
Tesla Fremont to Soon Activate World’s Largest Unibody Casting Machine - rbanffy
https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/tesla-model-y-from-fremont-will-soon-use-the-biggest-casting-machine-for-mass-production
======
jeffbee
Just curious, not to go all-in on the "fake news" stuff, but does anyone take
this article or this entire site seriously and if so, why? The "author" is a
fake persona using a photograph from a hair salon advertisement as their
avatar. All of the photos are from Tesla's own materials. The lead photo is
from their Q2 investor letter, and it depicts a machine in China, not
California. The site is just weird clickbait and, if not deliberately
misleading, at least seems to lack any reason to exist.

This article from the SAE (you know, the industry group of car building) is
way more interesting.

[https://www.sae.org/news/2020/06/tesla-model-y-big-
castings](https://www.sae.org/news/2020/06/tesla-model-y-big-castings)

~~~
dbtc
This website also apparently sells a cooler with branding that matches
Tesla's, and some planet-shaped lamps.

Putting the 'hack' in hackernews, I suppose.

------
andrewmunsell
For everyone concerned about repairs-- this isn't exactly a new concept.

The BMW i3 has a carbon fiber frame that, as far as I know, they do not sell
in sections ([https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/crash-your-carbon-
fiber-i...](https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/crash-your-carbon-fiber-i3-ev-
heres-how-bmw-will-fix-it/)). This means during an accident, the damaged
portion is cut out and a new section is glued in, though the repair would
likely involve purchasing an entirely new frame unless the shop has one
leftover from a previous repair.

With the Y, it'd be the same thing-- the shop would either have a spare,
partial casting from a previous repair or need to order a new one, and it
would be cut and welded into place.

The repair itself shouldn't be any more difficult than any other car, it's
just purchasing the part that becomes more expensive if you have to purchase a
new entire casting for damage in one area of the car. That, however, is
entirely fixable through some clever supply chain fixes and may be something
Tesla can support through savings on the single casting.

~~~
Aeolun
It seems to me that cutting out, and welding or glueing in a new part had a
serious effect on the structural integrity of the vehicle.

~~~
markstos
From the internet: "assuming your joint is designed properly and you have an
experienced welder performing the work, your welded joint will be as strong as
the base materials it is joining."

Welds are key to most bicycle frames and they are not known as the part that's
likely to fail.

~~~
deelowe
The "weld is stronger than the base metal" argument is often repeated on the
internet, but it's overly simplistic. Welded joints don't usually fail at the
seam (a.k.a the weld). Instead, they fail near the seam where the base metal
has been stressed due to thermal expansion/contraction and heat treating. It
is correct that when done properly, everything should be fine, but I wouldn't
trust the vast majority of body shops to have access to welders who would do
it "properly."

~~~
glenstein
This doesn't make it any more clear whether weld repair poses a practical
danger for most people in most circumstances. If it's the case that metal
stress near the point of welding is the where it's more likely to fail, that
still doesn't tell me how much more likely to fail. For all I know it could be
the weakest part but still such a trivial difference as to pose no concern.

And the point about welders leaves a dangling, open ended implication that
invites anyone reading the sentence to just go ahead and assume that poor weld
jobs leading to immenent danger are happening all the time. But are they? Or
is that just being noted as a hypothetical possibility? I'm having a hard time
telling whether a possible or probable danger is being asserted here.

~~~
jacquesm
Welding is like programming. Everybody with half a brain and some skills can
weld. But _proper_ welding is an art form, and the difference between the two
levels is many years of work and study.

So for most people welding like that is not in the cards, but a trained and
meticulous professional can do miracles (or close to miracles). It starts to
get really interesting when you start hanging stuff from your welds, for
instance when building an overhead crane.

~~~
throwaway0a5e
Welding is just practice, practice, practice. Like everything else.

Welding lifting rings onto stuff is not really a high bar. High quality welds
are easy if the materials you're dealing with are easy. Stuff that is exotic,
expensive and hard to work with is the stuff that takes real skill because
it's really hard to get a ton of practice at those things (there's only so
much magnesium alloy that needs welded) so you need a lot of skill and
experience in varied circumstances to do a high quality job from the get go.

I can weld and I can dick around in a bash shell but I'm much better at the
one that is my current day job that I do for ~40hr a week.

~~~
jacquesm
You only know how good your welds are once you've seen them destructively
tested. What _looks_ good may not be all that good. A really good welder will
be able lay bead after bead after bead with very consistent quality and
material characteristics.

~~~
throwaway0a5e
It's hard to look at someone else's weld and know if it's good because lord
knows what they did under there (if it's externally bad there's some pretty
obvious signs). It's easy to lay a weld and know that it's good from a
combination of how you did it and how it came out. If you know what you're
doing then a bend test just confirms what you already knew. X-rays keep honest
welders honest.

For "easy" material combinations you can get away with a surprising amount of
corner cutting and still pass a bend test. Good welds aren't hard. A community
college will have you passing a bend test on an overhead weld in a semester
and doing the same for pipe in two but it will all be in steel and a limited
variety of consumables and processes. Those kids might be masters of 7018 but
hand them some aluminum electrodes and they'll be lost. Good welds the first
or nearly the first time on material + consumable combo on which you only burn
say 10lb a year is what really takes practice.

------
dweekly
It's exciting, and at the same time it makes clear that even small accidents
may cause a complete write off of the vehicle due to the unrepairability of
cars manufactured with this technique.

~~~
foxtr0t
It is disappointing that Tesla uses much of its engineering prowess to design
products that are inherently difficult for owners or small shops to modify,
maintain, or repair. Taken directly from Apple's playbook.

~~~
mcot2
They are now in the insurance business and Musk has already stated this will
drive them to produce cars that can be repaired more cheaply. I cited his
statement on the earnings call elsewhere in this thread.

~~~
justapassenger
Musk says many things

~~~
jlisam13
he says many things and his timelines are completely off but IMO he delivers

------
Shivetya
I am fascinated by their attempts to simplify manufacturing but this does
bring up the question, how easy is it to change what this casting machine
produces? Will they make similar changes to the 3? One question is will the
heat pump design make its way to the 3 or are changes to the 3 just on hold.

I am curious how long they will go without changing the outward design of the
3 or Y. Most manufacturers find it necessary to iterate every few years to
keep customers interested and show progress while Tesla shows progress mostly
through features added OTA. They already have range numbers down for a
significant lead covering a few years so they are not under the same pressure.

edit: This all goes back to Musk's question to engineers why can't a car be in
as few pieces as possible using a matchbox/hot wheels car as example

~~~
Alupis
> This all goes back to Musk's question to engineers why can't a car be in as
> few pieces as possible using a matchbox/hot wheels car as example

Because then trivial accidents become major costly repairs and/or result in
totaling of the vehicle.

There is an advantage of having separate body panels, support pillars,
bumpers, etc. It can all be replaced separately.

~~~
mcot2
Since they are now in the insurance business as well they will soon figure
this out. Even was mentioned at the last conference call, they’ve admitted to
making a lot of mistakes in the past about manufacturing for repairability.

The transcript is not great but you get the point:

“ It's like if you want to pay more for insurance, you can. But if you want to
pay less, then please don't drive so crazy. Then people can make a choice.
Like, OK, they want to drive aggressively.

In that case, it'll be higher insurance. Or they want more capital enter
driving and pay less. This was actually very helpful for us to have a feedback
loop to see what is driving insurance expense. A lot of it is just -- it's
like a little fender bender and the net fender bender because of the way that
the body collision repair is being done.

It costs like $15,000 or something crazy and like -- and then we can actually
adjust the design of the car and adjust how the repair is done to actually
have the fundamental cost of solving that problem would be less.So this has
helped us under a whole bunch of facility things that we were doing basically
without realizing it. But this is a problem with -- in general, with insurance
is like if the insurance is, like, all you can eat, then the feedback loop for
improvement is sweet. So this gives us a great feedback for improvement
because it's basically a fundamentally better insurance product. I'd also like
to say, I'm inspired of recruiting because if there's one thing I'd like to
come out of this call, it's that a lot of great people want to join Tesla.”

[https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-
transcripts/2020/07/23/te...](https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-
transcripts/2020/07/23/tesla-tsla-q2-2020-earnings-call-transcript.aspx)

~~~
Alupis
From my understanding, Tesla has been offered help by many major automotive
manufacturers such as VW, and rejected it.

Perhaps that was foolish in hindsight, since most of their quality,
workmanship and repairability problems stem directly from having to learn
(through trail-and-error) all the same things the other manufactures learned
long ago.

The parallels with McDonalds taking Chipotle under their wing to teach supply
chain management, distribution, food safety and more are undeniable.
Chipotle's founders famously scoffed at learning _anything_ from McDonalds...
which may have resulted in the numerous food safety handling issues they had a
few years back (not washing raw produce that was transported through multiple
handling facilities and then into stores), and legendary portion control
variance (totally depends who makes your burrito... it may weigh a 1/2 lb, or
2lbs... a total coin flip).

It's difficult to scale these complex organizations - why make it harder on
yourself? Learn from other people's mistakes and try not to repeat them.

foisting large insurance bills onto Tesla customers because Tesla couldn't
design their car to be repairable, even by Tesla themselves - doesn't seem
fair either.

------
siscia
I find hard to believe that no one has thought about this before, so it makes
me wonder what are the disadvantages and if the conditions changed enough that
those disadvantages are not a problem anymore.

I don't buy that the only disadvantage is the increase repair cost of the car
in case if accident.

~~~
avernon
Tesla had to do the R+D on a new alloy of aluminum to make this work. None of
the carmakers do R+D on basic materials and are limited by the commercially
available alloy formulas. They have been doing aluminum castings but they are
much smaller than Tesla's.

~~~
justapassenger
> Tesla had to do the R+D on a new alloy of aluminum to make this work.

Teslas RD budget is tiny, given for much stuff they do in-house - designing
cars, autopilot, seats, batteries, robots, solar panel, solar roof, and many
others. Their RD is roughly on the level of Mazda, which does much less stuff
in-house.

> None of the carmakers do R+D on basic materials and are limited by the
> commercially available alloy formulas

You really believe that companies that spend billions of dollars per year on
basic materials, that are some of the most important for their products, just
look at the prodcut catalogue from suppliers and order from there?

~~~
avernon
Obviously Tesla is getting a much larger bang for their R+D buck. That comes
from the incredible amount of talent they are able to attract vs. legacy
automakers.

That is pretty close to what they do. Modern car companies mostly do
integration and final assembly along with some marketing and finance. Vertical
integration in the American auto industry died with Henry Ford until Tesla
revived it. You could argue that Toyota is somewhat vertically integrated with
the cross holdings they have in some of their Japanese suppliers.

~~~
gamblor956
_Obviously Tesla is getting a much larger bang for their R+D buck._

Citation needed. What has Tesla been able to accomplish with its inhouse R&D
that nobody else has? Other than battery design (using cells developed and
manufactured by Panasonic), pretty much everything Tesla does is subpar
compared to automobile industry standards.

------
ogre_codes
This is a little reminder that Tesla isn't _just_ about battery tech/
electrification. They have a lot of engineering talent pushing most all
aspects of the auto industry forward. Companies like Lucid and Rivian can nail
a lot of the basics, but Tesla is pushing hard on all fronts. Likewise GM,
Ford, and Chrysler are going to have trouble attracting engineering and
management talent. VW, Honda, and Toyota are Tesla's big competitors. Them and
perhaps on the other end of the spectrum, Chinese manufacturers who crank out
tiny, super cheap cars more people can afford. Though in the US those don't
seem to take hold.

~~~
cptskippy
> Chinese manufacturers who crank out tiny, super cheap cars more people can
> afford. Though in the US those don't seem to take hold.

Those cars aren't generally sold outside of China due to their failure to meet
international safety standards.

~~~
ogre_codes
Mostly true, but then -> [https://thenextweb.com/shift/2020/08/03/this-
chinese-ev-make...](https://thenextweb.com/shift/2020/08/03/this-chinese-ev-
maker-is-bringing-its-small-affordable-cars-to-truck-loving-texas/)

Also, I'm not convinced the reason smaller cars don't come to the US is due to
safety issues since they exist in Europe where there are similar safety
standards.

------
apendleton
I wonder if there are likely to be any metallurgical differences (e.g.,
strength, flexibility, likelihood to crack, etc.) between cast and stamped
parts? My sense is that it's generally understood that 3D printing methods for
metal produce weaker parts than casting, but I'm not sure how different non-3D
printing methods compare.

~~~
avernon
Tesla is using a proprietary alloy to make this part be strong enough and cost
effective to do.

~~~
apendleton
Neat. Do you have a link with more info about this? I guess I'm curious if
they needed to switch alloys when they switched from stamping to casting, and
if so, how the properties of the new material differ from the properties of
the old one.

~~~
avernon
[https://electrek.co/2020/02/07/tesla-aluminum-alloys-die-
cas...](https://electrek.co/2020/02/07/tesla-aluminum-alloys-die-casting-in-
electric-car-parts/)

------
somethoughts
Just out of curiosity - is there an explanation of how you can handle a fender
bender that happens to affect the frame? Does the entire unibody frame need to
be swapped out in that case? Is this the equivalent to soldering RAM to the
motherboard.

~~~
_ph_
A normal fender-bender shouldn't affect the frame, especially if it as rigid
as this cast one. If it does, the car is a write-off anyway.

------
specialist
Long time coming, long over due.

Sandy Munro (and others) have advocated larger castings for ages. Watch
munrolive, autoline and other youtube podcast interviews for ongoing analysis
and discussion.

The community interest in unibottle, multivalve (name?), simplified wiring
harnesses, large form unicasting, and all the other deepdive innovations is
really gratifying. There's been such a huge backlog and now the dam is
bursting.

Whatever else I think about Tesla and Elon Musk, this really feels like a sea
change.

~~~
BellLabradors
_" multivalve (name?)"_

Octovalve, here's a good video on it:

[https://youtu.be/rgmBpEQtJ1s](https://youtu.be/rgmBpEQtJ1s)

------
lmilcin
Not sure... ensuring quality of cast parts that complicated is going to be a
huge ongoing issue. Any local temperature difference or fill problem might
cause the body to fail to perform when it is needed the most. Stamping from
uniform material is much morw repeatable and predictable.

------
stefan_
It already costs absurd amounts to repair a fender bender or some smartphone
zombie driving into the back of a full aluminum Tesla, so if they make the
whole chassis some unibody they'll just total the cars for the slightest
damage?

No wonder insurance rates are that high.

~~~
jliptzin
The insurance on my brand new model 3 is around $80/mo? Not that high. On the
other hand my friend who has a Lexus RX had some pretty minor damage from a
fender bender and still it somehow cost $8,000 to repair so I don’t think this
problem is unique to Tesla.

~~~
skrtskrt
A big part of the fender bender cost in my experience is the paint.

I got hit in my old Corolla, bill (for insurance) was $4500. $3000 of that was
the paint job.

------
bob1029
This is impressive engineering. I wonder what the turnaround time will be on
this casting process (assuming the ideal 1 part casting approach)?

~~~
mcot2
Estimated at around 500,000 units/yr per machine based on their production
capacity and the number of machines on order.

------
MayeulC
What does MBH mean?

How would it compare with a few laser sinterers? I expect the initial
investment would be bigger, especially as these machines are slower, so more
would be required. But then, sinterers are probably a lot more versatile,
could produce the whole 70 parts plus the rivets holding them _at once_ , or a
few single replacement parts. Probably with less wasted material?

~~~
steffan
It was a mistake in the article s/MBH/NVH -> Noise, Vibration, Harshness

~~~
gfody
is this an assumption or is there an actual source for the original statement
- just curious as all I can find is a tweet from a suspended twitter account

------
tempsy
This really isn't a reputable news source - this blog literally exists to pump
the share price.

~~~
jlisam13
[https://www.sae.org/news/2020/06/tesla-model-y-big-
castings](https://www.sae.org/news/2020/06/tesla-model-y-big-castings)

------
dvduval
So wpuld I save enough money on this new car because Tesla saved money
building it, and therefore have enough money for a car insurance that would
cover any damage to the frame so that this is a non-issue? Or is Tesla just
passing this problem on to the consumer?

------
bfrog
I wonder how this affects repairability and insurance costs? Steel is
seemingly repair able by bending and welding, I can't imagine stamped aluminum
let alone cast is ever repairable? Doesn't that make insurance insanely
expensive?

------
joncrane
How much money does this save per vehicle?

------
cyberpwr
What is a cast unibody?

~~~
Timothycquinn
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_casting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_casting)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_frame#Unibody](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_frame#Unibody)

~~~
cyberpwr
Trying to picture a whole unibody being cast was difficult. Turns out its a
"small" sub-assembly.

Curios -- could the whole body be cast?

------
pengaru
How long before we're hearing reports of Model Y unibody cracks?

