The Accountant
Active Member
Agree. BMW's CEO states he is not interested in "mega castings" (he won't use the word Giga). He gives a host of reasons but I imagine that the economics don't work (as you point out) because the scale is not there on a single model at a single plant.Cory is making a point I have made before.
The large "gigapress" castings make old-style fabrications of stamped & welded assemblies uneconomic (as well as technically unattractive) provided that the auto-plants using them are making approximately 250-500,000/year of one vehicle.
If you look at a table of the output of US auto plants very few are more than 250k/year. (I've previously posted this table but cannot find it right now). However if you then look up those borderline plants at ~250k/yr it is noticeable that many of them make more than one vehicle and further inspection shows they are often on dissimilar product platforms. It is unattractive to keep switching tooling in a casting machine like this for all sorts of reasons, some technical, some economic. So most of the ~250k/yr factories could not easily adopt gigapress-style castings.
In fact very few auto-mfg-lines in US or worldwide are at the requisite volume to adopt this technology. Tesla's Fremont factory is (I think) now the #1 in USA and (from memory) there are only a couple of others of similar scale in USA. The distribution is similar worldwide. There are very few car plants in the world that seem to break the 500k/yr barrier, and even fewer do so of just one product or platform.
That is one reason why legacy-auto-mfg never found this sort of technology attractive. But it is of course attractive to Tesla who regard a 500k/yr factory as their current minimum building block (imho). I think one can go further and talk about vehicle platform being the relevant scale-setting item, but I am unsure to what extent the various 3 castings and the Y castings can be formed out of one common tool.
If legacy auto do not make the switch to adopt this (and other, e.g. cell manufacturing which is also a volume game) technologies, and suitably focus their manufacturing onto fewer sites, and reduce product (model) proliferation, they will go bust in this new manufacturing paradigm. Yet if legacy auto do go down this pathway the political wails regarding the lost jobs will destroy any minimal goodwill they still have left.
This also has huge strategic implications for which countries will be able to retain vehicle manufacturing. And that in turn has still more implications for other related clusters, skillsets, and national economies, and minimum strategic asset sets.
(Once a site as-a-whole is at-scale, then it becomes easier to run some sub-scale casting production. That is what we see at Fremont with the S and X now using castings, but first the 3 and the Y are needed to get the Fremont site to a scale where it is economically viable to run those castings in the mix.)
Article here: BMW CEO won't use mega casting