3D Printed Car Is Nearing Production

The machine pictured is a Stratasys Fortus 900MC, which costs $379,900. An annual lease on a machine of this type is usually about a fifth of its purchase cost, so let's be generous and call it $70,000 per year. Each body therefore costs about $20,000 in machine time alone, before you factor in the cost of materials and the not-inconsiderable amount of finishing that an FDM part requires once it comes off the machine.

There's nothing magical about 3d printing, so we could just as easily injection-mold these parts in exactly the same ABS plastic at a tiny fraction of the cost. There'd be no point, because ABS is a terrible material for car bodies.

Car bodies are largely stiffness-critical structures. In most practical materials, they're much stronger than they need to be once you've made them sufficiently stiff. That's why carbon composite is such an excellent material for performance cars - it's immensely stiff. You don't need to be an engineer to know that ABS plastic isn't very stiff.

The whole thing is hokum, absolute hokum.

I am impressed that someone took 3d printing this far, it shows the many uses traditional automakers will be able to derive from it, mostly on the component sides. There is no reason dash assemblies could not be done this for current makers other that costs and and that printing time. You can bet they have or are looking into such technologies.

There are many tricks to forming car bodies in steel that allow for variances of thickness and such. Hot form steel manufacturing being introduced now allows for thinner and stronger stamped steel parts; essentially a water cooled press.

So while its neat, its not a car, yet.

"The design puts a tubular metal cage around the driver, “like a NASCAR roll cage,” Kor claims. And he also mentioned the possibility of printed shock-absorbing parts between the printed exterior and the chassis. "

Interesting demonstration of the technology, but if you want a light, non-structural body, carbon fibre (or even fibreglass if worried about cost) would almost certainly be cheaper and faster to produce.

There's other safety concerns, but those have already been mentioned.

Printer costs too much? prices come down. Long production time? machines get faster. Materials not strong enough? they're getting stronger.

Sorry if the future will be here next Tuesday instead of today.

This is simply false. If a plastic 3D print were "as strong as steel", then we could print an entire gun that would fire more than one round. But we can't, because what comes out of plastic 3D printers is not remotely "as strong as steel".

The title is hype, not reporting.

Though I guess those kinds of printers are really expensive and take days to complete a fender. So I guess for a long while you'll have to have a central location do all the printing. Which defeats the whole point really.

Seems like he's trying to mention every buzzword possible, even if they contradict.

Also, how do you repair it if it's all one piece?

Of course carbon fibre is the composite of choice at the moment and it's relatively expensive but surely that will change.

TVR made cars with tubular frames and fiberglass bodies for decades. And these were full on cars, not 3 wheeled toys.

Only printing the body takes... 2500 hours.

So one printer can create a body in... 105 days!

So if this was to scale to, say, 100 000 cars per year one would need 30 000 printing machines. That would be quite a huge factory and it begs the question: who's going to produce the printers? (and how?)

Also he would probably make more waves/growth if he were to print up things like all-plastic parts for the Honda accord and sell it to local garages for 1/100th of the price.