Toyota Will Adopt Tesla-Style Cast Bodies That Might Be Impossible to Fix
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a car NOT be written off after “major damage”. The industry already doesn’t bother to fix cars, they just get scrapped, so I don’t see what the actual difference is.
Shopping for a replacement vehicle in the damaged one, various tier 2-3 dealer types said, oh, we could fix that up real nice for $3K, and one of them would have been happy to have the car at the insurance company's quoted value in damaged condition. So you can bet that that thing has by now been auctioned off, fixed up like that and sold, possibly with a "rebuilt" title, at a modest profit, and continues to be used. It was too good to scrap and the damage, while a PITA to fix, was not even remotely structural.
So it's not that insurance companies consign all these written-off cars to the scrap heap. It's just that they don't want to deal with the repairs, and possible post-repair complaints. So just like bad debts, it's sent down the pipe to the people best matched to the job. A broken cast frame would short-circuit this process, causing the car to be scrapped for real and thus raising costs for everyone.
If the damage is bad enough o require a frame fix, it’s very likely there’s significant damage to other parts of the car.
Of course, your question is basically a tautology if you define "major damage" as "that which causes a car to get totaled". The whole concern is that, with these cast bodies, damage that would have been considered fixable or minor in the past now becomes an instant write off.
Having a car written off when you need to essentially take the entire thing apart is fairly reasonable, as is not wanting to repair the actual body part itself.
When the car is made out of multiple different parts, a low-speed bump into a bollard or another car might result in the bumper needing to be replaced. Not the cheapest repair, but definitely quite doable and probably not worthy of a complete writeoff. When the entire car is made out of a single cast that very same bump results in the entire body needing to be replaced - and that's just not going to happen.
Literally nobody plans to remove crush cans from the vehicle, even if the whole body is cast.
See: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla...
So if you think about it - if you first decide you need to go down the "structural battery" route to save cost and weight, you've already lost repairability if the frame is bent. Then moving to a cast frame doesn't really change anything.
AFAICT the actual batteries inside the "structural battery" are separate much smaller cells [1] that can at least be recovered from the bent frame and reused if undamaged.
Consider four factors: normal car performance, car's safety in a crash, car's repairability after a crash, and car's price. They all work against each other; no wonder that repairability is sacrificed to optimize the other three. (In a military vehicle the price is usually sacrificed instead.)
[1]: https://insideevs.com/news/323682/rare-look-inside-a-tesla-m...
This would also lighten EVs, which has a tremendous number of benefits.
Do you think just because the pack itself is not structural it just not gone get unharmed?
And by the way, structural pack doesn't mean its not replaceable.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/next-s...
https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/tesla-structural-battery-pack...
Structural packs are nothing new, lots of EV always had structural packs.
What Tesla is doing in the newer Model Y (called 'Structural Pack') is actually structural cells. That's the innovation. Where the cells themselves are glued together and sandwiched in a pack. So the cells themselves act as vertical enforcers. The whole back is basically filled with structural foam.
The only other company that is doing something like that is BYD but that is quite different as those are really big Prismatic cells stacked up.
Sounds like extra steps for the profit of middle men
Write-off is about insurance policies, and whether it is cheaper to repair damage to the standard committed to by the insurer within the parameters (e. g., new original manufacturer parts) in the insurance contact or to pay the amount the insurer is committed to pay in the alternative.
It is only tangentially related to whether it is econonically viable to restore the vehicle to usable condition.
A newish car, a minor crash, bumper, hood, a front light or two, couple of airbags... at ~1500eur per light, 2-3k for original hood, 2-3k for airbags, body work, and low eurotax estimate of the price of the car, your repair cost is easily above 70% of the "car value".
A few trips to the dump, some aftermarket parts and someone to do the work for cheap, and you've got a drivable car.
The people who buy salvage titled cars are usually happy to drive a car that doesn’t work quite right if they get a killer deal for it.
The other thing is that generally, a person is free to buy their car back from the insurance company instead of taking the cash from the totaling. That is when they will discover they can't just send it to a shop and get it repaired for any reasonable amount, plus the salvage title means no one else wants it.
You send it for an estimate. If that estimate is too high, insurance gives you a check then sells the car as a salvage.
- what it would cost them to repair it (including the risk of having to get additional work done, etc)
- what the car was worth minus what they can sell it for at auction.
If the values get close, they total the car. Then someone else buys it: maybe for parts, or maybe to repair it to a standard that the original owner wouldn't have been happy with.
Well to get the owner of the written-off car installed into a new vehicle of course! With a whole new loan and likely a higher insurance premium esp. if they "upgraded" in the process.
I see this frequently driving through poor, rural communities. Very nice vehicles, with some sort of damage and repairs. You can get a super nice interior and high quality ride if you’re willing to deal with vanity flaws.
Vehicle was repaired, frame was able to be straightened on a rack.
I was rear-ended in a new Jeep Wrangler. Damage included a bent frame, crushed rear bumper, bent rear hatch, bent roll cage, bent rear fender, shattered tail light, and a bent floor.
It was nearly $20k in damage. It was repaired. [and I very quickly sold it because I had zero faith in the longevity of the repairs]
There are more than a few A-body Oldsmobile Cutlass Cieras and Buick Centuries from the late 1980s that I still see driven around where I live. The environmental impact they've had has been far less than any of these cast-body cars will be because an A-body is a cockroach that will never die no matter how many times you hit something with it. They were produced decades ago and have long since offset their initial production impact. Add in all the Chevrolet C-10s, Chevrolet S-10s, Ford Rangers, Suzuki Sidekicks/Geo Trackers, and XJ Jeep Cherokees I see daily and they still have less of an impact environmentally than these disposable cars will have because they can be repaired instead of requiring total replacement.
And older cars definitely fold in crashes just not in predetermined ways that minimize intrusion and injury like modern cars. Generally older cars have far less rigid chassis than modern vehicles.
Most(85%+) of a car's environmental footprint comes from usage - namely fuel.
And no wonder - a car works itself through approximately 10x its weight in fuel during its lifetime.
A car from the 80s or even 90s will naturally have visibly higher fuel consumption that a modern car and thus keeping it running is actually the more environmentally impactful choice.
On top of that nowadays factories run on a much cleaner grid than in the 90s, so despite there being more tech and sophisticated materials inside, it's actually less environmentally damaging to produce a car than it used to be.
Another best part is our currently skyrocketing car insurance - even for people who don't carry collision. Even if you don't contribute to the problem, insurance companies force you to financially support everyone who does.
No because cars with castings still have crush cans. Only a crash hard enough to go threw the crush cans and bend the frame will require totaling.
And that is not a small crash. The castings are very strong and hard to bend, being aluminum that is specifically cast in a shape to be strong.
You can see the crush cans here: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla...
And in fact, the aluminum casting is actually more stable. With cast aluminum you can get it into the perfect shape and you can even cast rips and things like that in it. The final piece is a much more optimal shape then you could ever get from welded steel. Companies try to minimize the amount of welds in a design because its costly and increases the size of your body shop.
See here: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla...
An just because this articles doesn't make this clear, Tesla still have crushcans integrated in the design and those are perfectly replaceable, just as they are now. So this really only matters when you have front impact so strong that it goes threw the crushcan and damages the massively strong casting.
In such a case, you should be happy for the extra stiffness provided by the casting, because it might make the difference between live and death.
At the end of the day this is a no brainer. You are replacing literally 100s of robots, lots of production time, lots more chance for error and it ends up costing far less. The waste majority of cars, never do repairs on their welded together body structure, this is the extreme minority of cases. Seems to me it makes a whole lot more sense to optimize for the majority of cases, not the vast minority.
For those that want to see the process in operations, this is a nice video: https://youtu.be/BwoiFC-HwPE?si=R9sRMEDkgDJqBMew&t=306
Many people believe that decent models will be considerably cheaper than today’s Tercels, Civics, Corollas, etc. in as little as 2-3 years.
Today you can buy a brand new Tesla Model 3 for $39,000 and with the U.S. tax credits that drops to $31,500. If you are in states like NY with additional credits, $26,500.
So it is already around the price levels of Accords, Camrys, etc. on the existing Tesla platform.
Tesla’s goal in their next platform is to cut the price to manufacture in HALF, and there is good reason to believe they will achieve that. The aspirational goals Toyota is claiming in this article, if achieved, will help them get closer to Tesla’s current architecture, which will be a great step forward.
As manufacturing becomes more efficient and prices drop, it will indeed make less and less sense to do major repairs, which are only getting more expensive.
* EVs are simpler when they have a proper hardware/software integration and over-the-air updates. Continuing the current industry practice of stringing together 150 off-the-shelf ECUs is one reason why most companies are losing money on their EVs and will never keep up with those who understand the software-defined car.
For a great deep dive on how Tesla has created their software-defined car architecture check out https://youtu.be/fUCgLCbX_18?si=X9-s_aNLyrunmGHi
I'm interested in how this could be realistically changed. I'm convinced most of the environmental and societal problems caused by economic activity is inevitable at scale, where an organisation's behaviour becomes dominated more by underlying economic rules than any principles it's originators may have had at a younger age or smaller scale.
It also shouldn't necessarily be so specific as "must maximise vehicle life", it really depends, because it's not impossible that with the right manufacturing and recycling techniques shorter vehicle life could bring down the total environmental and societal cost. The question is how to make that economically interesting to the manufacturers, e.g what if each manufacturer was responsible, end-to-end, for the recycling of it's own vehicles... shorter vehicle life could mean more sales, but could also mean more recycling. If the process is optimised for that then it could be profitable and cheap for the consumer and good for the environment, but if not it will hurt their bottom line.
Model Y has been using casting for a few years now.
It's also among the safest cars in a crash: https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/956/tesla-model-y-receives...
In this particular test it was THE safest cars ever tested by Australian ANCAP.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/tesla-gigacasting-a-cars-entir...
Cast iron is already used in transmission cases etc, and it does indeed shatter. But it's not because its cast (although it can't be forged even a little; it breaks apart almost like sand), it's because it's actually just a name for an alloy. It's very high carbon (>1%) steel, which makes it very brittle but also very easy to cast. You can cast aluminum or low carbon steel and it will not be brittle at all, particularly if you let it cool slowly.
They claim that due to material advances and such, casting can meet or exceed the strength of typical 'forged' steel.
All the savings you hear about with regards to EV’s are going to be more than offset by insurance premiums - which means these gigacast vehicles aren’t going to sell well.
That's not actually what's happening.
> which means these gigacast vehicles aren’t going to sell well.
The Model Y is one of the one of the most sold car in the world and uses more casting then any other vehicle in the world. But why bother with data when one can just make up stuff.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/sep/30/the-quotes-wer...).
The article even talks about how this doesn't just apply to Tesla, so again, this has nothing to do with using castings.
This is also a British articles based no British concern and insurance companies.
I suggest you read my top level post, to get my overall position.
To make statement about CyberTruck before we have ever seen the internally design and a detailed tear-down talking about its repair-ability is mostly nonsense speculation that I will not take seriously.
This is a nice efficiency gain, but they don’t seem to be constrained by how quickly they can produce cars…as far as I can tell, demand in the market for their product is more based on the cost of the supply, not how quickly they are producing units.
Or are they thinking that by producing units faster the supply will increase enough to reduce prices? Will they allow supply to increase such that individual units become cheaper?
In any case it is bothersome that they would back a group that is against repairing your car…cars aren’t like phones where you can just buy an entire replacement if the screen cracks and if you’re already eyeballing the new model……
Of course both the large casting machine and the fleet of welding robots need engineers and maintenance.
Its really just cheaper, and the resulting piece is higher strength while being lighter.
Its btw the official product name:
Also, you can actually use less material since you don't have to reinforce the points where you weld/bolt.
My point is that mechanics deal with more challenging problems on a daily basis and it's actually easier to have one bent out of shape piece that costs X, instead of several pieces forming the same section of the car, each bent out of shape in a cascade of damage and costing e.g. 0.6X each.
Personally I paid the most for replacing parts that contained electronics - like a rear bumper with parking sensors.
A name-brand parking sensor can go for as much as a second-hand quarter panel.
The most easily imaginable conspiracy theory is that Tesla has pioneered techniques that let it manufacture electric vehicles with good range at a reasonable cost, catching other auto manufacturers flat-footed. By continually improving and lowering prices, Tesla makes it nearly impossible for others to keep up. So the traditional auto makers deploy FUD to try to buy time.
But that's just a theory.
Here’s a picture of the Ford casting machine under construction/testing at Idra:
Also, because Tesla is so popular, is it possible that its attractions have far less to do with the environment and more to do with everything else about the car?
These concerns about the environmental impact of increased write-offs and increased insurance premiums are perfectly understandable, but I wonder if they will stop even a single sale?
For Tesla to do this they had to work with a company that made the largest casting and task them with creating a massively larger casting. Tesla material teams also developed its own aluminum alloy that wouldn't bend as much during cooling. This allowed Tesla to not have to dip the castings into a fluid to cool them.
Castings had been used by car companies for a while, sometimes decent size ones around the wheel for example. But Tesla took the idea and put in the effort to take it way further.
They started with doing only half the back, and then bond the two sides. When the company finished development on the larger generation of machines they pioneered doing the whole back piece all at once.
See: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla...
> Also, because Tesla is so popular, is it possible that its attractions have far less to do with the environment and more to do with everything else about the car?
This is clearly the case. People never by things 'just of the environment'. Tesla produces the arguable the best price to return for EVs. At least unless you want a much smaller shorter range car.
See: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla...
There is a reason Tesla cars do so well on safety while been pretty light comparatively.
> Why can't the blocks be modular and replaceable?
Everything is possible. But if you have many independent pieces that are all independently bonded that introduces a whole lot of complexity. Each connection is an additional place for failure. There is a reason every single car welds these pieces together. Its just not smart to try to use fasteners to connect these pieces. Its much harder to design, much harder (and more expensive) to produce, much error prone its likely also heavier.
Most folks in the car market chase fashion and could care less about quality, dependability (Ford, GM, Chrysler still exist) and longevity. They just make their $600 a month payment and roll over the remainder every 3 years into a new vehicle.
Instead their next EV will move to a different platform to be consistent with their newer cars which is good but also at a higher price point, which is not. Particularly with that subsidy they could own that low-end EV market; they've had to extend the retirement date of the current car several times due to demand!
But, they're not alone: from the linked article "Last month, 17% of new vehicles sold were under $30,000, compared to 44% five years ago." Which sucks for people who do just want a point-a to point-b vehicle and not a rolling status symbol.
https://www.businessinsider.com/cheapest-cars-abandoned-by-a...
Not to be too cynical about it, but if wrecking a car means totalling a car, that's also another potential sale. At the very least making them less repairable smacks of consumer-hostile moves we've seen in the electronics industry and similarly without right to repair legislation, the manufacturers can do whatever they want. At least for me it's frustrating.
Using these casts, regardless of how good or bad they are, is not enshittification.
The car examples I gave is already pushing it. But if the new Toyota is worse than yours it's not really enshittification because your car still works just as well, and you're not locked into buying another Toyota next time. That's just them cheaping out.
Kia and Hyundai are among the last brands to be selling cars without them, and that's the reason they've been targeted so heavily by car thieves.
If you have one key and lost one, you can use the one you have to more easily reprogram the other.
However, if you have lost all of your keys, a technician needs physical access to your car to reprogram everything together.
Add on top of that the licensing cost for the software to do the programming (you don't want random people having easy access to reprogramming your locks after all) . Reprogramming keys is a fairly low-volume sale, especially if you need access to the car to do it (hard to scale volume remotely) so the per-key cost is much higher as a result.
p * (cost of theft via roll onto trailer) << $700
p = probability of roll onto trailer theft