Many will say that the idea of making car frames using large castings is revolutionizing the way that cars are being built. Tesla started it. Toyota has now said it is a great idea and they plan to do it. Some Chinese manufacturers are moving to gigacastings.
There are an assortment of reasons it makes sense. They include:
- The parts count is substantially reduced
- It is more precise because you no longer depend on the alignment of multiple welds and fasteners
- Production speed is increased along with decreased demand for employees and robots
Part of the FUD about electric vehicles comes from the reduced labor needed to build them compared to ICE vehicles. Gigacastings just adds to this reduced labor issue. It sounds like the new source of FUD is starting in France and spreading to the EU. Check out the coverage of this by The Electric Viking and see what I mean.
