GIGA press a game changer.

[Lake X Kid]

Quality control inspired Elon Musk to venture into creating a new Giant press machine.

Surely, Henry Ford (and most production engineers) would be impressed. The giant Giga press has eliminated many smaller parts (70 parts are now press-molded into One larger part), having to be bolted or welded onto the larger metal structure.

The Giga press has the “volume of a small house”. And generates 6,000 tons of pressure.
The castings are so large that Tesla’s materials engineers had to develop a new aluminum alloy to enable the molten aluminum to flow into all the intricate areas of the die before setting. A truly revolutionary breakthrough in engineering.

Cost, labor, and time reduced and savings increased. Those price savings can be passed on to the retail sticker price.

[Lake X Kid]

Adam Jonas, of Morgan Stanley, says there are three key areas of improvement which come with Tesla’s Giga casting.

• Reduced parts saving 10% mass and increasing vehicle range by 14%
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• Reduced production area saving 300-1000 robots and 35% of manufacturing floor space. Model Y which currently uses single body casings uses just 30% of the robots used for Model 3.
• 
  
• High productivity and shorter production time. 80-90 seconds to complete a part that would take 1-2 hours with the traditional process.

[David]

It's not just the giga press. Tesla is changing the status quo in both design and manufacturing.

Tesla is now using the battery pack as a stressed floor in the Model Y.
Tesla's combining the thermal systems, battery and vehicle greatly reduces the number of parts
Tesla also has by far the simplest electrical systems.

According to Munro and Associates, Tesla can crank out a car in 40 seconds vs the industry standard 60s.

Toyota recently benchmarked the Model Y and described it as a work of art. Toyota admits Tesla Model Y is "truly a work of art" as it rethinks EV strategy (thedriven.io)
Ironically this may slow Toyota's conversion to EVs as they have realized that a combined EV/hybrid/ICE platform is compromised and cannot be competitive with a pure EV platform.




Very cool engineering, even if you don't want an EV.

The charts are from Munro Live. Munro is a benchmarking company. I spent a couple of hours there once looking at B pillars with a customer.

[CDave]

With a cast chassis, I'd imagine, you wreck it and it's junk. Where a sheet metal chassis can be repaired.