The world needs cheaper EVs, but Tesla has historically
been the only automaker outside China making electric vehicles
profitably. The rest are bleeding money, and everyone is trying to
cut costs and move faster. Mega casting or giga casting, as it's often called, is
the latest manufacturing technique promising to do exactly that: make EVs cheaper,
lighter, and simpler. Tesla has been credited with pioneering the method. I think it's basically going to be how old cars are
made in the future. Rivals are already sinking billions and trying to jump
on the bandwagon. If you want to make an efficient electrified car, you
need to have more aluminum, you need to have less parts, you need to have less complexity, and you end
up in, okay, let's look at on how we can use casting in a better way. It's a very logical kind of process step
for us in our technology transformation, I would say.

Details on how much each is spending are scant, but the
total market for die casting, which includes parts of all sizes, is expected to grow 70% in less
than a decade. That's $126 billion by 2032. I see tons of opportunities going forward, so we can
increase the amount of aluminum and reduce the weight of the vehicle, which in the end is CO2 and range for
the customer. Researchers agree mega casting is potentially
revolutionary if it works, but there are some serious challenges. To say this is the future of car production can be. But the realization showed that the problems are more
expensive and we should go back to the conventional way. So this is really an open game at
the moment. Mega casting, or as Tesla calls it, giga casting, is a
form of die casting. It's a common manufacturing technique that
can be used to make all sorts of things, including car parts.

The process is fundamentally simple. You fill a high-pressure mold with a substance, such as molten aluminum, and form a cast. After some cutting and finishing, the part is ready to go. While casting has been used to make smaller parts for a long time, many of the larger parts on a vehicle have historically been made out of stamped steel pieces, typically welded or joined together. But at some point, Tesla started pushing the limits of the casting technique and now uses large giga casts in the Model Y, Model 3, and the Cybertruck. Large sections of the front and the back of the vehicle are made out of single casts. Tesla is really the first one to go and have very large, high-pressure, die-cast aluminum castings in cars to replace large sections of what are traditionally stamped steel or stamped aluminum structures. The front and rear portions of the early Model 3 chassis each contained more than 70 parts.

The same two portions on the very similar model Y are
now just one part each. They cast a rear body or front body is lighter,
cheaper, better noise, vibration, and harshness. Much easier to manufacture. Beginning with these big pieces allows Tesla to make
tweaks that improve manufacturing efficiency. We decided the floor should be a part of the car. The battery is the floor. With that, Tesla says it can build different parts of
the car at the same time instead of piecing things together one by one. The carmaker claims it cut the size of its assembly
line by 10%. Casting also provides the opportunity to rethink
designs, allowing for a wider variety of shapes than stamped sheet metal. You could add support in places where it would be too
difficult to do. Otherwise, you can use less material to get the same amount of
strength because you can customize the shape of it to be most advantageous for the loads that you're
trying to carry.

The material matters to giga casting is typically done with molten aluminum because EVs already carry such heavy battery packs, reducing weight as much as possible wherever you can is essential. Automakers have been using aluminum, even in gas cars, to improve fuel efficiency. Ford was able to drop 15% of the f-150's weight just by using an aluminum body instead of steel, but aluminum is more expensive than steel. Overall, giga casting can help close that gap. A Giga cast component would be about 30% cheaper than trying to make the same part or assembly out of stamped aluminum. It would still cost about 50% more than stamped steel, but weight reduction, part reduction, and other advantages might make it worthwhile. Tesla has said that combining its giga casting process with battery improvements can reduce vehicle weight by about 10%, increase range by 14%, and use 370 fewer parts. Cnbc reached out to several automakers.

However, most said their plans for mega casting are in the very early stages. Eric Severinsen leads Volvo's electrification strategy. The company doesn't break out exactly how much it is investing in mega casting, but says it is a significant portion of the $1 billion it spent on a plant in Sweden. Right now, we are investing in Torslanda. That's the first plant out with this. Of course, you know, long term, this is what we will have in all the plants where we are building this generation of vehicles. The potential goes far beyond reducing weight or the number of needed parts. Automakers say giga casting offers them a chance to change the way cars are made. In the past, when you had to change your rear floor, you had to go in and change in 100 different tools. And now we need to change in one tool. So one you have the machine there, one you have the casting infrastructure to actually do a change on the

rear floor is much easier, and that offers you flexibility for product upgrades. It offers you for flexibility for, you know, improvements of the products during the lifespan of it. So it has a lot of other benefits to it. Of course, it's a big investment to start with, but it is very much infrastructure. Once you have it, you can really get more flexibility in your products portfolios. Tesla has said it wants to use giga casting to completely change the way it makes vehicles. In the very early days of the automotive industry, cars were built one at a time, piece by piece, in a single place. Henry Ford changed all this by adopting the assembly line. This streamlined the process and allowed cars to be made continuously. This is still basically how vehicles are made today. First, sheet metal is stamped into the panels that make up the body. These are welded together. Then the doors get hung on the body. The whole thing goes through the paint shop and gets painted.

Then the vehicle goes into final assembly. The body is married to the chassis or the frame. But at this point, oftentimes the doors might come off,
and they travel down a separate belt where window mechanisms, door trim panels, and other things are
added. While the doors are off, the interior of the vehicle goes in: all the instrument panels, seats,
carpets, everything. This, some say, is really inefficient. Those door openings make it tricky to fit all that
equipment into the car. Robotic equipment helps, but it is tough to automate
that process. You still have to have people leaning into the vehicle,
sometimes in kind of awkward positions with torque wrenches and those things. Putting all of this
together, the unboxing is really blowing that apart. So you start with some large gigacastings, attach
components onto each of those, paint what is necessary, and then, kind of Lego fashion, everything comes together at the end.

And the big advantage of this is that instead of trying to reach into a car, you have people working around something like the size of a table. So you could have four people working at the same time, much better access. So there's lower labor content. It also takes up a much smaller footprint, because I can get four people around this thing versus having to stretch it out. Tesla has claimed it could reduce factory size by 40% and costs by 50%. When you look at the million to 2,000,000 square foot, you're talking seven $800 million worth of potential investment on a large plant that you would have by being able to shrink that footprint. Volvo installed Gigapresses in its new $1 billion plant in Torslanda, Sweden, and at a plant it is building in Slovakia. We have casting, we have the structural battery pack and adaptations in the plant for full EV production, and the casting is a significant part of that.

Ford, General Motors, Toyota, Hyundai, Nissan, and others have all announced investments. Despite all this, reports have said Tesla has paused or even abandoned its plan to cast the underbody of its next-gen vehicle out of one piece during its first-quarter earnings call. Tesla said it does plan new models that will use aspects of the next-generation platform but will be produced on current manufacturing lines rather than on a new factory or production line, such as the one discussed on Investor Day 2023. The company did not elaborate on whether it planned an entirely new, cheaper vehicle, reportedly called the Model 2. Tesla VP of engineering Lars Moravy said the unboxed manufacturing method it had described earlier came with risk because it required new production lines. One argument for why they did this is because Tesla seems to be pivoting towards autonomy more thanks to the success of the FSD version 12. And so what we're going to get in tandem with the next-gen facility is this

robotaxi. So it has less to do with them being
dissatisfied with the next-gen facility or giga casting, and more to do with
their own internal pivot towards autonomy. But there may also be technical challenges. First, there is some skepticism that casting very
large parts will necessarily lead to significant weight reduction. Volk's own research indicates that extra
large castings could actually be 10% heavier than a comparable solution from sheet metal. There also appear to be higher scrap rates for every
100 parts you cast; about 15 will on average be unusable due to defects. For stamping, it's
just one out of 100. Again, castings are made by filling a mold with molten
aluminum, sometimes from more than one angle. But the larger a part is, the further into the mold
the material has to travel, and as it is traveling through the mold, it is cooling. Filling the mold properly becomes more challenging, and
then as the material cools, it contracts.

That can create small voids in the molded part. Those defects can become structural weak points within there. So that's a general challenge. With any casting and large castings, it gets a little bit worse. Some evidence indicates cars with large gigacasts or megacasts either are or will be more expensive to repair. In discussion with our German premium carmakers like BMW and Volkswagen, while we can't do this because our customers wouldn't accept that with these relatively often happened low-speed crash, we have an Unrepairable car. Repairability on a rear floor, for example, has one importance level versus repairability on a door, for example, if you would go for that one, right. What we're going after here are components which are very durable. And, you know, you don't repair them that much either. And if we need to, of course, there is a solution to repairing also a casted rear floor.

It's not an easy operation, but it's definitely doable. On its second quarter earnings call in 2023, VP of engineering, Moravy said Tesla can replace a rear cast rail on a model Y ten times cheaper and three times faster than a corresponding set of stamped parts. My design team works with our collision repair team. Since we're closed loop on this with insurance, and we design specific parts that will make it easier and faster to repair. We have an incentive to do that because we have our own insurance and our own body shops. We expect that we'll continue to do this, and collision repair will continue to become cheaper and faster over time, and we are actually able to change the details of the casting with inserts. And we actually do do that all the time. So because the answer is actually wear out and need to be replaced anyway, so we can actually make design changes to the inserts and tweak the castings.

I've been casting everything from, you know, a gearbox
housings to, to, you know, engine parts and whatnot. And also we have made this as a kind of a
step-wise approach. So we have already in the second generation, the x90,
for example, a certain level of large cast aluminum parts. And now we're taking the next step of doing the rear
floor. But the way on how to optimize your process and the
way how to minimize the risks, I would say, is to take it a bit like that
step by step. So we are done now doing the rear floor. We're not doing the full car, and then we're building
on the knowledge we already have created. The question will be the next and the over next model
while still having, uh, these mega casting parts. Question mark.

Why Tesla And Other EV Makers Are Betting Big On Gigacasting

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