It was never worth it to retool for decades?
Or was there a pathological lock-in between suppliers and manufacturers that prevented even the most obvious innovations from happening if they required any amount of coordination?
Or was there a pathological lock-in between suppliers and manufacturers that prevented even the most obvious innovations from happening if they required any amount of coordination?
Using a higher voltage is not an innovation (it's an obvious change, and we've gone from 6V to 12V to, in some cases, 24V already) - rather it's just a slight efficiency improvement in largely non-critical systems, with not a lot of incentive to take on the cost of transition.
In a a personal ICE vehicle, the only real significant power was to the starter motor and from the generator, and the distance there was short so the copper didn't really matter and thus no one cared for 24V - unlike industry where you might have significant aux systems. With EVs, you have heat pumps and brake boosters on the auxillary power, so you now have a stronger driver for conversion.
Even within 12V, you'd get a larger weight reduction from not carrying an aux battery, and just feeding through a converter from the HV system.
If the aux supply is near or in the battery, leaving that connected would while the rest of HV is interrupted would probably not cause any notable increase in risk.
At the same time, vehicle fires have been caused by a shorted auxillary battery (I have personally experienced an entire industrial building burn down because the 12V battery in a parked ICE car shorted and went up in flames), so I imagine only having one battery to worry about is a risk reduction.
Classic example of legacy automakers happy to maintain the status-quo because it is easiest, while the new kid on the block is pointing out that things don't have to be the way they are just because they are that way.
Tesla worked closely with a supplier, did lots of its own research and development and continue to work with a supplier to make the technology better over time.
This was considered stupid at first. This is now very widely copied. First automakers from China copied it. And now others are copying it as well. Even Toyota (who everybody believes are some kind of gods of manufacturing) are copying this now.
If you have been doing something one way for long enough, going into a radically different direction is hard. Your whole workforce knows about welding steel sheets together, and nobody knows anything about casting. Your whole workforce knows about V12 and the ecosystem for that.
Its hard to fundamentally change how you do things when you are producing millions of vehicles a year.
>> S&P Global Mobility forecasts 15% to 20% of traditional body-in-white (BIW) stampings in 2030 may be at risk from these gigacastings. Underbody components typically comprise about 50% of a vehicle's BIW shell, and this soft underbelly is the target of gigacasting's focus.
Source: https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/gigac...
Obviously not a technical journal, nor did I double check anything.
What the numbers say 15-20% might be replaced by gigastampings (sidenote: I ak surprised Elon didn't rename Twitter to Giga-X). Which, ok, is a thing. But nowhere near the revolution people seem to believe. First, it has to happen. Second, others have to consider it better, read overall cheaper, and continue doing it. Then we can properly judge. Until then, it might as well be in the category of Teslas fully automated factories that ended with Elon doing pyjama parties with his workers on the shopfloor and ad-hoc tents.
And Toyota, as per the linked article, is not copying it, they are "eyeing" it. And believe itbor not, manufacturers are eyeing new production tech all the time.
And Toyotas reputation in car manufacturing is well earned.
The majority of cars sold then will be existing models with minor updates.
And car companies only upgrade their major platforms every 5-7 years. Many companies are currently planning their second (or first real) EV platform.
But by 2030 even the waste number of EV will be on first generation EV platforms still.
Companies have 100s of million invested in their current body lines. So unless you build a totally new factory you are not gone adopt this technology.
When Toyota came out with their production system it took decades for all the practices to become established.
Also, 20% of castings still means a lot of welding before a car body is made.
One thing regarding Toyotas production system so: it is all about management and processes and not about the actual machinery. And it share a lot of principles ranging as far back as Venice's Arsenal in the 16/17th century and, especially, WW2 mass manifavturing of, e.g., planes.
Anothet major difference: TPS is a proven methodology for longer than Tesla, let alone any production tech coming out of Tesla, exists as a company.
Why would they upgrade a system when they don’t need to? Tesla can be a front runner and companies like Bosch will start creating 48v parts as EVs become more popular for legacy auto to use.