3 ms·
It's mostly just a lack of willingness to spend on large casting machines. Tesla is famous for purchasing the largest presses: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G
by chrisco255 3y ago
It's mostly just a lack of willingness to spend on large casting machines. Tesla is famous for purchasing the largest presses: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Press https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Press
Tesla is partly empowered to do this because electric vehicles are mechanically simpler than ICEs, and the batteries themselves also are made to be structural components. There's nothing fundamentally unsound about pressed aluminum.
- jeffbee 3y agoThe casting flaw in the OP would never have passed through a working quality control system, which would be automated radiography. You don't just buy casting machines, you have to develop the organizational doctrine to put them into practice.
- Fluorescence 3y agoOne of the reasons it isn't done is the QC problem. If you have a 10% rejection rate on 20 parts, 18 parts will pass. If they were all one mega-part, the whole casting has to be rejected. You then add in repairability issues and no flexibility to accommodate other types of manufacturing variability (errors, fit) and your savings from a single casting can become a big deficit instead. Sadly the reason this bad casting was shipped to a customer is probably because they are not achieving the desired pass rate so they knowingly wave through defective castings.