Tesla Breakthrough 3D Printing With Sand For Single Piece Casting of Complex Underbody

Reuters reports that Tesla has combined a series of innovations to make a technological breakthrough for single casting of the complex underbody of the car. Tesla already can gigacast the front and the rear of its cars. This would mean a further reduction in parts and complexity. This will enable faster and cheaper car production and will reduce the factory space needed for car manufacturing.

Tesla is making progress to snapping together just a few major sub-pieces of the car. They already have front and rear casting which removed ove a thousand parts and hundreds of robots. They will soon cast the complex underbody. A video shows how they already can easily snap together major pieces like the bumper and trunk parts. The goal will be like maybe a few dozen pieces snapping together like giant legos. Those giant legos will be snapped together by humanoid robots.

Tesla will be able to die cast nearly all the complex underbody of an EV in one piece, rather than about 400 parts in a conventional car. The know-how is core to Tesla’s “unboxed” manufacturing strategy unveiled by Chief Executive Musk in March, a linchpin of his plan to churn out tens of millions of cheaper EVs in the coming decade, and still make a profit, the sources said.

The unboxed model involves producing large sub-assemblies of a car at the same time and then snapping them together.

Three major body sections will enable Tesla to develop a car from the ground up in 18 to 24 months, while most carmakers can currently take anywhere from three to four years.

The unboxed process will be very easy to adapt for humanoid robot Teslabot to replace human workers.

Tesla cars already can mostly snap together as shown by Autoline.

3D Printing and Sand

The breakthrough Tesla has made centers on the how the giant molds for such a large part are designed and tested for mass production, and how casts can incorporate hollow subframes with internal ribs to cut weight and boost crashworthiness.

In both cases the innovations, developed by design and casting specialists in Britain, Germany, Japan and the United States, involve 3D printing and industrial sand, the five people said.

To overcome the obstacles, Tesla turned to firms that make test molds out of industrial sand with 3D printers. Using a digital design file, printers known as binder jets deposit a liquid binding agent onto a thin layer of sand and gradually build a mold, layer by layer, that can die cast molten alloys.

The cost of the design validation process with sand casting, even with multiple versions, is minimal – just 3% of doing the same with a metal prototype.

Tesla can make the complex molds with industrial sand and then cast the complex underbody with molten metal alloy.