How do you then repair such vehicles? Repairing very large diecast units will be an expensive nightmare.

So that company from Italy was the only one in the world working in secret to reproduce something already done for more than 70 years? 🙂

<p style=”text-align: left;”>I thought that such a large press could be used for both forging and die casting. Just by replacing the die.</p>

Given the repair nightmare (as already mentioned), what will the insurers think, I wonder? Another example of ‘Because we can’ not being a rational justification?

So, if all the folk who would have been making cars, and all the government employees, and all the others who the current Trump/Musk administration have put out of work can no longer afford a tesla, who’s going to be able to afford one? Oh that’s right,  they are going to give them all some of the trillions of dollars that tariffs are flooding into the USA.

Whatever the manufacturing pros and cons, this is not going to repopulate the Detroit car factories with the thousands of grateful happy workers that Trump is triumphantly predicting!

Colin

Tesla California plant. Not many jobs for the unemployed here. A few robot techs is all.
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MANY years ago a Japanese car manufacturer has a factory where gearbox assembly was automated.  A human being loaded in the components, and another unloaded complete gearboxes at the other end.

Many years ago, Bosch EPVE injection pumps were assembled and set with similar minimal human intervention.

So the days of full employment in any car plant, and many others also, seem to be long gone.

The benefit of full automation and robotics, is complete consistency of the product.  The disadvantage is that if anything is wrong, (poor programming / malfunction, etc) the end product will be wrong but probably consistently so.  In that way, you know either how to fix it, or to scrap the lot!

A casting or forging will produce a near near shape component requiring the minimum of extra work, for the finished item, again saving labour and cost.

The labour cost portion of the cost of the item will have been overtaken by material cost and the overheads of capital to set up and program the assembly line

Fifty years ago, an engine test took eight hours, now the actual test bed time is a few minutes, but labour is needed for rigging, before and after, the actual test. But the entire process occupies far less time, and therefor cost.

Howard

50,000 tons is the clamping force used to hold the two halves of the mould (steel die) together as the molten aluminium is forced into it by effectively a large piston being pushed down a cylinder full of the molten metal,  something like a syringe, hence injection moulding.

I guess it’s  like also a hydraulic brake, small pressure on a small piston is multiplied over a larger area at the ‘slave’ end. The Tesla die makes 5 rear subsections at once, so it’s a big area where the molten aluminium is pressing against the die.

50,000 tons would presumably be the total force? Standard diecast presses are more like 10,000, doing one subsection at a time. But there is so much hype around this stuff, it’s a good question. Pressure of the molten metal being forced in can be as low as 5psi or up to 10 or 20,000psi on a high pressure machine. Multiplied by the square inches of five large subsection components, that could give you the 50,000 ton clamping force required.