One day at the end of 2018 in Palo Alto, Musk sat at his desk at Tesla Engineering headquarters and played with a toy car model of Model S, which looked like a miniature version of a real car.
When Musk took it apart, he found that there was even a suspension system inside, but the whole bottom of the car was molded into a whole piece of metal.
At the team meeting that day, Musk took out the toy car and put it on the white conference table.
“Why can’t we do this?” he asked.
The plot of the above passage, which is quite dramatic and seems to come from a domestic online Shuang Wen, is actually contained in the Biography of Elon Musk, published last year, written by the famous American biographer Walter Isaacson.
The description of the biography inevitably involves beautification and exaggeration.
But one thing is certain, since Tesla officially announced in September 2020, the latest Model Y model will begin to use integrated die-casting to produce rear body floor assembly, and the use of die-casting technology in Tesla brand cars will be greatly promoted in the future.
After a brief period of confusion and chaos, the global auto industry began to follow quickly.
For a while, die-casting technology seems to be the main direction of automobile manufacturing technology in the future.
Europe, Japan, the United States and even local car companies have launched die-casting technology.
The landmark data of the large die casting machine is the clamping force, that is, the die casting machine exerts a locking force on the mold in order to overcome the opening force of the melt after the metal liquid is injected into the mold cavity.
Generally speaking, the larger the mold, the stronger the clamping force.
Since 2020, Edra, a subsidiary of Lijin Technology, developed a “Giga Press” with a clamping force of 6000 tons for Tesla, mainframe factories at home and abroad have competed to place orders for more powerful die-casting equipment.
The clamping force of the die casting machine has also crossed the nodes of 7000 tons, 8000 tons and 9000 tons all the way up to the 9100-ton “steel giant” used by Xiaomi cars to produce large chassis parts of SU7 models.
Even at the beginning of this year, Xiaopeng announced that its 12000-ton die-casting machine had been installed and started production.
However the trend of the industry led by Tesla suddenly changed at the beginning of May.
During the period of International Labour Day, when the title of “Tesla Even Gives Up On Next-GenGigacasting” (Tesla even gave up the next generation of one-piece casting) appeared on the pages of American media, many people must have felt a hoop.
Because on Tesla investors’ Day on March 1 last year, a more aggressive “unpacking process” (Unboxed Assembly Process) was just announced, announcing a further 50 per cent reduction in production costs and a 40 per cent reduction in factory space.
And its essence is the integrated die-casting process version 2.
0, that is, the production of larger-size integrated castings.
So what happened that caused the “way of the world” to change so quickly? The “arms race” of the die casting machine, which combines more than 70 parts into one, can reduce the total weight of the “rear floor” by 30%, and the manufacturing cost of the whole vehicle by 40%.
In September 2020, when Tesla officially announced that Model Y would use integrated die-casting technology to produce the rear floor assembly, this explained the advantages of this process.
As early as in 2019, when Tesla announced the latest Model Y model, Tesla kept revealing to his investors and even to the outside world through various bright and dark channels that he would “pioneer the use of integrated die-casting design” on this important model.
There is no doubt that higher production capacity and lower costs are the pursuit of the automobile industry and even the global manufacturing industry from the beginning to the end.
So in order to achieve this, Tesla even sacrificed the versatility of Model Y and Model 3.
Even if the former is based on the chassis of the latter, sister models are developed.
Even so the whole process is still arduous from the current point of view.
From the end of 2019 to the outside world for the first time (the actual trial production should be earlier than this), until the first half of 2021, the cycle of tackling key technical problems took more than a year, and finally basically solved the deployment of large-scale die-casting equipment, the whole process, as well as the qualified rate and production capacity.
Previously, it has been reported that in the early stage of trial production of die castings, the qualified rate was even less than 40%.
Had it not been for this process Tesla’s most competitive model Model Y could actually be delivered within 2019 instead of procrastinating for a year after the official announcement.
As for capacity climbing, there is no need to delay until early 2022.
At that time, after being blessed by China’s local pure electric car industry chain, Tesla had the world’s top-class strength on the pure electric car track, which was far ahead of all his competitors.
So in the end, I was able to finish the whole process without danger.
The success of Model Y also makes all enterprises interested in automobile manufacturing seem to see the dawn of new technology.
The “competition” of die-casting equipment mentioned above also began at the end of 2022.
According to professional estimates, in order to realize the integrated die casting of the whole body bottom of the compact vehicle, the clamping force of the die casting machine needs at least 16000 tons, and the 12000 ton equipment used by Xiaopeng at the beginning of this year is particularly sufficient.
Of course, this does not seem to be a big deal in front of today’s Chinese equipment manufacturing industry.
after all, it was reported in December last year that Naha Automobile signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Lijin Group.
plans to jointly develop die-casting equipment with a lock grinding force of more than 20000 tons.
Once the equipment is delivered, it can theoretically process chassis components of medium-sized cars at one time.
What’s the price? In fact, the integrated die-casting technology seems to greatly save the production cost of automobile enterprises, but its initial investment is very high.
In addition to the corresponding development costs and the huge investment in the purchase of expensive large-scale die-casting machines, enterprises also have to bear the cost of developing and purchasing die-casting moulds and matching corresponding melting furnaces.
Die casting itself is only the beginning of the whole process.
After the billet is removed from the die-casting equipment, special cooling equipment, picking and transfer devices, corresponding edge trimming machinery and even special spraying process are needed for the subsequent process.
In fact this is the development of a whole set of new processes and the corresponding production line.
Even so, integrated die casting can not be compared with the traditional process in many respects.
Even Tess.
La has always continued the traditional style of “American rough car”, and its castings often make people feel indescribable.
Tesla officially showed off a set of rear body soleplate components produced by Model Y by die casting and compared with similar parts of Model 3 produced by welding process.
After reading it, it can only be said that it is a profound understanding of what is meant by “there is no harm without comparison”.
First of all, the precision of castings can not be compared with that of stamping parts.
The error of the former is often up to the millimeter level, while the modern automobile stamping process can control the error in the range of 10 wires.
In addition, there are usually bubbles in the casting process, and once the bubbles are concentrated in a certain area, it is bound to lead to the fragile zone of the casting.
In order to effectively detect this defect, the factory can only sacrifice X-rays for flaw detection.
But this means building a special testing room in the workshop, which is very troublesome and troublesome.
In addition, in order to increase the strength of the castings, heat treatment is usually carried out after the casting is completed.
But in this way, hot expansion and cold shrinkage is also inevitable, which is bound to make the problem of poor precision of castings more serious.
For this reason, Tesla specially developed a special aluminum alloy without heat treatment, which can achieve a certain strength without heat treatment and casting.
But although this can improve the rate of good products, but after all, it is only a “certain intensity”.
So at this point, you should understand what Tesla’s engineers have been doing for more than a year.
Whether the adoption of die-casting technology is a problem for Musk or not, but in order to realize this “dream”, the team of engineers is indeed troubled enough, and in many cases forced to make a lot of technical compromises.
For example, in the case of heat-free treatment above, in order to ensure that the strength of the castings is sufficiently redundant, the compromise is to add more materials, resulting in a considerable part of the cake originally drawn on the weight loss being returned.
Then is it true that die castings must not be done well? In fact, it may not be.
In July last year, for example, when I attended the 70th anniversary of the founding of FAW Group, I saw its display of the body floor assembly machined by a 8000-ton die-casting machine.
It can almost achieve the level of similar components in welding processing.
In addition Zhao Chunlin Vice President of Polar Krypton complained about the quality of Tesla castings on his personal social media account.
The complaint is very ruthless, but after showing the comparison picture, it is obviously just telling the truth.
Of course no matter FAW Group or extreme Krypton brand for the time being there is no car whose monthly output can be comparable to Tesla’s Model Y.
Taking into account the characteristics of die-casting technology, Tesla should be through a large number of production practice, to meet the basic technical indicators at the same time, to find a relatively reasonable and economical quality control standard point.
It has defects, but it can be used normally and will not affect the safety.
So among the owners of Tesla, there is also a self-mockery like “the car I bought has flaws, so it is the authentic Tesla.
” Musk announced Tesla’s decision to cut 10 per cent of jobs worldwide in April as accumulated orders were depleted and overall earnings expectations worsened.
Some senior executives have also been “persuaded to quit” and even directly fired, including those who have been with them for a decade.
And CaresoftGlobal, a US auto data and consulting firm, believes that Tesla is facing short-term financial pressure.
The temporary suspension of the expansion of the application of integrated die-casting process will avoid investing too much money which is difficult to recover in a short period of time.
Because in order to realize the casting of the chassis of the whole vehicle, Tesla needs to be equipped with a super die-casting machine of at least 20000 tons.
You can imagine how much money it will take to buy more such equipment.
Moreover, many technical problems faced in integral die casting have not been solved at present.
More importantly, consumers have gradually recovered from the craze of the past few years, and even gradually realized that integrated die-casting technology will not provide you with better cars, its only value is to reduce the production costs of car companies.
However, the key point is that under the interweaving of many factors, it is very difficult for Tesla to reduce the car price by a large margin again.
In addition, the problem of vehicle aging is also becoming a hidden worry for Tesla.
After all, the Model 3 is already an old car that went on sale eight years ago, and even the Model Y has been released for more than five years, while only the former made a mid-term change last year, mainly by changing the headlights.
It is understandable that consumers are getting tired of it.
Tesla’s first curve has passed its peak since the Shanghai Lingang Super Factory was put into operation in 2019.
So, can the F-SD system (Full-Self Driving), the most important achievement of Musk’s personal visit to China at the end of last month, draw a second curve for the global leader in new energy vehicles? We can wait and see! , return to the first electric network home page >.
