at a nearby university looking for industry mentor connections. Plus going on a field trip with students is a special joy :)

So we're building real cars the way we manufacture Hot Wheels?

Neat. We're living in the Gunbuster future, in which mecha were shipped in giant blister packaging and spaceship parts came on huge plastic model kit rails.

> Battery packs currently make up 25%-40% of the total cost of BEVs.

> Automakers using aluminium casting machines claim they can reduce investments needed to build chassis - a vehicle's second most expensive component after the engine - by 40%, and the average cost of their parts by 30%, Ferrario said.

I'm having trouble with the math.

40% battery

41% chassis

42% engine

123% !

25% battery

26% chassis

27% engine

78% total (rest of car ~ 22%)

> I'm having trouble with the math.

The trouble you're having is taking it literally. These are averages, not absolutes.

Battery: 40%. Leaves the remainder: 60%. Chassis is the most expensive component of that remainder (no engine in EVs). Let's pretend the battery and chassis are the only two parts:

40% + ((1-40%)*60%) = 40%+36% = 76% cost of original. 24% reduction.

> reduce investments needed to build chassis - a vehicle's second most expensive component after the engine - by 40%, and

To me this is pretty clear: the press reduces the cost of the chassis by 40%. It could be 10%, 80% of the total cost of the car, it doesn't say.

> 123% !

Now you understand why EVs cost so much more than ICE vehicles!

Tesla’s leadership here is incentivizing huge efficiency gains which will help the world adopt EVs much faster than otherwise.

During WW2 Germany had the biggest steam presses in the world - allowing them to build airplanes from bigger components pressed into shape, while all the other countries had to use a lot more smaller components bolted together. Made Nazi planes lighter and stronger than what every one else had.

All these presses where in East Germanay (mostly Berlin and Brandenburg) and after the end of WW2 felt in Soviet hands, together with plans for even bigger presses - which the Soviets did build. The British Empire was so short on cash at the time that they sold their jet engine designs to Stalin. Good frames and good jet engines made Soviet jets at least equal to the American in the 1950s.

Hydraulic Press Channel needs this immediately. Lauri only goes to ~140 tons.

It was reading about the Telsa Gigapresses that led me to invest in Tesla. Between this and their software platform, they are, I believe, poised to leave the competition in the dust. Next step would be for me to buy one - not there yet.

They are great until you take a look at the price of aluminum

Car structures are often made of aluminum anyway, do these parts use significantly more than e.g. bonded extrusions?

These presses are for complex and fairly thick structural parts. Think like radiator core supports, subframes, dashboard support structures and control arms. Yhe resultant parts are substantially more expensive than the stamped and welded steel they replace. The range of cost difference vs steel also wide because the complexity of the part and the shape of the part affect the service life and initial cost of the die a lot. Some parts lend themselves well to the process, some don't. What this increased expense buys you is weight and NVH improvements.

In previous cases aluminum has been used for car bodies and cosmetic sheet-metal panels. The cost difference vs steel is not nearly as large in that application.

Big car manufacturers use their own modular platforms for the chassis of different vehicles, in order to optimise R&D and production costs. An upsized vehicle from the range usually uses the same basic platform with a few size adjustments here and there. "Gigacasting" would require them to create moulds for every individual part.

Seems by using "gigacasts" Tesla is kind of limiting the use of cross-model platforms... Interesting approach to ignore one of the most beneficial automotive principals, and being lauded for it.

> cross-model platforms

and spare parts

I did, actually. Looks like aluminum is down about 60% from a peak last year, and sitting about 20% higher than its pre-pandemic level (which inflation-corrected isn't much of a change at all).

Is there a specific point you're trying to make? Or you're just saying steel is cheaper?

No i mean the machines are great but the war is making the cost of cars uncertain and probably high

It’s mostly stored electricity and completely recyclable.

Sure, pure aluminium is.

Surely the Tesla parts will be special alloys to get the correct plastic deformation during crashes (amongst other constraints).

I would guess special alloys could require different recycling paths, or recycling to lower value impure material?

Then again, it must be a solved problem, which I should bing!

Weight is negative fuel and must be considered in the equation.

Aluminum holds its value

With a typical car having 200kg of aluminium, thats $400. Substantial, but not massively so for the chassis of a $60,000 car.

I made a similar argument to explain that science fiction technologies like "asteroid mining" won't improve the cost of everyday products like cars. Even if the material costs were reduced to zero, the sticker price would remain essentially unchanged.

Elon Musk made a similar point about the inefficiency of NASA-style rocket construction. The "raw materials" to make a rocket cost something like $500K, but the completed launch vehicle is often north of a billion dollars. The SLS program currently costs a whopping $4B per launch! Even if you got all the "expensive" materials like titanium or carbon fibre for free, the SLS launches would still cost too much.

EV passenger vehicles are great until you look at the supply of copper.

Seriously, I love my car, but I also understand that we can't have everyone in one. Mass transit, walking, biking, e-bikes, etc... These are all competitors to EVs and unless we have a revolution in production requiring less copper or increases in copper supply, coupled with large increases in energy production, we're not giving everyone a cheap EV and the sort of mobility ICE drivers have had over the last 100 years.

Google indicates that a typical electric car contains 183 pounds of copper. That's a lot! But a typical house contains 470 pounds. That's even more. So I'm not convinced that cars alone will dominate the market for copper.

Does that include copper pipes, which are being phased out?

Regardless, it matters. Nearly everything that is being electrified, including formerly gas appliances like water heaters and stoves, will require more copper. Unlike lithium, we do not appear to have readily available reserves of copper that aren't already being extracted. Unlike lithium, there is no suitable competitor right now like you have with sodium.

The majority is in wiring, but pipes are included in the average. Aluminum wiring is a thing, but allowance must be made for its high coefficient of thermal expansion, which has led to fires with aluminum wiring in the past.

Overall, I would agree that copper is one of the tightest resources right now (moreso than nickel or lithium) but I don't think it's going to create a worldwide crisis. Applications where switching to aluminum is the least difficult will probably be changed first. But do also notice:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adfm.201806...

Copper in an EV is almost entirely unneeded.

Copper conductors could be replaced with aluminium. Aluminium actually has a better conductivity to weight ratio.

It's just a little difficult to join aluminium wires, but we have invented processes to do it already.

No great for those who probably didn't lock in their prices long ago. I assume those that have bet long on gigapresses also had the presence of mind to think ahead about the cost of everything related.

Is it repairable? (genuine question)

Seems to result the car being totaled. https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/t-boned-totaled-or-w...

The equation is a bit different for Teslas. The battery or even a fraction of a battery has substantial value on the used market. There's even a section on ebay just for Tesla batteries.

I was tboned in my brand new s (there’s a thread on it on tmc)and they finally declared it a loss after three months. Looking at it didn’t seem like that much damage but yeah once the frame is even slightly skewed it’s done.

In general most modern cars are totaled when the unibody construction gets bent. The car gets written off by insurance and sold at an auction for low price. The repair people typically buy 2 cars and weld them together if possible. Otherwise the unit is parted out.

No real idea on how this would work on a Tesla though.

> . The repair people typically buy 2 cars and weld them together if possible.

The repair people also commonly just straighten out the bent part and resell (sometimes shipping overseas first to a place where less attention is paid to bent crumple zones)

And outside the purview of consumer protection services such as Carfax.

There's an enormous trade in totaled cars to Nigeria from the USA

It is pretty similar. A bunch of stamped, then bent pieces of sheet metal all welded together isn’t more or less reparable. We are talking about frame components here, and so repairs require using hydraulics to bend the components back to straight’ish and then weld gussets to hold it in place. Regardless of the manufacturing technique, most insurance companies will total the car if these components get bent.

so if you fuck the subframe (the single casting that hosts the motor and rear wheels with suspension) and you somehow manage to not break anything else, then its replaceable by unbolting it: https://youtu.be/uoJWjhqjq2k?t=365

this is from a JAAAAAAG. but its the same idea.

Repairable by you or me? No.

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