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Toyota Will Adopt Tesla-Style Cast Bodies That Might Be Impossible to Fix

63 points by elorant 3y ago

spikels 3y ago
Idra, the supplier of Tesla’s casting machines, is also building similar casting machines for Ford, Hyundai and an unnamed premium European carmaker. Here’s a picture of the Ford casting machine under construction/testing at Idra: https://twitter.com/lucagrecoita/status/1712112497673568738 https://twitter.com/lucagrecoita/status/1712112497673568738
loloquwowndueo 3y ago
“cast bodies might be more difficult to fix in the event of major damage, such as a crash.” Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a car NOT be written off after “major damage”. The industry already doesn’t bother to fix cars, they just get scrapped, so I don’t see what the actual difference is.
- tifik 3y ago
  That the car is written off doesnt mean it gets scrapped though. It usually gets auctioned, and if its fixable, some mechanic can buy it for peanuts and put it back on the market.
  - GenerocUsername 3y ago
    So why the write off nonsense. Just send it to a repair shop directly and if it cannot be repaired, then initiate a write off. Sounds like extra steps for the profit of middle men
    - pengaru 3y ago
      > So why the write off nonsense. Just send it to a repair shop directly and if it cannot be repaired, then initiate a write off. Well to get the owner of the written-off car installed into a new vehicle of course! With a whole new loan and likely a higher insurance premium esp. if they "upgraded" in the process.
    - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
      Risk mostly. Many of the vehicles won't be repairable and will just go to the scrap yard. Some will appear to repairable but after some effort end up scrapped too. And some will be repairable but only by guys who specialize in such things and have customers willing to buy a retitled salvage vehicle. For the insurance company, it's not worth the effort and added risk. That someone else can make some money off the missed margin isn't a big deal to the insurance company.
    - robennals 3y ago
      Because it wouldn’t be economic to repair it to “good as new” status. The people who buy salvage titled cars are usually happy to drive a car that doesn’t work quite right if they get a killer deal for it.
    - RickHull 3y ago
      The original owner of the car has some ability to refuse the repair job. It may be impossible to (economically) bring the car back to its previous state. The insurance company prefers not to take the risk. They write a clean check and recover some cost by selling the salvage, which will likely be repaired and sold.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      Writing it off is just the insurance company buying it from you for your insured amount because they owe you the value of the car and it'll be cheaper to just buy it from you than repair it. Normally you can then buy it back for what they expect to get at auction and do the repairs yourself with a salvage title.
    - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
      At least in my country, insurance can only replace with original parts... A newish car, a minor crash, bumper, hood, a front light or two, couple of airbags... at ~1500eur per light, 2-3k for original hood, 2-3k for airbags, body work, and low eurotax estimate of the price of the car, your repair cost is easily above 70% of the "car value". A few trips to the dump, some aftermarket parts and someone to do the work for cheap, and you've got a drivable car.
    - mlyle 3y ago
      The insurance company is always looking at: - what it would cost them to repair it (including the risk of having to get additional work done, etc) - what the car was worth minus what they can sell it for at auction. If the values get close, they total the car. Then someone else buys it: maybe for parts, or maybe to repair it to a standard that the original owner wouldn't have been happy with.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > So why the write off nonsense Write-off is about insurance policies, and whether it is cheaper to repair damage to the standard committed to by the insurer within the parameters (e. g., new original manufacturer parts) in the insurance contact or to pay the amount the insurer is committed to pay in the alternative. It is only tangentially related to whether it is econonically viable to restore the vehicle to usable condition.
      - thechao 3y ago
        When hail totaled my car, I kept it for another 4 years. Just "cosmetic" damage. It's still kicking around in New Mexico; I guess it's 17 years old, now.
        tim333 3y ago
        My current car was an insurance write off and looks good if you look at it casually though looking closely the line is not quite straight down the side where it was hit and you can see a boundary in the paint where the respray finished. Works fine though.
    - cityofdelusion 3y ago
      Cars bought at auction have a salvage title, and they are not repaired to a level that would be considered acceptable by most people. Those cars are usually mechanics projects using junkyard parts and zip ties. The other thing is that generally, a person is free to buy their car back from the insurance company instead of taking the cash from the totaling. That is when they will discover they can't just send it to a shop and get it repaired for any reasonable amount, plus the salvage title means no one else wants it.
    - SkyPuncher 3y ago
      Isn’t that exactly what happens? You send it for an estimate. If that estimate is too high, insurance gives you a check then sells the car as a salvage.
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    or gets parted out?
- bitbangboom 3y ago
  Yeah I feel like this is the next stepping stone on a path we have been on for years. I remember Rich Rebuilds got rear ended in his Rivian and the total repair bill was somewhere around $30K if I remember right. I really do wish repairability was considered more not less, but with safety standards, manufacturing costs, etc it seems like cars are racing towards the cliff of just “discarding” if they have a problem just like the rest of consumer goods
  - semi-extrinsic 3y ago
    With EVs this problem is getting a lot worse. In latest-gen EVs the battery pack is a stressed member of the frame. Any type of collision that distorts the frame will also imply a deformation of the battery module, which means instant write-off. So if you think about it - if you first decide you need to go down the "structural battery" route to save cost and weight, you've already lost repairability if the frame is bent. Then moving to a cast frame doesn't really change anything.
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      Can you point to any references/examples of this? Not a challenge, but as an EV owner I didn't know this and I'm interested to learn more.
      - vel0city 3y ago
        He's probably referencing Tesla's structural battery packs. Essentially the pack makes up the bottom part of the frame of the car. https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/tesla-structural-battery-pack-first-picture/ https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/tesla-structural-battery-pack...
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        Tanoc 3y ago
        The Ford Mach-E does the same thing. There's thin box frame rails as part of the traditional ladder frame, and the battery pack actually forms the floorpan and stressed crossmembers. Without the battery pack the frame will deform because there's no lateral reinforcement, making it this weird hybrid of a ladder frame and unibody that it shares with the Model X and Ioniq 5. Most EVs like the Bolt and the Ioniq 6 are unibodies however since they're just designed like regular cars with battery packs shoved where the fuel tank would normally go under the rear seat or rear hatch floor, and the battery pack simply reinforces the floor.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  There are body shops all over town here repairing collision damage every day. Yes a major crash is a write off especially on an older car, but the problem is that with cast frames, if they are more likely to be irreparably damaged in a collision, that's more write-offs. That means insurance premiums for these cars will be more costly as well.
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    My understanding is frame damage generally results in a write off. It’s too expand too risky.
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      It often does if it's severe, but if the frame is just "tweaked" it can often be pulled back into spec with specialzed jigs and equipment. Any comprehensive collision repair shop will have that equipment.
      - SkyPuncher 3y ago
        My understanding is it’s just not common to do that anymore. Most vehicles are already unibody, so fixing frames is much harder. If the damage is bad enough o require a frame fix, it’s very likely there’s significant damage to other parts of the car.
- scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
  They don’t always get scrapped - they often get sent out to another country, sold at a discount, fixed there.
  - oldpersonintx 3y ago
    so are we at..."this is bad because it will restrict the flow of unsafe junkers passed off to someone living in Panama"?
    - scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
      I don't know tbh. I just drive a 10-15 y.o. US vehicle in Poland because the previous owner imported it. Who knows, when I'm done with it, it might even be exported on out of the EU.
    - 90-00-09 3y ago
      Not unsafe necessarily. The cost of labor is so high in the US that fixing even minor damage might not be cost efficient. Also consider the possible increase in the insurance fees if you continue driving a car after repairs. Other countries have lower cost of labor overall, so it's a profitable (and, hopefully, safe) business for them.
      - skullone 3y ago
        Lots of passed off vehicles to poorer countries tend to be body on frame style. Lots of ford/Toyota trucks, where frame damage can as "simple" as welding steel bar stock or straightening with a basic frame puller. If a unibody vehicle is totaled from major damage in the US, they get scrapped of nearly every usable part, then crushed and melted down. Not even worth the shipping/hassle to send a smashed up Kia to Central America, let alone Africa. People aren't stupid. They're just as savvy at this, if not more, than we would ever be. Hence the amount of body on frame SUVs and trucks that get salvaged there. Sure, you'll see "beat up" cheap cars there, but they'll pass on anything majorly damaged, cuz even there, it's simply not worth it.
- throw9away6 3y ago
  I think having cast body be written off is preferable to having forever damaged car
  - oldpersonintx 3y ago
    exactly! pretty much anything beyond superficial damage to a body panel...new car please, that is why I pay insurance
- dylan604 3y ago
  i can't imagine what insurance company premiums are going to be when they figure out how much they're going to be paying out for each incident with one of these.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Hand raised. Of course, your question is basically a tautology if you define "major damage" as "that which causes a car to get totaled". The whole concern is that, with these cast bodies, damage that would have been considered fixable or minor in the past now becomes an instant write off.
  - loloquwowndueo 3y ago
    Well the article says major damage, not me.
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      I know, but you are the one proposing that "major damage" is always written off.
  - hwillis 3y ago
    Not really. Major damage would be damage to the subframes or wheel wells. It's a step right above getting entire axles ripped off. In most situations, for most cars, that will total the car.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  Hand raised! I was rear-ended in a new Jeep Wrangler. Damage included a bent frame, crushed rear bumper, bent rear hatch, bent roll cage, bent rear fender, shattered tail light, and a bent floor. It was nearly $20k in damage. It was repaired. [and I very quickly sold it because I had zero faith in the longevity of the repairs]
- segmondy 3y ago
  Hands down. I haven't personally experienced major damage, but I have bought and know folks to buy many of these written off cars only to have them repaired, certified by the state and put back on the roads.
- hellotheretoday 3y ago
  That doesn’t mean it’s not fixed by someone else after auction and salvage titling assuming it’s a car that’s somewhat desirable. So this is just a move that generates more waste?
  - skullone 3y ago
    I mean, there's certainly rebuilt/salvaged cars, but more often than not people are scammed into buying those from shady AF places. Lesson is, don't waste your time or money on a unibody car with major damage. Scrap em. It's pointless. And people arguing we need to repair everything even from major damage when it makes zero economic or ecological sense and from those with no experience in the industry is just tiring.
- crote 3y ago
  It does lower the bar for what is considered "major damage". Having a car written off when you need to essentially take the entire thing apart is fairly reasonable, as is not wanting to repair the actual body part itself. When the car is made out of multiple different parts, a low-speed bump into a bollard or another car might result in the bumper needing to be replaced. Not the cheapest repair, but definitely quite doable and probably not worthy of a complete writeoff. When the entire car is made out of a single cast that very same bump results in the entire body needing to be replaced - and that's just not going to happen.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    Those castings have a slot for crush cans that are not welded. If you have a low-speed bump it would crush your bumper and the crush cans behind it, it would not effect the casting. Literally nobody plans to remove crush cans from the vehicle, even if the whole body is cast. See: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla-mOdel-Y-underbody-2.jpg?quality=82&strip=all https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla...
- gnicholas 3y ago
  They sell the wreck and recover some money that way. If the new vehicles are essentially unsalable, this will cause premiums to rise.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jdmg94 3y ago
  In my 3rd world home country most cars are bought on copart as "salvage", they get fixed up and usually get ran well above the 100k miles, this change will undoubtedly reduce the opportunity to give new life to salvage cars while making it more dangerous for the people who have no other choice. In the end this will create a lot more waste than we had before, its a shame because Toyota's are the most highly regarded cars where I am from
- theGnuMe 3y ago
  They are scrapped but then usually resold/exported to a cheaper country where they get fixed up and sold there. Maybe the unicast cars will get a lot of duct tape and Bondo.
- bahmboo 3y ago
  Had a car with major body damage. Repair estimate magically came in $100 less than salvage value. Insurance company went with repair of course.
- bobsmooth 3y ago
  I had to fight with my insurance to not have my 2005 model car written off after a fender bender. Thankfully I did because this was just before used car prices skyrocketed.
- hokkos 3y ago
  They don't get scrapped most of the time they are send overseas and repaired.
- MarkusWandel 3y ago
  My car got written off. 11 years old but in good condition, got hit on the rear left corner, sheet metal work was damaged. The tier 1 body shop that the insurance company sent me to quoted about 3/4 of the car's (undamaged) value in repair costs, including replacing most of the left side, the back window among other things, and even $600 worth of paint. Shopping for a replacement vehicle in the damaged one, various tier 2-3 dealer types said, oh, we could fix that up real nice for $3K, and one of them would have been happy to have the car at the insurance company's quoted value in damaged condition. So you can bet that that thing has by now been auctioned off, fixed up like that and sold, possibly with a "rebuilt" title, at a modest profit, and continues to be used. It was too good to scrap and the damage, while a PITA to fix, was not even remotely structural. So it's not that insurance companies consign all these written-off cars to the scrap heap. It's just that they don't want to deal with the repairs, and possible post-repair complaints. So just like bad debts, it's sent down the pipe to the people best matched to the job. A broken cast frame would short-circuit this process, causing the car to be scrapped for real and thus raising costs for everyone.
- hakfoo 3y ago
  My mum had a 2004 Sonata and it got T-boned with like 3,000km on the odometer. It was like a $17k car brand new, with and they put like $15k of body work (and then hiring a loaner car for a month while doing it) into it. Ran fine for another 150,000km before she traded it in, but I was baffled that the other driver's insurance didn't just say "we're writing it off, go get another one." OTOH, she was so pleased by their willingness to pay without hassle that she switched to that carrier.
- alphabettsy 3y ago
  Was in a front-end crash with minor frame damage in addition to airbags deploying. Vehicle was repaired, frame was able to be straightened on a rack.
SoftTalker 3y ago
Cast metals are rather brittle, normally? Good for complex shapes that may be further refined by machining, and in compression loads, but not in shear or tension. I would think they would shatter in a collision rather than bend like steel.
- binarymax 3y ago
  They must anneal them
  - coryrc 3y ago
    Also when people hear "cast" they think "cast iron" or cheap appliance broken piece (mostly zinc). They're brittle because of material choice, not because of casting. (Though casting does influence the choice of materials)
    - silisili 3y ago
      Ruger, for example, makes everything from gun barrels to golf clubs from casting. They claim that due to material advances and such, casting can meet or exceed the strength of typical 'forged' steel.
  - Uzza 3y ago
    Not necessarily. Tesla actually developed a proprietary alloy for their giga casting that removed the need for heat treatment, as the large castings tended to deform during it. On the plus side, also meant they could remove that process step. Article didn't give any details how Toyota would handle it though.
- jgalt212 3y ago
  Indeed, when I heard about the gigapress, I was like that is pretty neat, but when I read it was just casting, and not forging, I was like oh, it's not the *best* solution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forging
  - 3y ago
rslogix 3y ago
I'm not sure how it is currently but when I was working in the gigafactory like a year ago they had such a hard time making the cast unibody they just gave up and switched back to making Model Y's the traditional way.
metadat 3y ago
It's interesting how the casting process produces a lighter, weaker, and impossible to repair or chassis. Why can't the blocks be modular and replaceable?
- dantheman 3y ago
  What incentive does anyone ever to have pass on savings efficiencies? The answer is competition / competing goods.
  - jgalt212 3y ago
    True, and fortunately for the consumer and unlike other markets, the auto market is broadly competed.
- skullone 3y ago
  Because the welding/bolting/etc joining processes are intricate and time consuming, and also equally as hard to repair.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  A casting isn't weaker. You can make much more complex shapes with castings. You have much more variety in the thickness on the right points and interduce structural cross members. See: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla-mOdel-Y-underbody-2.jpg?quality=82&strip=all https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla... There is a reason Tesla cars do so well on safety while been pretty light comparatively. > Why can't the blocks be modular and replaceable? Everything is possible. But if you have many independent pieces that are all independently bonded that introduces a whole lot of complexity. Each connection is an additional place for failure. There is a reason every single car welds these pieces together. Its just not smart to try to use fasteners to connect these pieces. Its much harder to design, much harder (and more expensive) to produce, much error prone its likely also heavier.
ravenstine 3y ago
Like I've said many times, until regulation mitigates the enshittification of vehicles, you will have to pry my dumbcar from my cold dead hands. You want me to buy an electric vehicle? Don't pull shenanigans that disempower me.
- jgalt212 3y ago
  I really do miss physical keys. Replacement cost for an Audi key fob is over $700. And it extends to broader market brands. My mom's Mazda replacement fob cost $500. WTF is going on here?
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    That's the cost for integration with the immobilizer. Car keys and fobs have chips that signal to the onboard computer, and may use a variety of techniques such as rolling codes to make the cars harder to steal. Gone are the days when you can easily hotwire a car by yanking and touching random wires together from the steering column. Kia and Hyundai are among the last brands to be selling cars without them, and that's the reason they've been targeted so heavily by car thieves. If you have one key and lost one, you can use the one you have to more easily reprogram the other. However, if you have lost all of your keys, a technician needs physical access to your car to reprogram everything together. Add on top of that the licensing cost for the software to do the programming (you don't want random people having easy access to reprogramming your locks after all) . Reprogramming keys is a fairly low-volume sale, especially if you need access to the car to do it (hard to scale volume remotely) so the per-key cost is much higher as a result.
    - fbdab103 3y ago
      Surely the BOM on the fobs is at most tens of dollars. Hard to see a $700 cost justifiable as anything but greed against a captive audience.
  - skullone 3y ago
    Would you rather the keys be $5 from Walmart and pair with the car without needing an OEM programmer?
ChumpGPT 3y ago
Does anyone think 99% of the car buyers market cares about cast bodies? Just look at all the folks who bought Tesla's, they don't have a problem buying a car that costs more to insure, waiting for months to get repaired, at the same time happy with poor finishes, paying extra for every possible detail, and never being able to fix them on their own. Most folks in the car market chase fashion and could care less about quality, dependability (Ford, GM, Chrysler still exist) and longevity. They just make their $600 a month payment and roll over the remainder every 3 years into a new vehicle.
- oldpersonintx 3y ago
  99% of the market cares about cheaper cars...and eventually, cast bodies will reduce costs substantially
  - technofiend 3y ago
    No doubt it's projection on my part but I too assume the majority of car buyers are looking for cheap, reliable new cars and therefore that's where the greatest volume would be, right? Yet manufacturers are moving to higher profit cars. What surprises me is even Chevrolet is ending their low-cost EV which enjoys a hefty subsidy via purchaser tax break. Instead their next EV will move to a different platform to be consistent with their newer cars which is good but also at a higher price point, which is not. Particularly with that subsidy they could own that low-end EV market; they've had to extend the retirement date of the current car several times due to demand! But, they're not alone: from the linked article "Last month, 17% of new vehicles sold were under $30,000, compared to 44% five years ago." Which sucks for people who do just want a point-a to point-b vehicle and not a rolling status symbol. https://www.businessinsider.com/cheapest-cars-abandoned-by-automakers-in-search-of-profits-2023-3?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/cheapest-cars-abandoned-by-a... Not to be too cynical about it, but if wrecking a car means totalling a car, that's also another potential sale. At the very least making them less repairable smacks of consumer-hostile moves we've seen in the electronics industry and similarly without right to repair legislation, the manufacturers can do whatever they want. At least for me it's frustrating.
GravityLab 3y ago
> Toyota anticipates it'll generate 20 percent higher productivity than its competitors, and could halve body assembly time from 10 hours. This is a nice efficiency gain, but they don’t seem to be constrained by how quickly they can produce cars…as far as I can tell, demand in the market for their product is more based on the cost of the supply, not how quickly they are producing units. Or are they thinking that by producing units faster the supply will increase enough to reduce prices? Will they allow supply to increase such that individual units become cheaper? In any case it is bothersome that they would back a group that is against repairing your car…cars aren’t like phones where you can just buy an entire replacement if the screen cracks and if you’re already eyeballing the new model……
- crote 3y ago
  Manufacturing cars currently still involves humans. Halving body assembly time also means you only need to pay half the wages for the humans. That's going to significantly reduce their expenses.
  - GravityLab 3y ago
    I wonder if this means their cars will become more affordable…
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    This isn't really true. The body assembly is overwhelming automated in any large volume car. Its basically a long assembly line with welding robots and robots holding the pieces. There are few humans involved. Of course both the large casting machine and the fleet of welding robots need engineers and maintenance. Its really just cheaper, and the resulting piece is higher strength while being lighter. Its btw the official product name: https://www.idragroup.com/en/gigapress https://www.idragroup.com/en/gigapress
- Tade0 3y ago
  One large part is much cheaper to produce than the same section made out of several parts - chiefly because you don't have to spend time and resources on putting it all together. Also, you can actually use less material since you don't have to reinforce the points where you weld/bolt.
Tade0 3y ago
Where I'm from there's a tired old joke, the punchline of which is that the mechanic calls back that the car will be ready in three weeks. Only issue being - the customer came in with a piece of bent aluminium roofing sheet. My point is that mechanics deal with more challenging problems on a daily basis and it's actually easier to have one bent out of shape piece that costs X, instead of several pieces forming the same section of the car, each bent out of shape in a cascade of damage and costing e.g. 0.6X each. Personally I paid the most for replacing parts that contained electronics - like a rear bumper with parking sensors. A name-brand parking sensor can go for as much as a second-hand quarter panel.
Tanoc 3y ago
Environmentally friendly my ass. Any minor damage and the car will be toast because the insurance company will total it. Even if it gets back on the road it'll have a salvage title, something that's poison to a car and ensures that it ends up either crushed or parted out. These are already problems with unibody cars thanks to how quickly insurance adjusters will take any deformation of the core unibody, even just cosmetic damage like the C-pillar having a dent, and call the car a total loss. There are more than a few A-body Oldsmobile Cutlass Cieras and Buick Centuries from the late 1980s that I still see driven around where I live. The environmental impact they've had has been far less than any of these cast-body cars will be because an A-body is a cockroach that will never die no matter how many times you hit something with it. They were produced decades ago and have long since offset their initial production impact. Add in all the Chevrolet C-10s, Chevrolet S-10s, Ford Rangers, Suzuki Sidekicks/Geo Trackers, and XJ Jeep Cherokees I see daily and they still have less of an impact environmentally than these disposable cars will have because they can be repaired instead of requiring total replacement.
- petee 3y ago
  Eh, even now Toyotas have a low threshold for being totaled, the parts are just so expensive. My 2014 Tacoma was essentially sideswiped hard; repair was estimated at $12,000 but was deemed totalled, insu paid me $17,000. It is now rotting in a junk yard for the past 4 years (I check the old VIN time to time)
  - skullone 3y ago
    Don't feel too bad about your truck in a junkyard. It has probably donated enough parts to keep a dozen other ones on the road with economical scrapped parts.
- w0z_ 3y ago
  My Model S was hit in the unibody and not totaled, not sure how you're making this up.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > Any minor damage and the car will be toast because the insurance company will total it. Another best part is our currently skyrocketing car insurance - even for people who don't carry collision. Even if you don't contribute to the problem, insurance companies force you to financially support everyone who does.
isykt 3y ago
If you want cars made in the US by people making a living wage, something has to give. The demographics of manufacturing workers is already hollowed out, and will only get progressively worse as the years roll on.
forrestthewoods 3y ago
I live in Seattle. If you drive a Tesla and get rear ended the wait time for repairs is 6 months. I know multiple friends dealing with this. It’s a major problem. So major that when we bought a new car Tesla was ruled out.
taylodl 3y ago
Minor accidents resulting in cars being totaled does what to insurance premiums? Makes them sky-high. There was an article earlier this week how some Tesla owners were facing extreme insurance premium increases and others had their insurance dropped altogether. All the savings you hear about with regards to EV’s are going to be more than offset by insurance premiums - which means these gigacast vehicles aren’t going to sell well.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  > Minor accidents resulting in cars being totaled That's not actually what's happening. > which means these gigacast vehicles aren’t going to sell well. The Model Y is one of the one of the most sold car in the world and uses more casting then any other vehicle in the world. But why bother with data when one can just make up stuff.
  - taylodl 3y ago
    Maybe you didn't see this news? https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/sep/30/the-quotes-were-5000-or-more-electric-vehicle-owners-face-soaring-insurance-costs#:~:text=%E2%80%9CI%20am%20a%20member%20of,screengrab%20shared%20by%20one%20driver https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/sep/30/the-quotes-wer...).
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      That article has noting todo with castings. It literally doesn't even mention castings. If this owner had damanged his casting it couldn't be repaired for 5k. The article even talks about how this doesn't just apply to Tesla, so again, this has nothing to do with using castings. This is also a British articles based no British concern and insurance companies.
      - taylodl 3y ago
        Other articles are covering the irreparability of gigacast autos. Stainless steel is the icing on the cake for irreparability (technically it can be repaired, but it requires different tooling and skills - you're not going to be to take your Cyber Truck to a normal body repair shop). All that drives up insurance costs.
aniijbod 3y ago
If it turns out that in order to make EVs cheaper to build than combustion cars right now you have to switch to castings because batteries are expensive, then when batteries become much cheaper, will we switch back to the current non-casting-based 'strut and fastener' model? Also, because Tesla is so popular, is it possible that its attractions have far less to do with the environment and more to do with everything else about the car? These concerns about the environmental impact of increased write-offs and increased insurance premiums are perfectly understandable, but I wonder if they will stop even a single sale?
- panick21_ 3y ago
  No, casting is simply a better technology. Its better no matter what type of propulsion you use. Its just that other car companies, unlike Tesla, were not willing to make the massive investment it required to make truly huge castings. Smaller casting have been in use before on various cars, some Audi had a decently big one on the wheel well. For Tesla to do this they had to work with a company that made the largest casting and task them with creating a massively larger casting. Tesla material teams also developed its own aluminum alloy that wouldn't bend as much during cooling. This allowed Tesla to not have to dip the castings into a fluid to cool them. Castings had been used by car companies for a while, sometimes decent size ones around the wheel for example. But Tesla took the idea and put in the effort to take it way further. They started with doing only half the back, and then bond the two sides. When the company finished development on the larger generation of machines they pioneered doing the whole back piece all at once. See: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla-mOdel-Y-underbody-2.jpg?quality=82&strip=all https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla... > Also, because Tesla is so popular, is it possible that its attractions have far less to do with the environment and more to do with everything else about the car? This is clearly the case. People never by things 'just of the environment'. Tesla produces the arguable the best price to return for EVs. At least unless you want a much smaller shorter range car.
panick21_ 3y ago
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. See here: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla-mOdel-Y-underbody-2.jpg?quality=82&strip=all https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla... 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 less. The waste majority of cars, never do repairs on their welded together body structure, this is the extreme minority of cases. Seems to me it makes a whole lot more sense to optimize for the majority of cases, not the vast minority. For those that want to see the process in operations, this is a nice video: https://youtu.be/BwoiFC-HwPE?si=R9sRMEDkgDJqBMew&t=306 https://youtu.be/BwoiFC-HwPE?si=R9sRMEDkgDJqBMew&t=306
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tomxor 3y ago
> Car companies make their money from selling new cars, not keeping old ones on the road. I'm interested in how this could be realistically changed. I'm convinced most of the environmental and societal problems caused by economic activity is inevitable at scale, where an organisation's behaviour becomes dominated more by underlying economic rules than any principles it's originators may have had at a younger age or smaller scale. It also shouldn't necessarily be so specific as "must maximise vehicle life", it really depends, because it's not impossible that with the right manufacturing and recycling techniques shorter vehicle life could bring down the total environmental and societal cost. The question is how to make that economically interesting to the manufacturers, e.g what if each manufacturer was responsible, end-to-end, for the recycling of it's own vehicles... shorter vehicle life could mean more sales, but could also mean more recycling. If the process is optimised for that then it could be profitable and cheap for the consumer and good for the environment, but if not it will hurt their bottom line.
- peteradio 3y ago
  Part of the sale value of a car incorporates its resalabilty.
hefferbub 3y ago
I think something missed in this discussion is the fact that an EV is so much simpler than an ICE vehicle* that costs will inevitably come down. Many people believe that decent models will be considerably cheaper than today’s Tercels, Civics, Corollas, etc. in as little as 2-3 years. Today you can buy a brand new Tesla Model 3 for $39,000 and with the U.S. tax credits that drops to $31,500. If you are in states like NY with additional credits, $26,500. So it is already around the price levels of Accords, Camrys, etc. on the existing Tesla platform. Tesla’s goal in their next platform is to cut the price to manufacture in HALF, and there is good reason to believe they will achieve that. The aspirational goals Toyota is claiming in this article, if achieved, will help them get closer to Tesla’s current architecture, which will be a great step forward. As manufacturing becomes more efficient and prices drop, it will indeed make less and less sense to do major repairs, which are only getting more expensive. * EVs are simpler when they have a proper hardware/software integration and over-the-air updates. Continuing the current industry practice of stringing together 150 off-the-shelf ECUs is one reason why most companies are losing money on their EVs and will never keep up with those who understand the software-defined car. For a great deep dive on how Tesla has created their software-defined car architecture check out https://youtu.be/fUCgLCbX_18?si=X9-s_aNLyrunmGHi https://youtu.be/fUCgLCbX_18?si=X9-s_aNLyrunmGHi
RickJWagner 3y ago
I've become really skeptical of all the auto magazines that find ways to criticize Tesla in every article. The most easily imaginable conspiracy theory is that Tesla has pioneered techniques that let it manufacture electric vehicles with good range at a reasonable cost, catching other auto manufacturers flat-footed. By continually improving and lowering prices, Tesla makes it nearly impossible for others to keep up. So the traditional auto makers deploy FUD to try to buy time. But that's just a theory.
- spikels 3y ago
  Better conspiracy theory: auto magazines/websites make most of their revenue from advertising and while car makers spend around $10B/year on advertising Tesla spends nothing.

63 points by elorant 3y ago

Idra, the supplier of Tesla’s casting machines, is also building similar casting machines for Ford, Hyundai and an unnamed premium European carmaker. Here’s a picture of the Ford casting machine under construction/testing at Idra: https://twitter.com/lucagrecoita/status/1712112497673568738 https://twitter.com/lucagrecoita/status/1712112497673568738

loloquwowndueo 3y ago

“cast bodies might be more difficult to fix in the event of major damage, such as a crash.” Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a car NOT be written off after “major damage”. The industry already doesn’t bother to fix cars, they just get scrapped, so I don’t see what the actual difference is.

tifik 3y ago
That the car is written off doesnt mean it gets scrapped though. It usually gets auctioned, and if its fixable, some mechanic can buy it for peanuts and put it back on the market.
- GenerocUsername 3y ago
  So why the write off nonsense. Just send it to a repair shop directly and if it cannot be repaired, then initiate a write off. Sounds like extra steps for the profit of middle men
  - pengaru 3y ago
    > So why the write off nonsense. Just send it to a repair shop directly and if it cannot be repaired, then initiate a write off. Well to get the owner of the written-off car installed into a new vehicle of course! With a whole new loan and likely a higher insurance premium esp. if they "upgraded" in the process.
  - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    Risk mostly. Many of the vehicles won't be repairable and will just go to the scrap yard. Some will appear to repairable but after some effort end up scrapped too. And some will be repairable but only by guys who specialize in such things and have customers willing to buy a retitled salvage vehicle. For the insurance company, it's not worth the effort and added risk. That someone else can make some money off the missed margin isn't a big deal to the insurance company.
  - robennals 3y ago
    Because it wouldn’t be economic to repair it to “good as new” status. The people who buy salvage titled cars are usually happy to drive a car that doesn’t work quite right if they get a killer deal for it.
  - RickHull 3y ago
    The original owner of the car has some ability to refuse the repair job. It may be impossible to (economically) bring the car back to its previous state. The insurance company prefers not to take the risk. They write a clean check and recover some cost by selling the salvage, which will likely be repaired and sold.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    Writing it off is just the insurance company buying it from you for your insured amount because they owe you the value of the car and it'll be cheaper to just buy it from you than repair it. Normally you can then buy it back for what they expect to get at auction and do the repairs yourself with a salvage title.
  - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    At least in my country, insurance can only replace with original parts... A newish car, a minor crash, bumper, hood, a front light or two, couple of airbags... at ~1500eur per light, 2-3k for original hood, 2-3k for airbags, body work, and low eurotax estimate of the price of the car, your repair cost is easily above 70% of the "car value". A few trips to the dump, some aftermarket parts and someone to do the work for cheap, and you've got a drivable car.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    The insurance company is always looking at: - what it would cost them to repair it (including the risk of having to get additional work done, etc) - what the car was worth minus what they can sell it for at auction. If the values get close, they total the car. Then someone else buys it: maybe for parts, or maybe to repair it to a standard that the original owner wouldn't have been happy with.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > So why the write off nonsense Write-off is about insurance policies, and whether it is cheaper to repair damage to the standard committed to by the insurer within the parameters (e. g., new original manufacturer parts) in the insurance contact or to pay the amount the insurer is committed to pay in the alternative. It is only tangentially related to whether it is econonically viable to restore the vehicle to usable condition.
    - thechao 3y ago
      When hail totaled my car, I kept it for another 4 years. Just "cosmetic" damage. It's still kicking around in New Mexico; I guess it's 17 years old, now.
      - tim333 3y ago
        My current car was an insurance write off and looks good if you look at it casually though looking closely the line is not quite straight down the side where it was hit and you can see a boundary in the paint where the respray finished. Works fine though.
  - cityofdelusion 3y ago
    Cars bought at auction have a salvage title, and they are not repaired to a level that would be considered acceptable by most people. Those cars are usually mechanics projects using junkyard parts and zip ties. The other thing is that generally, a person is free to buy their car back from the insurance company instead of taking the cash from the totaling. That is when they will discover they can't just send it to a shop and get it repaired for any reasonable amount, plus the salvage title means no one else wants it.
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    Isn’t that exactly what happens? You send it for an estimate. If that estimate is too high, insurance gives you a check then sells the car as a salvage.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  or gets parted out?
bitbangboom 3y ago
Yeah I feel like this is the next stepping stone on a path we have been on for years. I remember Rich Rebuilds got rear ended in his Rivian and the total repair bill was somewhere around $30K if I remember right. I really do wish repairability was considered more not less, but with safety standards, manufacturing costs, etc it seems like cars are racing towards the cliff of just “discarding” if they have a problem just like the rest of consumer goods
- semi-extrinsic 3y ago
  With EVs this problem is getting a lot worse. In latest-gen EVs the battery pack is a stressed member of the frame. Any type of collision that distorts the frame will also imply a deformation of the battery module, which means instant write-off. So if you think about it - if you first decide you need to go down the "structural battery" route to save cost and weight, you've already lost repairability if the frame is bent. Then moving to a cast frame doesn't really change anything.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Can you point to any references/examples of this? Not a challenge, but as an EV owner I didn't know this and I'm interested to learn more.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      He's probably referencing Tesla's structural battery packs. Essentially the pack makes up the bottom part of the frame of the car. https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/tesla-structural-battery-pack-first-picture/ https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/tesla-structural-battery-pack...
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - Tanoc 3y ago
        The Ford Mach-E does the same thing. There's thin box frame rails as part of the traditional ladder frame, and the battery pack actually forms the floorpan and stressed crossmembers. Without the battery pack the frame will deform because there's no lateral reinforcement, making it this weird hybrid of a ladder frame and unibody that it shares with the Model X and Ioniq 5. Most EVs like the Bolt and the Ioniq 6 are unibodies however since they're just designed like regular cars with battery packs shoved where the fuel tank would normally go under the rear seat or rear hatch floor, and the battery pack simply reinforces the floor.
SoftTalker 3y ago
There are body shops all over town here repairing collision damage every day. Yes a major crash is a write off especially on an older car, but the problem is that with cast frames, if they are more likely to be irreparably damaged in a collision, that's more write-offs. That means insurance premiums for these cars will be more costly as well.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago
  My understanding is frame damage generally results in a write off. It’s too expand too risky.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    It often does if it's severe, but if the frame is just "tweaked" it can often be pulled back into spec with specialzed jigs and equipment. Any comprehensive collision repair shop will have that equipment.
    - SkyPuncher 3y ago
      My understanding is it’s just not common to do that anymore. Most vehicles are already unibody, so fixing frames is much harder. If the damage is bad enough o require a frame fix, it’s very likely there’s significant damage to other parts of the car.
scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
They don’t always get scrapped - they often get sent out to another country, sold at a discount, fixed there.
- oldpersonintx 3y ago
  so are we at..."this is bad because it will restrict the flow of unsafe junkers passed off to someone living in Panama"?
  - scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
    I don't know tbh. I just drive a 10-15 y.o. US vehicle in Poland because the previous owner imported it. Who knows, when I'm done with it, it might even be exported on out of the EU.
  - 90-00-09 3y ago
    Not unsafe necessarily. The cost of labor is so high in the US that fixing even minor damage might not be cost efficient. Also consider the possible increase in the insurance fees if you continue driving a car after repairs. Other countries have lower cost of labor overall, so it's a profitable (and, hopefully, safe) business for them.
    - skullone 3y ago
      Lots of passed off vehicles to poorer countries tend to be body on frame style. Lots of ford/Toyota trucks, where frame damage can as "simple" as welding steel bar stock or straightening with a basic frame puller. If a unibody vehicle is totaled from major damage in the US, they get scrapped of nearly every usable part, then crushed and melted down. Not even worth the shipping/hassle to send a smashed up Kia to Central America, let alone Africa. People aren't stupid. They're just as savvy at this, if not more, than we would ever be. Hence the amount of body on frame SUVs and trucks that get salvaged there. Sure, you'll see "beat up" cheap cars there, but they'll pass on anything majorly damaged, cuz even there, it's simply not worth it.
throw9away6 3y ago
I think having cast body be written off is preferable to having forever damaged car
- oldpersonintx 3y ago
  exactly! pretty much anything beyond superficial damage to a body panel...new car please, that is why I pay insurance
dylan604 3y ago
i can't imagine what insurance company premiums are going to be when they figure out how much they're going to be paying out for each incident with one of these.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Hand raised. Of course, your question is basically a tautology if you define "major damage" as "that which causes a car to get totaled". The whole concern is that, with these cast bodies, damage that would have been considered fixable or minor in the past now becomes an instant write off.
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  Well the article says major damage, not me.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    I know, but you are the one proposing that "major damage" is always written off.
- hwillis 3y ago
  Not really. Major damage would be damage to the subframes or wheel wells. It's a step right above getting entire axles ripped off. In most situations, for most cars, that will total the car.
alistairSH 3y ago
Hand raised! I was rear-ended in a new Jeep Wrangler. Damage included a bent frame, crushed rear bumper, bent rear hatch, bent roll cage, bent rear fender, shattered tail light, and a bent floor. It was nearly $20k in damage. It was repaired. [and I very quickly sold it because I had zero faith in the longevity of the repairs]
segmondy 3y ago
Hands down. I haven't personally experienced major damage, but I have bought and know folks to buy many of these written off cars only to have them repaired, certified by the state and put back on the roads.
hellotheretoday 3y ago
That doesn’t mean it’s not fixed by someone else after auction and salvage titling assuming it’s a car that’s somewhat desirable. So this is just a move that generates more waste?
- skullone 3y ago
  I mean, there's certainly rebuilt/salvaged cars, but more often than not people are scammed into buying those from shady AF places. Lesson is, don't waste your time or money on a unibody car with major damage. Scrap em. It's pointless. And people arguing we need to repair everything even from major damage when it makes zero economic or ecological sense and from those with no experience in the industry is just tiring.
crote 3y ago
It does lower the bar for what is considered "major damage". Having a car written off when you need to essentially take the entire thing apart is fairly reasonable, as is not wanting to repair the actual body part itself. When the car is made out of multiple different parts, a low-speed bump into a bollard or another car might result in the bumper needing to be replaced. Not the cheapest repair, but definitely quite doable and probably not worthy of a complete writeoff. When the entire car is made out of a single cast that very same bump results in the entire body needing to be replaced - and that's just not going to happen.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Those castings have a slot for crush cans that are not welded. If you have a low-speed bump it would crush your bumper and the crush cans behind it, it would not effect the casting. Literally nobody plans to remove crush cans from the vehicle, even if the whole body is cast. See: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla-mOdel-Y-underbody-2.jpg?quality=82&strip=all https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla...
gnicholas 3y ago
They sell the wreck and recover some money that way. If the new vehicles are essentially unsalable, this will cause premiums to rise.
deleted 3y ago
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jdmg94 3y ago
In my 3rd world home country most cars are bought on copart as "salvage", they get fixed up and usually get ran well above the 100k miles, this change will undoubtedly reduce the opportunity to give new life to salvage cars while making it more dangerous for the people who have no other choice. In the end this will create a lot more waste than we had before, its a shame because Toyota's are the most highly regarded cars where I am from
theGnuMe 3y ago
They are scrapped but then usually resold/exported to a cheaper country where they get fixed up and sold there. Maybe the unicast cars will get a lot of duct tape and Bondo.
bahmboo 3y ago
Had a car with major body damage. Repair estimate magically came in $100 less than salvage value. Insurance company went with repair of course.
bobsmooth 3y ago
I had to fight with my insurance to not have my 2005 model car written off after a fender bender. Thankfully I did because this was just before used car prices skyrocketed.
hokkos 3y ago
They don't get scrapped most of the time they are send overseas and repaired.
MarkusWandel 3y ago
My car got written off. 11 years old but in good condition, got hit on the rear left corner, sheet metal work was damaged. The tier 1 body shop that the insurance company sent me to quoted about 3/4 of the car's (undamaged) value in repair costs, including replacing most of the left side, the back window among other things, and even $600 worth of paint. Shopping for a replacement vehicle in the damaged one, various tier 2-3 dealer types said, oh, we could fix that up real nice for $3K, and one of them would have been happy to have the car at the insurance company's quoted value in damaged condition. So you can bet that that thing has by now been auctioned off, fixed up like that and sold, possibly with a "rebuilt" title, at a modest profit, and continues to be used. It was too good to scrap and the damage, while a PITA to fix, was not even remotely structural. So it's not that insurance companies consign all these written-off cars to the scrap heap. It's just that they don't want to deal with the repairs, and possible post-repair complaints. So just like bad debts, it's sent down the pipe to the people best matched to the job. A broken cast frame would short-circuit this process, causing the car to be scrapped for real and thus raising costs for everyone.
hakfoo 3y ago
My mum had a 2004 Sonata and it got T-boned with like 3,000km on the odometer. It was like a $17k car brand new, with and they put like $15k of body work (and then hiring a loaner car for a month while doing it) into it. Ran fine for another 150,000km before she traded it in, but I was baffled that the other driver's insurance didn't just say "we're writing it off, go get another one." OTOH, she was so pleased by their willingness to pay without hassle that she switched to that carrier.
alphabettsy 3y ago
Was in a front-end crash with minor frame damage in addition to airbags deploying. Vehicle was repaired, frame was able to be straightened on a rack.

SoftTalker 3y ago

Cast metals are rather brittle, normally? Good for complex shapes that may be further refined by machining, and in compression loads, but not in shear or tension. I would think they would shatter in a collision rather than bend like steel.

binarymax 3y ago
They must anneal them
- coryrc 3y ago
  Also when people hear "cast" they think "cast iron" or cheap appliance broken piece (mostly zinc). They're brittle because of material choice, not because of casting. (Though casting does influence the choice of materials)
  - silisili 3y ago
    Ruger, for example, makes everything from gun barrels to golf clubs from casting. They claim that due to material advances and such, casting can meet or exceed the strength of typical 'forged' steel.
- Uzza 3y ago
  Not necessarily. Tesla actually developed a proprietary alloy for their giga casting that removed the need for heat treatment, as the large castings tended to deform during it. On the plus side, also meant they could remove that process step. Article didn't give any details how Toyota would handle it though.
jgalt212 3y ago
Indeed, when I heard about the gigapress, I was like that is pretty neat, but when I read it was just casting, and not forging, I was like oh, it's not the *best* solution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forging
- 3y ago

rslogix 3y ago

I'm not sure how it is currently but when I was working in the gigafactory like a year ago they had such a hard time making the cast unibody they just gave up and switched back to making Model Y's the traditional way.

metadat 3y ago

It's interesting how the casting process produces a lighter, weaker, and impossible to repair or chassis. Why can't the blocks be modular and replaceable?

dantheman 3y ago
What incentive does anyone ever to have pass on savings efficiencies? The answer is competition / competing goods.
- jgalt212 3y ago
  True, and fortunately for the consumer and unlike other markets, the auto market is broadly competed.
skullone 3y ago
Because the welding/bolting/etc joining processes are intricate and time consuming, and also equally as hard to repair.
panick21_ 3y ago
A casting isn't weaker. You can make much more complex shapes with castings. You have much more variety in the thickness on the right points and interduce structural cross members. See: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla-mOdel-Y-underbody-2.jpg?quality=82&strip=all https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla... There is a reason Tesla cars do so well on safety while been pretty light comparatively. > Why can't the blocks be modular and replaceable? Everything is possible. But if you have many independent pieces that are all independently bonded that introduces a whole lot of complexity. Each connection is an additional place for failure. There is a reason every single car welds these pieces together. Its just not smart to try to use fasteners to connect these pieces. Its much harder to design, much harder (and more expensive) to produce, much error prone its likely also heavier.

ravenstine 3y ago

Like I've said many times, until regulation mitigates the enshittification of vehicles, you will have to pry my dumbcar from my cold dead hands. You want me to buy an electric vehicle? Don't pull shenanigans that disempower me.

jgalt212 3y ago
I really do miss physical keys. Replacement cost for an Audi key fob is over $700. And it extends to broader market brands. My mom's Mazda replacement fob cost $500. WTF is going on here?
- zdragnar 3y ago
  That's the cost for integration with the immobilizer. Car keys and fobs have chips that signal to the onboard computer, and may use a variety of techniques such as rolling codes to make the cars harder to steal. Gone are the days when you can easily hotwire a car by yanking and touching random wires together from the steering column. Kia and Hyundai are among the last brands to be selling cars without them, and that's the reason they've been targeted so heavily by car thieves. If you have one key and lost one, you can use the one you have to more easily reprogram the other. However, if you have lost all of your keys, a technician needs physical access to your car to reprogram everything together. Add on top of that the licensing cost for the software to do the programming (you don't want random people having easy access to reprogramming your locks after all) . Reprogramming keys is a fairly low-volume sale, especially if you need access to the car to do it (hard to scale volume remotely) so the per-key cost is much higher as a result.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    Surely the BOM on the fobs is at most tens of dollars. Hard to see a $700 cost justifiable as anything but greed against a captive audience.
- skullone 3y ago
  Would you rather the keys be $5 from Walmart and pair with the car without needing an OEM programmer?

ChumpGPT 3y ago

Does anyone think 99% of the car buyers market cares about cast bodies? Just look at all the folks who bought Tesla's, they don't have a problem buying a car that costs more to insure, waiting for months to get repaired, at the same time happy with poor finishes, paying extra for every possible detail, and never being able to fix them on their own. Most folks in the car market chase fashion and could care less about quality, dependability (Ford, GM, Chrysler still exist) and longevity. They just make their $600 a month payment and roll over the remainder every 3 years into a new vehicle.

oldpersonintx 3y ago
99% of the market cares about cheaper cars...and eventually, cast bodies will reduce costs substantially
- technofiend 3y ago
  No doubt it's projection on my part but I too assume the majority of car buyers are looking for cheap, reliable new cars and therefore that's where the greatest volume would be, right? Yet manufacturers are moving to higher profit cars. What surprises me is even Chevrolet is ending their low-cost EV which enjoys a hefty subsidy via purchaser tax break. Instead their next EV will move to a different platform to be consistent with their newer cars which is good but also at a higher price point, which is not. Particularly with that subsidy they could own that low-end EV market; they've had to extend the retirement date of the current car several times due to demand! But, they're not alone: from the linked article "Last month, 17% of new vehicles sold were under $30,000, compared to 44% five years ago." Which sucks for people who do just want a point-a to point-b vehicle and not a rolling status symbol. https://www.businessinsider.com/cheapest-cars-abandoned-by-automakers-in-search-of-profits-2023-3?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/cheapest-cars-abandoned-by-a... Not to be too cynical about it, but if wrecking a car means totalling a car, that's also another potential sale. At the very least making them less repairable smacks of consumer-hostile moves we've seen in the electronics industry and similarly without right to repair legislation, the manufacturers can do whatever they want. At least for me it's frustrating.

GravityLab 3y ago

> Toyota anticipates it'll generate 20 percent higher productivity than its competitors, and could halve body assembly time from 10 hours. This is a nice efficiency gain, but they don’t seem to be constrained by how quickly they can produce cars…as far as I can tell, demand in the market for their product is more based on the cost of the supply, not how quickly they are producing units. Or are they thinking that by producing units faster the supply will increase enough to reduce prices? Will they allow supply to increase such that individual units become cheaper? In any case it is bothersome that they would back a group that is against repairing your car…cars aren’t like phones where you can just buy an entire replacement if the screen cracks and if you’re already eyeballing the new model……

crote 3y ago
Manufacturing cars currently still involves humans. Halving body assembly time also means you only need to pay half the wages for the humans. That's going to significantly reduce their expenses.
- GravityLab 3y ago
  I wonder if this means their cars will become more affordable…
- panick21_ 3y ago
  This isn't really true. The body assembly is overwhelming automated in any large volume car. Its basically a long assembly line with welding robots and robots holding the pieces. There are few humans involved. Of course both the large casting machine and the fleet of welding robots need engineers and maintenance. Its really just cheaper, and the resulting piece is higher strength while being lighter. Its btw the official product name: https://www.idragroup.com/en/gigapress https://www.idragroup.com/en/gigapress
Tade0 3y ago
One large part is much cheaper to produce than the same section made out of several parts - chiefly because you don't have to spend time and resources on putting it all together. Also, you can actually use less material since you don't have to reinforce the points where you weld/bolt.

Tade0 3y ago

Where I'm from there's a tired old joke, the punchline of which is that the mechanic calls back that the car will be ready in three weeks. Only issue being - the customer came in with a piece of bent aluminium roofing sheet. My point is that mechanics deal with more challenging problems on a daily basis and it's actually easier to have one bent out of shape piece that costs X, instead of several pieces forming the same section of the car, each bent out of shape in a cascade of damage and costing e.g. 0.6X each. Personally I paid the most for replacing parts that contained electronics - like a rear bumper with parking sensors. A name-brand parking sensor can go for as much as a second-hand quarter panel.

Tanoc 3y ago

Environmentally friendly my ass. Any minor damage and the car will be toast because the insurance company will total it. Even if it gets back on the road it'll have a salvage title, something that's poison to a car and ensures that it ends up either crushed or parted out. These are already problems with unibody cars thanks to how quickly insurance adjusters will take any deformation of the core unibody, even just cosmetic damage like the C-pillar having a dent, and call the car a total loss. There are more than a few A-body Oldsmobile Cutlass Cieras and Buick Centuries from the late 1980s that I still see driven around where I live. The environmental impact they've had has been far less than any of these cast-body cars will be because an A-body is a cockroach that will never die no matter how many times you hit something with it. They were produced decades ago and have long since offset their initial production impact. Add in all the Chevrolet C-10s, Chevrolet S-10s, Ford Rangers, Suzuki Sidekicks/Geo Trackers, and XJ Jeep Cherokees I see daily and they still have less of an impact environmentally than these disposable cars will have because they can be repaired instead of requiring total replacement.

petee 3y ago
Eh, even now Toyotas have a low threshold for being totaled, the parts are just so expensive. My 2014 Tacoma was essentially sideswiped hard; repair was estimated at $12,000 but was deemed totalled, insu paid me $17,000. It is now rotting in a junk yard for the past 4 years (I check the old VIN time to time)
- skullone 3y ago
  Don't feel too bad about your truck in a junkyard. It has probably donated enough parts to keep a dozen other ones on the road with economical scrapped parts.
w0z_ 3y ago
My Model S was hit in the unibody and not totaled, not sure how you're making this up.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> Any minor damage and the car will be toast because the insurance company will total it. Another best part is our currently skyrocketing car insurance - even for people who don't carry collision. Even if you don't contribute to the problem, insurance companies force you to financially support everyone who does.

isykt 3y ago

If you want cars made in the US by people making a living wage, something has to give. The demographics of manufacturing workers is already hollowed out, and will only get progressively worse as the years roll on.

forrestthewoods 3y ago

I live in Seattle. If you drive a Tesla and get rear ended the wait time for repairs is 6 months. I know multiple friends dealing with this. It’s a major problem. So major that when we bought a new car Tesla was ruled out.

taylodl 3y ago

Minor accidents resulting in cars being totaled does what to insurance premiums? Makes them sky-high. There was an article earlier this week how some Tesla owners were facing extreme insurance premium increases and others had their insurance dropped altogether. All the savings you hear about with regards to EV’s are going to be more than offset by insurance premiums - which means these gigacast vehicles aren’t going to sell well.

panick21_ 3y ago
> Minor accidents resulting in cars being totaled That's not actually what's happening. > which means these gigacast vehicles aren’t going to sell well. The Model Y is one of the one of the most sold car in the world and uses more casting then any other vehicle in the world. But why bother with data when one can just make up stuff.
- taylodl 3y ago
  Maybe you didn't see this news? https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/sep/30/the-quotes-were-5000-or-more-electric-vehicle-owners-face-soaring-insurance-costs#:~:text=%E2%80%9CI%20am%20a%20member%20of,screengrab%20shared%20by%20one%20driver https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/sep/30/the-quotes-wer...).
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    That article has noting todo with castings. It literally doesn't even mention castings. If this owner had damanged his casting it couldn't be repaired for 5k. The article even talks about how this doesn't just apply to Tesla, so again, this has nothing to do with using castings. This is also a British articles based no British concern and insurance companies.
    - taylodl 3y ago
      Other articles are covering the irreparability of gigacast autos. Stainless steel is the icing on the cake for irreparability (technically it can be repaired, but it requires different tooling and skills - you're not going to be to take your Cyber Truck to a normal body repair shop). All that drives up insurance costs.

aniijbod 3y ago

If it turns out that in order to make EVs cheaper to build than combustion cars right now you have to switch to castings because batteries are expensive, then when batteries become much cheaper, will we switch back to the current non-casting-based 'strut and fastener' model? Also, because Tesla is so popular, is it possible that its attractions have far less to do with the environment and more to do with everything else about the car? These concerns about the environmental impact of increased write-offs and increased insurance premiums are perfectly understandable, but I wonder if they will stop even a single sale?

panick21_ 3y ago
No, casting is simply a better technology. Its better no matter what type of propulsion you use. Its just that other car companies, unlike Tesla, were not willing to make the massive investment it required to make truly huge castings. Smaller casting have been in use before on various cars, some Audi had a decently big one on the wheel well. For Tesla to do this they had to work with a company that made the largest casting and task them with creating a massively larger casting. Tesla material teams also developed its own aluminum alloy that wouldn't bend as much during cooling. This allowed Tesla to not have to dip the castings into a fluid to cool them. Castings had been used by car companies for a while, sometimes decent size ones around the wheel for example. But Tesla took the idea and put in the effort to take it way further. They started with doing only half the back, and then bond the two sides. When the company finished development on the larger generation of machines they pioneered doing the whole back piece all at once. See: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla-mOdel-Y-underbody-2.jpg?quality=82&strip=all https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla... > Also, because Tesla is so popular, is it possible that its attractions have far less to do with the environment and more to do with everything else about the car? This is clearly the case. People never by things 'just of the environment'. Tesla produces the arguable the best price to return for EVs. At least unless you want a much smaller shorter range car.

panick21_ 3y ago

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. See here: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla-mOdel-Y-underbody-2.jpg?quality=82&strip=all https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla... 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 less. The waste majority of cars, never do repairs on their welded together body structure, this is the extreme minority of cases. Seems to me it makes a whole lot more sense to optimize for the majority of cases, not the vast minority. For those that want to see the process in operations, this is a nice video: https://youtu.be/BwoiFC-HwPE?si=R9sRMEDkgDJqBMew&t=306 https://youtu.be/BwoiFC-HwPE?si=R9sRMEDkgDJqBMew&t=306

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tomxor 3y ago

> Car companies make their money from selling new cars, not keeping old ones on the road. I'm interested in how this could be realistically changed. I'm convinced most of the environmental and societal problems caused by economic activity is inevitable at scale, where an organisation's behaviour becomes dominated more by underlying economic rules than any principles it's originators may have had at a younger age or smaller scale. It also shouldn't necessarily be so specific as "must maximise vehicle life", it really depends, because it's not impossible that with the right manufacturing and recycling techniques shorter vehicle life could bring down the total environmental and societal cost. The question is how to make that economically interesting to the manufacturers, e.g what if each manufacturer was responsible, end-to-end, for the recycling of it's own vehicles... shorter vehicle life could mean more sales, but could also mean more recycling. If the process is optimised for that then it could be profitable and cheap for the consumer and good for the environment, but if not it will hurt their bottom line.

peteradio 3y ago
Part of the sale value of a car incorporates its resalabilty.

hefferbub 3y ago

I think something missed in this discussion is the fact that an EV is so much simpler than an ICE vehicle* that costs will inevitably come down. Many people believe that decent models will be considerably cheaper than today’s Tercels, Civics, Corollas, etc. in as little as 2-3 years. Today you can buy a brand new Tesla Model 3 for $39,000 and with the U.S. tax credits that drops to $31,500. If you are in states like NY with additional credits, $26,500. So it is already around the price levels of Accords, Camrys, etc. on the existing Tesla platform. Tesla’s goal in their next platform is to cut the price to manufacture in HALF, and there is good reason to believe they will achieve that. The aspirational goals Toyota is claiming in this article, if achieved, will help them get closer to Tesla’s current architecture, which will be a great step forward. As manufacturing becomes more efficient and prices drop, it will indeed make less and less sense to do major repairs, which are only getting more expensive. * EVs are simpler when they have a proper hardware/software integration and over-the-air updates. Continuing the current industry practice of stringing together 150 off-the-shelf ECUs is one reason why most companies are losing money on their EVs and will never keep up with those who understand the software-defined car. For a great deep dive on how Tesla has created their software-defined car architecture check out https://youtu.be/fUCgLCbX_18?si=X9-s_aNLyrunmGHi https://youtu.be/fUCgLCbX_18?si=X9-s_aNLyrunmGHi

RickJWagner 3y ago

I've become really skeptical of all the auto magazines that find ways to criticize Tesla in every article. The most easily imaginable conspiracy theory is that Tesla has pioneered techniques that let it manufacture electric vehicles with good range at a reasonable cost, catching other auto manufacturers flat-footed. By continually improving and lowering prices, Tesla makes it nearly impossible for others to keep up. So the traditional auto makers deploy FUD to try to buy time. But that's just a theory.

spikels 3y ago
Better conspiracy theory: auto magazines/websites make most of their revenue from advertising and while car makers spend around $10B/year on advertising Tesla spends nothing.