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3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2021–2023
10:04 · 75K views · Jan 22, 2021
Drone footage over Tesla's Fremont factory in January 2021 that captures a Gigapress die-casting machine in operation.
HN commenters cite it as a rare look at Tesla's giant casting presses in action during discussions of mega-castings.
3 comments from Hacker News
Man why do people keep saying this. The normal parts that are replaced by a casting are LITERALLY WELDED TOGETHER. If there is an impact strong enough to bend that piece cast aluminum or welded steel then the car is most likely a right-off. And if not, you can in theory repair both, its just hard for both cases. Naturally the technology used to repair steel welded frames is much more common as its 80 year old technology. Body shops would need different tooling and methods to repair aluminum frames. And in fact, the aluminum casting is actually more stable. With cast aluminum you can get it into the perfect shape and you can even cast rips and things like that in it. The final piece is a much more optimal shape then you could ever get from welded steel. Companies try to minimize the amount of welds in a design because its costly and increases the size of your body shop. An just because this articles doesn't make this clear, Tesla still have crushcans integrated in the design and those are perfectly replaceable, just as they are now. So this really only matters when you have front impact so strong that it goes threw the crushcan and damages the massively strong casting. In such a case, you should be happy for the extra stiffness provided by the casting, because it might make the difference between live and death. At the end of the day this is a no brainer. You are replacing literally 100s of robots, lots of production time, lots more chance for error and it ends up costing far
In general yes, they solved their manufacturing issues on the Model 3 line and it reached the required speeds and saved the company. See the cashflow turnaround in 2018-2019. They managed to scale that line far beyond their initial targets. However that experience did teach them that their design was flawed and for future vehicles after Model 3 they did switch to large castings anyway rather then traditional welding of stamping. If you are interested in the flaws of the initial Model 3, see this interview with Elon and Sandy Munro where the discuss this: [LINK] First they had two casting in the back for the wheel area, then moved to one. Now they are moving to replace the whole front. So the new car designs will be two big castings connected by a structural battery pack (yes its removable). Here you see the changes: [LINK] The new design: [LINK] Example casting: [LINK] Here the first press in operation: this video Since then they have order many of these, 8 for Berlin for example. This should support around 500k cars production. These custom made for Tesla by IDRA in Italy, they put out a lot information: [LINK] Even more information: [LINK] They are moving to even larger presses for the Cybertruck.
- Mega Castings, casting have been used before, but never at the size Tesla does. Tesla has costume co-designed machines and they developed their own alloy to make it work. See: this video - Structural Battery Cell (Packs are structural in some cars, not cells) Eventually these two things together will basically be the main part of the car. This is nothing like anybody else does it: [LINK] - Fully integrated heating/cooling system 'Octovalve' ( [LINK] ) - Unifying chips to central computer - Stainless Steel Exoskeleton You can see a full breakdown of a last year Model Y here (same guy that did this interview with Elon, was very critical during Model 3 and impressed now): [LINK] That is of course only for cars, the improvement in battery production that Tesla has made are arguably more interesting. A whole video series on this: [LINK]