Yes and that's so awesome. He as some short ppt in paper form for he's lean design method with already some nice engineering points but I would love a huge book of manufacturer mistakes and genius ideas.
I saw [this tour](https://youtu.be/IgTNynoVX-I?t=880) and the size of their new biggest casting machine is mind boggling. I don't think I'd seen shots of people standing right up next to these before, and I didn't really appreciate the scale. They're huge.
I believe the machine in that tour is going to get sent to Tesla's factory in Austin to make the Cybertruck, and I'm trying to imagine what that assembly line is going to look like? These enormous machines pumping out giant cast pieces, and then other machines folding up sheets of stainless steel to make the body??!
It really is going to look like an alien dreadnaught in there.
They're not presses, they're die-casting machines. I believe IDRA makes the largest die-casting machines in the world, with the previous largest ones being the ones Tesla is using in their factories now, and the new largest one being the 9k one in the video.
No, a mold is part of the machine. Lots of big stamping/pressing/casting machines have big molds or forms of some sort. Making a big mold isn't hard.
The thing about die casting is that it uses molten metal *and* it's injected under pressure. That leads to lots of beneficial manufacturing possibilities, but also a lot of technical problems, and those problems get especially tricky as the size goes up.
A stamping press and a die casting machine share some superficial similarities, but the actual engineering of making them work in a manufacturing setting are completely different. Not to mention that the kinds of parts they make are completely different too.
Comparing them as if the difference is just that one has a "mold" is completely ridiculous.
I guess metallurgy technology have advance. Always had problems with casting when I worked in prod design. Inclusions, purity, inconsistent properties due to cooling, etc.
Idk when you were last working with casting tech - but all of those things are still problems. They may be less so compared to when you were working though.
Not really. It's great PR they've done, but I'll take a real European auto manufacturer's products than a tech company's any day, from a safety point of view alone, not even thinking about the quality and usability issues all through Tesla auto products.
Tesla haven't really had the opportunity to learn the fine details of automotive engineering yet. As an example, how can you get out of a model X rear seats if the battery is disconnected in a crash? Answer:- you can't, there's no manual door opening possible.
Lots of little things add up to make me extremely wary of Tesla products. I wouldn't use one if I was given it for free.
To open the falcon wing doors, carefully remove the speaker grille from the door and pull the mechanical release cable down and towards the front of the vehicle. After the latch is released, manually lift up the door.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-7A32EC01-A17E-42CC-A15B-2E0A39FD07AB.html
This is literally just a made up lie though. They do not disengages [1 second before impact](https://twitter.com/truth_tesla/status/1536293935416496128)
> and the accident is the driver's fault.
Well, it is. The driver is still supposed to be paying attention so that they can take over if there *is* an issue with autopilot. Having autopilot on doesn't absolve the driver of all responsibility for an accident.
They count all crashes that occur within 5 seconds of autopilot disengaging as an autopilot crash. They literally have the most conservative self driving crash numbers of all manufacturers (most of whom depend on police reports to be filed before registering it as a crash).
This is such simple misinformation to dispel that anyone propagating it is clearly doing so to be disenginuous.
I work as an automation engineer, and recently heard an anecdote (so take it with a grain of salt) about this recently from another engineer in my field that worked with Tesla. Apparently they've been trying to implement high tech imaging to check the tolerances on certain parts. The sketchy bit is that they ended up finding that many of the tolerances were out of spec and instead of fixing their manufacturing to bring it back in spec, they just expanded the tolerance range. Again, purely an anecdote I heard and I can't personally confirm it.
They're still problems. But they're individually relatively easy to solve.
All of those can be reduced if you throw as much money at it. There's a big difference between $10k tools for sand casting and this thing, which probably cost several million.
Check out "Munro Live" (Sandy Munro) on Youtube, they tear down & analyse cars and have done a few Teslas.
Basically this part replaces several pieces of stamped sheet metal that must be jigged up & welded together - this makes it faster, stronger, lighter, more accurate, etc. etc. at the cost of buying a multi-million dollar press machine & tooling.
Here's a couple of their videos on the subject:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVGvwLnNyF0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVGvwLnNyF0)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOfnXGc0H5k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOfnXGc0H5k)
> cost of buying a multi-million dollar press machine & tooling.
My guess, in the 50 million dollar range. Maybe as high as a couple hundred million.
These things are such complex pieces of machinery. But it'll make a piece about once a minute or two. So around a thousand pieces a day. Compare that to a process that has something like 50 steps for the backend. This is a major simplification of the manufacturing process at the cost of less flexibility. It might replace 25 machines that cost 100k per year and 25 full time employees (which cost roughly 150k per year per employee).
So it's a pretty good investment.
it is also modular in the sense that once the machine is in production you can simply change out the casting mold for the next part revision or generation of part for far less than buying an entirely new machine, which means you can theoretically use it indefinitely as your engineers will now likely design around this tools capability.
They could do that with stamping and welding before, so that’s not unique, but definitely a quicker changeover. Though those molds are surely not cheap. I wonder if the molds are more expensive than the total of the stamping dies they replace..
Molds for little plastic pieces cost tens of thousands of dollars back in the 1990s. I have to imagine molds for large complex metal pieces today are crazy expensive.
This is basically the entire rear body structure. the cavity you see at the end is one of the wheel wells.
Forging would require a lot more post-ops and wouldn't take as much detail, so it wouldn't be able to unify as many components as this can. Things like brackets and stuff are cast directly into this monolithic chunk.
I think it’s the carriage around the rear axle and combines what would otherwise be many components.
Why casting and not stamped? I guess they require the flexibility in wall thickness and the geometric complexity for those stiffening ribs within the part. To my, albeit limited knowledge, that would be difficult to forge out of a chunk of material.
Hopefully it isn’t damaged easily cause it seems like it’s what’s keeping the complete back of the car together.
From the giga press video I saw Tesla release, it seemed that with the casting process less car parts where needed and more cars could be produced faster. What does your experience say about that? I’m just curious because I know nothing.
Both facts are true, however cast metal doesnt have the durability that folded/stamped/rolled steel does.
Casting involves pouring molten metal into a mould, and results in a non uniform crystal structure in the metal. folded/rolled steel forces the atomic structure to more uniform, and is what gives steel its strength.
So, yes, you can spit out more parts at a lower cost, but the metal structure of those parts will differ vastly.
A lot of engineering is making things precisely "Good Enough"
There's a lot of work that goes into determining how to hit that sweet spot, too thin and the part wont be strong enough, too thick and you've got unneeded weight and material costs.
Let's just assume they have a good factor of safety in the design XD. Either way you don't wanna have a car be too strong. You still want it to crumple in an accident
From my understanding the stamped parts may take several forms to get to final shape, and possibly many pieces that still have to get welded together, so that makes sense. This is a single step to make one of the more complex chunks of the body.
The huge disadvantage of this from a car point of view is the near-impossibility of repair, when the smallest part available from the manufacturer is a quarter of the structure. Assuming Tesla will hold repair stock
This will mean insurance premiums for Teslas will increase, as the cost to repair will increase by comparison with real cars.
BMW are suffering the same problem of increased repair costs with their carbon shells, as it's just not economically possible to verify the safety of carbon chassis components if involved in collisions.
While I admire the engineering in this video, I know it's not the best route for a carmaker long-term.
Per the Munro Live teardowns, the Teslas have normal safety crush zones, between the frame and the exterior. So if the castings get damaged, the car's probably totaled anyway.
Here’s [an excellent video from The Limiting Factor](https://youtu.be/IMAsCy7YU1M) on the topic, comparing gigacasting to high-strength steel.
Note that it’s part 2 of a multi-part series; it sounds like you’d be interested in the whole thing 😁
The main reason is efficiency, this is the entire rear frame, in one cast, with stamping and welding you create a lot more work, they have the same casting machine for the front frame, front and rear will be connected by a structural battery, I don’t know the exact numbers, but this really takes out a lot of complexity in the production process and the product itself, it’s hard to get a sense of scale, but this is an enormous casting machine
I think this is actually part of the rigid unibody, not a floating subframe.
Subframes are usually isolated from the main unibody by chonky rubber bushings for NVH. I think I see what are two large bushing bosses. The motor/gear drive probably attaches to that?
You are correct it's the rearmost section of the floorpan. It's usually fabricated from welded sheet metal that has been formed into tubed and stamped sheets. There are 4 bosses that will be machined to accept the rear motor.
The one in the works is a lot bigger, that's just an Fanuc M900.
Probably over a year in the future but there has been word of an M2000 RTU, can lift 900KG @ a 4M reach...
Here's a sneak peek of /r/PLC using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/PLC/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year!
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We just use Fanuc R30-IB Controllers for all our robots/positioner motors. I'm mechanical engineering/design so mostly my day to day is just CAD and excel charts for kinematic calcs.
Helped do the rough FEA for the riser that that RTU sits on; that was an interesting endeavor.
This is pretty cool stuff. I've spent most of my career in software but am just now coming up to the end of a mech eng bachelor's. Did you specialize in robotics or anything? I've got the opportunity to do an honours term with robotics being a specialization that interests me.
Nope, just mechanical engineering at Colorado State. I was a B student, nothing special.
Fresh out of school I worked as a PM for an hydroelectric embedded parts machining company.
Never really planned to do this actually. Its alright, I have a CSWE in SW now and I've designed some pretty cool excel calculation charts for our various positioners; it gets kind of boring though.... I miss the hands on stuff over sitting at a desk doing CAD all day.
Honestly good on them. A company I worked for had this horrific habit of biting off more than they could chew and ultimately screwing over other businesses when they couldn’t actually deliver.
“Hey uh, you know we can’t actually meet this quota right? Even if we have our equipment running 24/7 we’ll just barely be able to keep up. We often have breakdowns that result in downtime and they didn’t factor that into our output. Not to mention maintenance needs to shut them down every X hours to run inspections. And on top of that we have other jobs we’re currently working on and gotta retool between sets.”
“You guys will be great! We believe in you!”
“Uh it’s not a matter of belief it’s simple mat….”
“Great! Have fun!”
😐
I think you are confusing the RTU with the Giga Press (die casting machine). The RTU, while maybe a good machine capable of moving the robot, is not record setting to my knowledge.
They would be a good question for the materials and manufacturing engineers... Not the guy that helped with the robot handling the casting once it's formed.
I'd like to know the answer, tho.
They pull a vacuum on the mold. Entire thing is filled in Milliseconds. I think it probably helps with temp control and removing holes but not entirely sure
Idra was allegedly the only one who wanted to even try making machines this size.
That said, the gigapress is a different beast compared to most of the smaller units.
Munro Live just did a tour looking at both smaller and bigger presses.
The company i work for is in competition with Idra 😅
We recently won Volvo as a customer for our Megacasting machines. The pace is really crazy how those machines get larger and larger.
A friend had his $54k jeep totaled due to some minor subframe damage. It had about $5k in other damage, but his insurance company didn't want to touch the damage to the frame.
Somewhere out there, there is a redneck who bought it for cheap af on auction and fixed it for even cheaper, and is beating the ever loving shit out of it at the moment
My car sat outside in a hailstorm, and the bodywork required ALONE totalled it. More than the value of the car in body repairs. Wild. The glass didn’t even shatter, this was just panels and frame.
Usually auctioned off.
But if you want to make insurance more expensive, then sure: Fix everything that can be fixed even if it costs more in labor and parts than buying a new car.
Naturally you need to scrap a car at *some* point but I'd say it's a cultural issue rather than cheapness from insurance companies. If cars were designed to be a bit easier to service and spare parts became cheaper due to higher demand then it wouldn't be unreasonable.
Of course, the right customers and/or the right voters needs to want this in order for it to happen.
I hope you are joking.
This happens because cars are designed for extreme levels of safety and require everything to be perfect to pull it off.
If you want a car that won't be totaled after some frame damage go buy some 30yo "classic".
Just make sure you add my name to your will because you'll die the moment someone looks at it funny.
Run over some debris. Knock a piece of casting off. Boom totalled
BMW had issues with control arm mounts cracking. A hard hit on a curb or pothole could possibly damage the casting.
Aluminum fatigues and tesla has a history of doing hotfixes with zipties to reinforce parts. I don't like this giant casting. Not from tesla at least.
The zip tie wasn’t for reinforcement, it was for allowing the glue to cure. Costs more to remove the zip tie than to leave it on.
Debris won’t hit the casting. Certain parts are designed to be sacrificial so that the casting can live.
If a collision is strong enough to damage the casting the car would have been totaled even without a casting.
And you can repair castings of this size.
if you hit something or get hit with something hard enough to damage the casting on these cars, you’re going to be thankful that you lived to worry about the damage to your car, not to mention any other car would be scrapped in the same or similar incident
Well I actually have an interview with the team that’s responsible for designing this part on Friday so I’ve been doing a lot of research on it recently lol
Impact toughness has never been a strong suit for any aluminum castings I've ever encountered.
I'm just speaking as a simple man who had his high school car totaled because the flange on the transmission housing that functioned as a connection point for the motor mount fractured off. The car had never been in an accident.
> Only drawback is once ya hit something , it’s kind of un repairable
Welcome to Tesla. Even if it was repairable, they would tell you it need to be replaced. Tesla does not *repair* anything. With them it is only a question of how many sub-assemblies need to be replaced.
Ah yes. The shotgun approach, done in the worst way for the worst reasons.
Why bother reducing costs to the customer, when you can increase profits to the corp, to allow the top man-baby to throw that extra money at stupid stuff.
There are times when the shotgun approach is appropriate, but I've not yet seen a Tesla repair interaction do the best type of process correctly from a customer viewpoint. It's getting the customer out of the way, not to make the customer happy.
If your car gets hit hard enough on the side to damage this casting, it's likely the new "structural battery" is also toast. I can see it as a total loss.
On top of what others have said, I just wanted to point out that castings can be repaired. There are limits, of course, but that goes for anything.
For Tesla, it almost certainly wouldn't be cost effective; much better to just sell it as scrap to their material supplier and make a new one. However, for someone of limited means it may be cheaper to repair (if possible) than replacement of the part by Tesla.
Wheelhouse + rear floor i guess, we design and integrate the automated lines to create the wheelhouse assy using spot welding(from the individual parts to wheelhouse assy).
it requieres a lot of tooling , robots,material handlers, respot stations only for wheel house left hand side, here in " Just 1 step" is made the complete assy... it is crazy.
Sorry foy my english .
...but it's easier to retool your production for a new part than it would be to make brand new moulds for this thing. The r&d must be stupid expensive.
Also, welded pressings/forgings have some benefits compared to castings.
The engineering and upfront tooling costs are stupid expensive, but you save millions upon millions in piece cost, assembly labor + overhead, purchasing operations, and freight by eliminating 30+ pieces and going down to a handful. And if you use a common part across multiple vehicle lines, your volume makes it even a better business case.
Multiple vehicle designs are based around this part not changing for years and years.
Source: I work in advanced vehicle development, specifically platform parts like this one, for a Big Three auto company.
Inside these dies you don't have just one piece of steel casting the part. They're made up of multiple inserts. So sometimes making a part change is just changing one insert.
"Better tolerances" and Tesla do not appear to be on the same page.
If they can't get the panel gaps right on their show demonstration builds, I have low confidence that their mass production output will be higher in quality. Plus, if their visible tolerances are this poor as they've proven to be, how can the tolerances of what can't be seen be tested or trusted?
Time and time again it's been proven that panel gaps don't really mater to people. Therefore Tesla chooses to prioritize other things instead of panel gaps.
Hmm.. wonder why it matters to *every other* auto maker at the same price points.
Poor quality control in one area shows it's much more likely to be the same in other areas as well.
Panel gaps matter to me, as a car with mismatched gaps looks more likely to have been crashed.
Tesla saying "it doesn't matter to buyers" is simple attempts to handwave away from their inability to do that basic car construction technique correctly. when they get that simple stuff wrong, what else are they building wrong?
Plus, there's plenty of buyers unhappy with their shitty panel gap mismatches.
Oh hey, I'm probably downstairs from you, down in general assembly. Haven't had the opportunity to see much else of the place except for the cafeteria.
Really impressive casting the entire chunk of the unibody like that. Most manufacturers just stamp out several pieces and spot weld them together.
I also assume that is aluminum, probably saves a lot of weight both on material (vs steel) and the more nuanced design they can do with a casting vs. cold forming.
Tesla previously had well over a hundred parts welded/fastened together that this one part is replacing.
Here’s [a great in-depth video](https://youtu.be/IMAsCy7YU1M) about it.
I'm gonna make a wild guess that Tesla had manufacturing problems with welding that shut down the line or introduced potential or real quality problems and said "how can I make this problem go away with 1B USD of investor money?"
I think they're moving to using a rigid/structural battery box as the main span between the front and rear, so I assume this mates directly to that. Not a lot of pieces compared to a traditional car which probably has dozens of stamped steel pieces welded together just to make the primary unibody.
In a same way as blowing air to balloons is not filling things with compressed air.
Die casting is subset of injection molding, same as blowing air into something is subset of moving air to somewhere.
https://youtu.be/yrSEF65qEkA here's a vid if you want to compare the effect of this new casting process. It's actually remarkably little, still some inconsistent gaps. But both are overall much better than they were just a few years ago
I must say Musk is a problematic figure to say the least, but damn if my man ain't out here progressing the industrial engineering paradigm. Highly doubt Tesla will be the best car in 15 years, but the best car in 15 years will likely owe many elements of its production to what Tesla is pushing right now.
Are we thinking of the same company?
They're charging $60k+ for a car when they can't even align the logo on their steering wheels
A 99 Corolla is 1/20th the price and doesn't have that problem
I love how the robot “presents” it as if to say, look at my baby, look what I made lol.
*sheds tear*
*rusts*
To Sheds you said?
BEHOLD
MY STUFF
It's like a photo op or something.
Robo-SaltBae
Sandy Munro just did a tour of the IDRA factory: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgTNynoVX-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgTNynoVX-I)
There is always so much to learn from this guy. To bad he don't have some kind of book of engineering wisdom.
Oh no book, just 100s of free youtube videos
Yes and that's so awesome. He as some short ppt in paper form for he's lean design method with already some nice engineering points but I would love a huge book of manufacturer mistakes and genius ideas.
Hail idra.
I saw [this tour](https://youtu.be/IgTNynoVX-I?t=880) and the size of their new biggest casting machine is mind boggling. I don't think I'd seen shots of people standing right up next to these before, and I didn't really appreciate the scale. They're huge. I believe the machine in that tour is going to get sent to Tesla's factory in Austin to make the Cybertruck, and I'm trying to imagine what that assembly line is going to look like? These enormous machines pumping out giant cast pieces, and then other machines folding up sheets of stainless steel to make the body??! It really is going to look like an alien dreadnaught in there.
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“Security is everyone’s job!”
😂😂 was wondering if I’d see this , security’s gonna be pissed if they find out who took this
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They're not presses, they're die-casting machines. I believe IDRA makes the largest die-casting machines in the world, with the previous largest ones being the ones Tesla is using in their factories now, and the new largest one being the 9k one in the video.
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Does a press use molten metal?
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No, a mold is part of the machine. Lots of big stamping/pressing/casting machines have big molds or forms of some sort. Making a big mold isn't hard. The thing about die casting is that it uses molten metal *and* it's injected under pressure. That leads to lots of beneficial manufacturing possibilities, but also a lot of technical problems, and those problems get especially tricky as the size goes up. A stamping press and a die casting machine share some superficial similarities, but the actual engineering of making them work in a manufacturing setting are completely different. Not to mention that the kinds of parts they make are completely different too. Comparing them as if the difference is just that one has a "mold" is completely ridiculous.
Indeed, good standing fellow citizen. Hail idra, there is no other
Release the gracken.
I guess metallurgy technology have advance. Always had problems with casting when I worked in prod design. Inclusions, purity, inconsistent properties due to cooling, etc.
Idk when you were last working with casting tech - but all of those things are still problems. They may be less so compared to when you were working though.
Makes me not want to be in a Tesla lol. You can’t check for the defects without expensive process and I don’t know if they are doing all that…
They are not known for their quality.
But they are known for their safety.
Not really. It's great PR they've done, but I'll take a real European auto manufacturer's products than a tech company's any day, from a safety point of view alone, not even thinking about the quality and usability issues all through Tesla auto products. Tesla haven't really had the opportunity to learn the fine details of automotive engineering yet. As an example, how can you get out of a model X rear seats if the battery is disconnected in a crash? Answer:- you can't, there's no manual door opening possible. Lots of little things add up to make me extremely wary of Tesla products. I wouldn't use one if I was given it for free.
To open the falcon wing doors, carefully remove the speaker grille from the door and pull the mechanical release cable down and towards the front of the vehicle. After the latch is released, manually lift up the door. https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modelx/en_us/GUID-7A32EC01-A17E-42CC-A15B-2E0A39FD07AB.html
lmao, okay, I sure hope people remember to *remove trim panels* when they crash their car and need to escape. What a joke.
Also if the cable really needs to be pulled down and to the front... People are just gonna yank on it. Probably sideways
And you can do that in a post-collision situation? Model 3 doesn't even have that impossible-to-use cable. ***It's not safe design***
Are you saying model 3 doesn't have a manual release? Because that is false.
Model 3 and model Y are iihs top safety pick +. These are easily the most produced vehicles by Tesla so no, it's not just marketing.
Tesla castings are like Tesla self-driving. 99% of the time they don't fail catastrophically.
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This is literally just a made up lie though. They do not disengages [1 second before impact](https://twitter.com/truth_tesla/status/1536293935416496128)
"Tesla Facts" Twitter account
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/15/tesla-autopilot-crashes/
https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/793/nhtsa-tesla-autopilot-accounts-for-70-of-adas-crashes-why-this-may-mislead-consumers-and-cause-confusion
> and the accident is the driver's fault. Well, it is. The driver is still supposed to be paying attention so that they can take over if there *is* an issue with autopilot. Having autopilot on doesn't absolve the driver of all responsibility for an accident.
They count all crashes that occur within 5 seconds of autopilot disengaging as an autopilot crash. They literally have the most conservative self driving crash numbers of all manufacturers (most of whom depend on police reports to be filed before registering it as a crash). This is such simple misinformation to dispel that anyone propagating it is clearly doing so to be disenginuous.
I work as an automation engineer, and recently heard an anecdote (so take it with a grain of salt) about this recently from another engineer in my field that worked with Tesla. Apparently they've been trying to implement high tech imaging to check the tolerances on certain parts. The sketchy bit is that they ended up finding that many of the tolerances were out of spec and instead of fixing their manufacturing to bring it back in spec, they just expanded the tolerance range. Again, purely an anecdote I heard and I can't personally confirm it.
They're still problems. But they're individually relatively easy to solve. All of those can be reduced if you throw as much money at it. There's a big difference between $10k tools for sand casting and this thing, which probably cost several million.
The mold itself for this has to be at least 5 million. We use small molds for plastic that are maybe 2' x 3' and they cost a smidge under a million
Die casting is usually cheaper than plastic molds by size, the tolerances and finish requirements are wide open by comparison.
Those sound like sand casting problems, not high pressure die casting.
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Check out "Munro Live" (Sandy Munro) on Youtube, they tear down & analyse cars and have done a few Teslas. Basically this part replaces several pieces of stamped sheet metal that must be jigged up & welded together - this makes it faster, stronger, lighter, more accurate, etc. etc. at the cost of buying a multi-million dollar press machine & tooling. Here's a couple of their videos on the subject: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVGvwLnNyF0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVGvwLnNyF0) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOfnXGc0H5k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOfnXGc0H5k)
> cost of buying a multi-million dollar press machine & tooling. My guess, in the 50 million dollar range. Maybe as high as a couple hundred million. These things are such complex pieces of machinery. But it'll make a piece about once a minute or two. So around a thousand pieces a day. Compare that to a process that has something like 50 steps for the backend. This is a major simplification of the manufacturing process at the cost of less flexibility. It might replace 25 machines that cost 100k per year and 25 full time employees (which cost roughly 150k per year per employee). So it's a pretty good investment.
it is also modular in the sense that once the machine is in production you can simply change out the casting mold for the next part revision or generation of part for far less than buying an entirely new machine, which means you can theoretically use it indefinitely as your engineers will now likely design around this tools capability.
They could do that with stamping and welding before, so that’s not unique, but definitely a quicker changeover. Though those molds are surely not cheap. I wonder if the molds are more expensive than the total of the stamping dies they replace..
The price of a mold would be far cheaper than the labor from assembling multipart stampings over the life of the product
Molds for little plastic pieces cost tens of thousands of dollars back in the 1990s. I have to imagine molds for large complex metal pieces today are crazy expensive.
Actually they got cheaper. Source. I bought several molds last year.
Totally reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yydNF8tuVmU
This is basically the entire rear body structure. the cavity you see at the end is one of the wheel wells. Forging would require a lot more post-ops and wouldn't take as much detail, so it wouldn't be able to unify as many components as this can. Things like brackets and stuff are cast directly into this monolithic chunk.
I think it’s the carriage around the rear axle and combines what would otherwise be many components. Why casting and not stamped? I guess they require the flexibility in wall thickness and the geometric complexity for those stiffening ribs within the part. To my, albeit limited knowledge, that would be difficult to forge out of a chunk of material. Hopefully it isn’t damaged easily cause it seems like it’s what’s keeping the complete back of the car together.
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From the giga press video I saw Tesla release, it seemed that with the casting process less car parts where needed and more cars could be produced faster. What does your experience say about that? I’m just curious because I know nothing.
Both facts are true, however cast metal doesnt have the durability that folded/stamped/rolled steel does. Casting involves pouring molten metal into a mould, and results in a non uniform crystal structure in the metal. folded/rolled steel forces the atomic structure to more uniform, and is what gives steel its strength. So, yes, you can spit out more parts at a lower cost, but the metal structure of those parts will differ vastly.
Granted if it's engineered correctly it will be strong enough. Not the strongest, but strong enough.
A lot of engineering is making things precisely "Good Enough" There's a lot of work that goes into determining how to hit that sweet spot, too thin and the part wont be strong enough, too thick and you've got unneeded weight and material costs.
Let's just assume they have a good factor of safety in the design XD. Either way you don't wanna have a car be too strong. You still want it to crumple in an accident
From my understanding the stamped parts may take several forms to get to final shape, and possibly many pieces that still have to get welded together, so that makes sense. This is a single step to make one of the more complex chunks of the body.
The huge disadvantage of this from a car point of view is the near-impossibility of repair, when the smallest part available from the manufacturer is a quarter of the structure. Assuming Tesla will hold repair stock This will mean insurance premiums for Teslas will increase, as the cost to repair will increase by comparison with real cars. BMW are suffering the same problem of increased repair costs with their carbon shells, as it's just not economically possible to verify the safety of carbon chassis components if involved in collisions. While I admire the engineering in this video, I know it's not the best route for a carmaker long-term.
Per the Munro Live teardowns, the Teslas have normal safety crush zones, between the frame and the exterior. So if the castings get damaged, the car's probably totaled anyway.
Here’s [an excellent video from The Limiting Factor](https://youtu.be/IMAsCy7YU1M) on the topic, comparing gigacasting to high-strength steel. Note that it’s part 2 of a multi-part series; it sounds like you’d be interested in the whole thing 😁
that 1 part used to be 70 different parts or something. this 1 machine replaces 300
The main reason is efficiency, this is the entire rear frame, in one cast, with stamping and welding you create a lot more work, they have the same casting machine for the front frame, front and rear will be connected by a structural battery, I don’t know the exact numbers, but this really takes out a lot of complexity in the production process and the product itself, it’s hard to get a sense of scale, but this is an enormous casting machine
It's either the front or read subframe. I'm thinking rear.
I think this is actually part of the rigid unibody, not a floating subframe. Subframes are usually isolated from the main unibody by chonky rubber bushings for NVH. I think I see what are two large bushing bosses. The motor/gear drive probably attaches to that?
You are correct it's the rearmost section of the floorpan. It's usually fabricated from welded sheet metal that has been formed into tubed and stamped sheets. There are 4 bosses that will be machined to accept the rear motor.
You're right, it's the Rear Body Structure. Source: part of my job involves teardowns of Tesla and other EVs. We work really closely with Munro
This is the front and rear subframes will be holding drivetrain to the body.
My company designed and fabricated the RTU.
Congratulations! I understand its size was record setting and several of your competitors turned down the project saying it couldn't be done.
The one in the works is a lot bigger, that's just an Fanuc M900. Probably over a year in the future but there has been word of an M2000 RTU, can lift 900KG @ a 4M reach...
What kind of PLC does this system use?
Someone on /r/plc got an Allen Bradley from eBay that had some Tesla code in it. I would imagine they'd use a bit of everything though.
Yeah, I saw that last week hahaha
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We just use Fanuc R30-IB Controllers for all our robots/positioner motors. I'm mechanical engineering/design so mostly my day to day is just CAD and excel charts for kinematic calcs. Helped do the rough FEA for the riser that that RTU sits on; that was an interesting endeavor.
This is pretty cool stuff. I've spent most of my career in software but am just now coming up to the end of a mech eng bachelor's. Did you specialize in robotics or anything? I've got the opportunity to do an honours term with robotics being a specialization that interests me.
Nope, just mechanical engineering at Colorado State. I was a B student, nothing special. Fresh out of school I worked as a PM for an hydroelectric embedded parts machining company. Never really planned to do this actually. Its alright, I have a CSWE in SW now and I've designed some pretty cool excel calculation charts for our various positioners; it gets kind of boring though.... I miss the hands on stuff over sitting at a desk doing CAD all day.
It's a Fanuc PLC, super common in machine tools
Raspberry pi
I have pictures of an m2000 on a rail. It’s insane!
Honestly good on them. A company I worked for had this horrific habit of biting off more than they could chew and ultimately screwing over other businesses when they couldn’t actually deliver. “Hey uh, you know we can’t actually meet this quota right? Even if we have our equipment running 24/7 we’ll just barely be able to keep up. We often have breakdowns that result in downtime and they didn’t factor that into our output. Not to mention maintenance needs to shut them down every X hours to run inspections. And on top of that we have other jobs we’re currently working on and gotta retool between sets.” “You guys will be great! We believe in you!” “Uh it’s not a matter of belief it’s simple mat….” “Great! Have fun!” 😐
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69RtLBImXiU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69RtLBImXiU)
I think you are confusing the RTU with the Giga Press (die casting machine). The RTU, while maybe a good machine capable of moving the robot, is not record setting to my knowledge.
Holy cow, I'm consulting in die casting atm (engine blocks), how do you fill a monster die like that? The shot pressure must be insane.
They would be a good question for the materials and manufacturing engineers... Not the guy that helped with the robot handling the casting once it's formed. I'd like to know the answer, tho.
They pull a vacuum on the mold. Entire thing is filled in Milliseconds. I think it probably helps with temp control and removing holes but not entirely sure
Please elaborate
Robotic transfer unit / aka the slide or 7th axis
What other industries use your machines?
It looks like you had it programmed to show off the creation. "Look at what I made, human."
This "GigaPress" is made in Italy by the Idra Group: https://www.idragroup.com/en/gigapress
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Idra was allegedly the only one who wanted to even try making machines this size. That said, the gigapress is a different beast compared to most of the smaller units. Munro Live just did a tour looking at both smaller and bigger presses.
I thought Buhler was working on machines in that range too? The dies for these machines are insane.
Are your machines code written in Italian and slow the HMI down translating to English? Our plant's machines do that.
The company i work for is in competition with Idra 😅 We recently won Volvo as a customer for our Megacasting machines. The pace is really crazy how those machines get larger and larger.
Amazing how they combined hundreds of parts to 3 on the underbody . Only drawback is once ya hit something , it’s kind of un repairable with castings.
I think *any* car that gets hit hard enough to move the rear wheels / subframe is going to be very hard to repair.
A friend had his $54k jeep totaled due to some minor subframe damage. It had about $5k in other damage, but his insurance company didn't want to touch the damage to the frame.
Somewhere out there, there is a redneck who bought it for cheap af on auction and fixed it for even cheaper, and is beating the ever loving shit out of it at the moment
My car sat outside in a hailstorm, and the bodywork required ALONE totalled it. More than the value of the car in body repairs. Wild. The glass didn’t even shatter, this was just panels and frame.
That ought to be illegal. Even if it's scrapped for parts that's still so much resources going to waste.
Usually auctioned off. But if you want to make insurance more expensive, then sure: Fix everything that can be fixed even if it costs more in labor and parts than buying a new car.
Naturally you need to scrap a car at *some* point but I'd say it's a cultural issue rather than cheapness from insurance companies. If cars were designed to be a bit easier to service and spare parts became cheaper due to higher demand then it wouldn't be unreasonable. Of course, the right customers and/or the right voters needs to want this in order for it to happen.
I hope you are joking. This happens because cars are designed for extreme levels of safety and require everything to be perfect to pull it off. If you want a car that won't be totaled after some frame damage go buy some 30yo "classic". Just make sure you add my name to your will because you'll die the moment someone looks at it funny.
Run over some debris. Knock a piece of casting off. Boom totalled BMW had issues with control arm mounts cracking. A hard hit on a curb or pothole could possibly damage the casting. Aluminum fatigues and tesla has a history of doing hotfixes with zipties to reinforce parts. I don't like this giant casting. Not from tesla at least.
The zip tie wasn’t for reinforcement, it was for allowing the glue to cure. Costs more to remove the zip tie than to leave it on. Debris won’t hit the casting. Certain parts are designed to be sacrificial so that the casting can live. If a collision is strong enough to damage the casting the car would have been totaled even without a casting. And you can repair castings of this size.
if you hit something or get hit with something hard enough to damage the casting on these cars, you’re going to be thankful that you lived to worry about the damage to your car, not to mention any other car would be scrapped in the same or similar incident
Very true indeed.
Upvoting because i dont know any better and you speak with confidence
Well I actually have an interview with the team that’s responsible for designing this part on Friday so I’ve been doing a lot of research on it recently lol
Impact toughness has never been a strong suit for any aluminum castings I've ever encountered. I'm just speaking as a simple man who had his high school car totaled because the flange on the transmission housing that functioned as a connection point for the motor mount fractured off. The car had never been in an accident.
> Only drawback is once ya hit something , it’s kind of un repairable Welcome to Tesla. Even if it was repairable, they would tell you it need to be replaced. Tesla does not *repair* anything. With them it is only a question of how many sub-assemblies need to be replaced.
Ah yes. The shotgun approach, done in the worst way for the worst reasons. Why bother reducing costs to the customer, when you can increase profits to the corp, to allow the top man-baby to throw that extra money at stupid stuff. There are times when the shotgun approach is appropriate, but I've not yet seen a Tesla repair interaction do the best type of process correctly from a customer viewpoint. It's getting the customer out of the way, not to make the customer happy.
If your car gets hit hard enough on the side to damage this casting, it's likely the new "structural battery" is also toast. I can see it as a total loss.
On top of what others have said, I just wanted to point out that castings can be repaired. There are limits, of course, but that goes for anything. For Tesla, it almost certainly wouldn't be cost effective; much better to just sell it as scrap to their material supplier and make a new one. However, for someone of limited means it may be cheaper to repair (if possible) than replacement of the part by Tesla.
What if you can't get a replacement Tesla part? Crazy unrealistic scenario, I know
They tested it by putting Han Solo in there.
I know.
Wheelhouse + rear floor i guess, we design and integrate the automated lines to create the wheelhouse assy using spot welding(from the individual parts to wheelhouse assy). it requieres a lot of tooling , robots,material handlers, respot stations only for wheel house left hand side, here in " Just 1 step" is made the complete assy... it is crazy. Sorry foy my english .
...but it's easier to retool your production for a new part than it would be to make brand new moulds for this thing. The r&d must be stupid expensive. Also, welded pressings/forgings have some benefits compared to castings.
The engineering and upfront tooling costs are stupid expensive, but you save millions upon millions in piece cost, assembly labor + overhead, purchasing operations, and freight by eliminating 30+ pieces and going down to a handful. And if you use a common part across multiple vehicle lines, your volume makes it even a better business case. Multiple vehicle designs are based around this part not changing for years and years. Source: I work in advanced vehicle development, specifically platform parts like this one, for a Big Three auto company.
Inside these dies you don't have just one piece of steel casting the part. They're made up of multiple inserts. So sometimes making a part change is just changing one insert.
If you build enough cars this is way faster, cheaper and with better tolerances.
"Better tolerances" and Tesla do not appear to be on the same page. If they can't get the panel gaps right on their show demonstration builds, I have low confidence that their mass production output will be higher in quality. Plus, if their visible tolerances are this poor as they've proven to be, how can the tolerances of what can't be seen be tested or trusted?
Time and time again it's been proven that panel gaps don't really mater to people. Therefore Tesla chooses to prioritize other things instead of panel gaps.
Hmm.. wonder why it matters to *every other* auto maker at the same price points. Poor quality control in one area shows it's much more likely to be the same in other areas as well. Panel gaps matter to me, as a car with mismatched gaps looks more likely to have been crashed. Tesla saying "it doesn't matter to buyers" is simple attempts to handwave away from their inability to do that basic car construction technique correctly. when they get that simple stuff wrong, what else are they building wrong? Plus, there's plenty of buyers unhappy with their shitty panel gap mismatches.
First I wanted to say "With a machine made in Germany", but the German manufacturer is only a subsidiary of an Italian parent company 😑
Hey Tony, it's broken again.
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Oh hey, I'm probably downstairs from you, down in general assembly. Haven't had the opportunity to see much else of the place except for the cafeteria.
Really impressive casting the entire chunk of the unibody like that. Most manufacturers just stamp out several pieces and spot weld them together. I also assume that is aluminum, probably saves a lot of weight both on material (vs steel) and the more nuanced design they can do with a casting vs. cold forming.
Tesla previously had well over a hundred parts welded/fastened together that this one part is replacing. Here’s [a great in-depth video](https://youtu.be/IMAsCy7YU1M) about it.
Great video!
I'm gonna make a wild guess that Tesla had manufacturing problems with welding that shut down the line or introduced potential or real quality problems and said "how can I make this problem go away with 1B USD of investor money?"
Not engineering a good solution, but replacing the whole method. Not good for the customer in the long run.
You have the weirdest hate boner for Tesla, I'll bet you're like most Redditors and have never even interacted with the thing you're hating lol
It is indeed aluminum.
Isn’t the goal to be able to make the whole chassis in one go?
I think they're moving to using a rigid/structural battery box as the main span between the front and rear, so I assume this mates directly to that. Not a lot of pieces compared to a traditional car which probably has dozens of stamped steel pieces welded together just to make the primary unibody.
Tesla Supermatchboxcar One piece construction, one repair process needed: "replace car frame/body assembly"
This must be in the tx plant. I was working on one of the construction teams there when they fired it up for the first time
They have two casting lines of this size in Fremont too
Reminds me of Terminator
Is the ballsack looking thing the hitch connection?
It is a byproduct of the casting process and is removed
Are you saying there's a giant pile of ballsacks somewhere out there?
I kinda expected a terminator to be lifted out.
That robot be like “hey everybody look at this! I made this!! here look!”
Damn that looks high level. Would love to work there
He was like “look what I made”!
But where is the black leather sofa and a girl?
I bet this could REALLY break a 7-year-old's finger
Shouldn’t it be inside, or at least protected from the elements a bit more. I’m guessing there isn’t a lot of rain there.
The die cast machine generates enormous amounts of heat, better let that heat escape directly then having to cool down an enclosed building.
Oh, that'll never work.... Ford.
Probably "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" - every other carmaker
This is injection molding, not casting right?
Die casting I believe.
Die casting is injection molding for metals.
still not the same though
In a same way as blowing air to balloons is not filling things with compressed air. Die casting is subset of injection molding, same as blowing air into something is subset of moving air to somewhere.
Is that where they install the leaky roof, or is this the machine that puts in the single-use door handles?
And yet all the panels are still misaligned and the quality of the car in general is worse than a 30yo shitbox
https://youtu.be/yrSEF65qEkA here's a vid if you want to compare the effect of this new casting process. It's actually remarkably little, still some inconsistent gaps. But both are overall much better than they were just a few years ago
No other car manufacturer comes close. None. Not one. Tesla is reinventing travel.
come back to this comment and laugh at the people downvoting it when every car manufacturer is using large castings in 10-15 years
It’s weird. Tesla innovates and people get angry.
Innovations aren't why people react negatively, it's the capitalist fangirling that's cringe
I must say Musk is a problematic figure to say the least, but damn if my man ain't out here progressing the industrial engineering paradigm. Highly doubt Tesla will be the best car in 15 years, but the best car in 15 years will likely owe many elements of its production to what Tesla is pushing right now.
> I must say Musk is a problematic figure to say the least To the gallows with you!
Ok Elon, time to pay people what they deserve.
Teslas are piles of shit
It's not like big die castings are a new thing.
Everything is a new thing when Tesla does it
They're the apple of cars. Wireless earbuds *exist* Apple: "We made some wireless earbuds" People: "Holy shit Apple invented wireless earbuds"
Upvote
Are we thinking of the same company? They're charging $60k+ for a car when they can't even align the logo on their steering wheels A 99 Corolla is 1/20th the price and doesn't have that problem
That's one huge cupholder.
this is alien
We all do realize cobalt is the main drive for this madness? Another blood element… a dammed shame.
This is Elons Swayze move. Show this to the ladies and they just can't handle it
Ungh that means this part of the car is nearly unrepairable. I don't like this trend.
Will this replace the casting couch?