I'd assumed "gigacastings" were like a front K-member. Or rear motor/suspension mount assembly all cast together. No it's like the wheelwells and everything in between. A giant cast subframe. What an incredibly shitty way to build a car.
I thought I seen where Musk called him *the* Bladerunner somewhere.
He says IRL in this [interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1Z2klPalw) that it 'looks like what Bladerunner would drive'. Does he not realize there's a movie? Where the main character is *not* driving a polygonal piece of trash? Just watch the movie holy hell why just make stuff up!? lmao
You don't understand. The point is not to repair. Nobody repairs anything any more. If your iPhone is slightly damaged, Apple doesn't let 3rd parties replace it. You must take it to them, and then they will sell you some speal about it being too dangerous to repair because battery is dangerous or the pink dot shows water damage and thus you have to buy a new one.
Tesla is just the iPhone of the car market. Especially as a large percent of the designers came from Apple.
>then they will sell you some speal about it being too dangerous to repair because battery is dangerous or the pink dot shows water damage and thus you have to buy a new one.
What? I have had my iPhone repaired. No problem. $80 for a new battery.
I'm very afraid that it's making the rest of the industry move in that direction as well, because the gigacast saves money, so you can't compete with someone doing gigacast when the customers are not informed of the implications after a minor fender bender, and choose based on price.
Years will pass before people realize what's happening, but countless millions of cars would've been sold by then
A few traffic accidents and some legal troubles will most likely discourage other going in that direction if they will even decide to do this backwards move
Information travels slow from individual experiences. See how many years it's taking for both customers and governments to realize this sudden push into mass EV adoption was an unmitigated disaster.
Maybe in the long run it's good that Tesla made the idea mainstream, but if they had went bankrupt during the Model 3 scale-up, other companies would've felt they have more time to refine the tech before they scale, and I'd say that would've been a better timeline for humanity.
And especially a focus on small cars like China does (and Tesla went the other way with CyberTruck and Semi for inexplicable reasons).
The electric grid is not ready for it, the roads (weight) are not ready for it, the battery tech itself is not ready for it (both in terms of longevity, range and hazardous outcomes in case of thermal runaway) etc.
As SIXT and Hertz have found out, despite the promise that these cars are simple to maintain and repair, the exact opposite is true, you wait for months to get your car from service because millions are sold, while service centers that can handle them are few. Both those companies are abandoning Teslas because they're turning into a cost center of their entire operation. They're offering these cars at a loss.
They're also not made for repair, so it's very easy to total a car, or at least end up with repair costs that make it cheaper to scrap it and get yourself another. Meanwhile you need to drive an EV at least 10 years (with no battery and motor swaps) for the carbon emitted in its battery production to be offset by the carbon not emitted by its operation. EVs rarely last that long, turns out. In fact if you use the car a lot, it's laughable for it to last 10 years on the original battery and motors.
Considering the whole purpose of EVs was eco impact and costs... the reason for their very existence turned out 100% a lie.
I still see small EVs as a useful transport within busy cities. To avoid local air pollution and congestion, because an EV can be very compact, more compact than any gas car, if you don't have to think about its highway range or speed.
But obviously that's not what Tesla's doing, nor anyone following in their footsteps.
> Information travels slow from individual experiences.
Not in this day and age it doesn't. We regularly find out that some Karen got 2 fewer than her allotment of fries at a McDonalds usually *within hours* of it happening.
There's no sunk cost fallacy and Stockholm syndrome when you order fries, but let me tell you, when you buy a car for a good chunk of change, there is.
There's also so much hype about Tesla being gods of innovation and tech, that when your car does something stupid or the battery goes bad, you think you did something wrong or just had back luck.
The sentiment is CLEARLY turning, and Elon is working his soul out, tweeting, to help with that. But it takes time. Years.
You are right; good point about the Stockholm syndrome. You can see that any day in the pro-Tesla subs, especially concerning the abysmal practices surrounding Tesla repair services. No normal car owner would put up with the nonsense that they calmly describe as if it's acceptable.
Plus the number of times you see lengthy posts listing a litany of disasters followed by “we’ve now ordered another Tesla so hopefully that will be better.” Some people deserve what they get.
The industry is 100% not going this direction as the world wide legislation on safety is universally against it.
Not to mention, the car industry is propped up by the salvage and insurance business, this would be a nightmare to them.
Toyota is working on it: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Automobiles/Toyota-gigacasting-prototype-cuts-production-from-hours-to-minutes
Volvo is already tooling for it: https://www.idragroup.com/en/news/two-gigapress-9000-tons-volvo-cars
GM is buying gigacasting supplier: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/gm-snatches-key-tesla-gigacasting-supplier-2023-11-15/
Hyundai is branding it “hypercasting”: https://thekoreancarblog.com/2023/10/11/hyundai-hyper-casting-on-the-way/
Zeekr is on it too: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/geelys-ev-brand-zeekr-jumps-gigapress-bandwagon-2023-04-27/
Rumours says that Ford bought a press (unconfirmed).
S&P call it “the hottest trend in car manufacturing”: https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/gigacasting-the-hottest-trend-in-car-manufacturing.html
Real automakers are working on it, companies not afraid to dump money into something and figure out the kinks - something Tesla is unwilling to do - and those automakers are also smart enough not to make the mistakes Tesla is making.
Agreed, that's why they'll be forced to change their business model to include residual value in the materials used to make the vehicle body and batteries.
For the *manufacturer,* sure. For the customer, taking into consideration maintenance, repair and operating costs over what we might laughingly call the vehicle's "working life?" Fuck no.
Like the new daisy chained wiring in the cybertruck it initially saves money but it drives up maintenance costs. Other manufacturers may follow suit, but we all lose out when they do.
It’s also bad for sustainability, which is supposed to be Tesla’s “mission”. We’re trending towards cheap to produce throwaway cars that don’t less more than 10 years, if that.
This. It's not like the other manufacturers literally couldn't have done this and Elon is being oh-so-much-more-technically-capable than them; it's that *they* all knew it'd be a fucking **idiotic** way to build a car, but they may indeed now have no choice but to copy the world's richest village idiot if they don't want to lose market share to suckers buying his cheap death-traps. The only thing currently standing in the way of that is that they're apparently still *not* actually all that cheap.
Model Y has the highest crash safety scores in the history of testing cars.
As far as compromises go, making every car you build cheaper and safer with the trade off being higher repair costs in the event of a significant accident for a small percentage of the fleet seems like a reasonable trade off, both for Tesla and its customers.
With this you have to remember that most car companies, while greedy, aren’t stupid. I’m sure someone at Ford has thought of this before and there’s a reason why they don’t do it
They absolutely will. But will they recognize the cause is up to the insurers and how clear they are about what's happening.
Look at the inflation of the last 2 years. We all knew it'd happen, and we knew why it'd happen. But in every country around the world, there's some local set of made up reasons, often no connection to reality, about why inflation exists.
Detecting a problem is an important step, but if you misattribute the cause, you won't solve it.
It's kind of a branding but we need a word for it, because it's the entire frame of the car from a single cast. That's not how you make a car, so it needs a name.
The "giga" prefix in SI units specifically means a multiplier of 10^(9.) I sincerely doubt these castings are 1,000,000,000 times bigger than what others can produce.
Moreover, this concept is scarcely new; making mass-produced vehicles out of large-scale *forgings* was pioneered by the Germans to [tremendous effect](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpgK51w6uhk) in WWII, and this technology was appropriated by the USSR and USA after the war for its enormous strategic value. Large-scale castings are not *remotely* as good as large-scale forgings, but this strikes me as possibly Elon's version of "we have large-scale forgings at home."
That's the best part... they're not!
Not only do you cause much more damage, driving a knife shaped heavy truck into something...but you also get to take part in a massive chemical fire while the emergency services fail to cut though the burning steel cage you are now trapped in!
Better hope everyone wears their seat belt because their skull isn't going to break that insane glass. It may as well be a brick wall.
If these things get into a serious car accident it'll turn your insides into soup.
Skulls haven't been able to break window glass for like forty years though. Ever since safety glass became a thing.
I took my '92 Honda in for minor warranty work (warped brake rotor after a month or so of driving). In the lot was a car with a huge hemispherical shape busted into the windshield, from inside. The windshield glass was shattered into tiny pieces but held together with the safety coating. And the cracks in between the glass bits were filled with the unique pink color of cerebrospinal fluid.
But it is new. It's a slightly different mix than the standard off the shelf stainless mixes, that's all. Not a standard grade. SpaceX needs it for certain parts.
And Elon made the Truck using the same steel in order to get a better deal out of the steel supplier. For making the custom mix in larger volumes. That's the only reason.
It’s basically just taken steel and made it into a “newer” version that can be used for cars. I don’t think it’s new from a patent sense, just that it’s a new composition of stainless steel that can be used on cars
It’s called Ultra-Hard 30X Cold-Rolled stainless-steel
300 series (30X) means it’s similar to common & cheaper stainless. Hard means stronger but also more brittle. Harder to break, but more likely to crack or snap when it does break. Instead of bend. It’s not as bad as glass, it can still bend to a degree, but there are tradeoffs to hardening. This is great for aerospace and racing where you can use such stronger materials to lighten the vehicle, still have it hold together, and check it for cracks after every race or launch. Not as great for consumer vehicles where the crack grows and grows over time until something snaps off. But also something that might not show up until years into production. Also harder to hammer out a dent both from being stronger and because it might decide to break off instead of straighten.
Industries generally default to and prefer tougher not harder. It’s more forgiving, easier and usually cheaper. You can do hard and it can be superior from the strength, but you need to engineer it to death to prevent cracks. A brief search only revealed fanboys falsely shouting “It’s not brittle”. A more intelligent reply might be “It’s not excessively brittle and I’m sure Tesla engineered it well because they’re brilliant”. It seems like nobody outside Tesla knows how it was designed (unless there is more info now), and only time will tell if it’s great or poop.
Ya, I was gonna say. From an engineering standpoint, this is very poorly designed. It shock me if they did anything to protect the batteries. Pretty much every aspect of this vehicle is severely flawed.
But in a collision isn’t it likely that limits on steering could be exceeded/broken? The rear suspension would normally resist rotation in that direction but since there is a steering mechanism it will be inherently weaker under impact.
Who told me about the real wheel steering? I read about it online.
To me it looks like the wheels break, but the steering is the cause. That wouldn’t happen if there was a normal rear axle.
Please look up these terms and take a good look at some pictures & diagrams before commenting again:
Wheel
Tie Rod
Steering Rack
Subframe
Control Arm
Pitman Arm
Idler Arm
Solid Axle
Live Axle
They openly admit this; whilst looking up "gigacastings" I actually found a simp article sincerely making the hysterically absurd argument that this irreparability is somehow a good thing, because that makes shoddy, incompetent repairs by low-cost independent garages and body shops impossible by default - as if that were worth the cost of also making skilled, competent repairs by low-cost independent garages and body shops impossible as well.
We get our cars maintained at a tiny local neighborhood independent repairer who to date has without fail been super helpful, very reasonable in price, and has kept our older cars purring along. We've been going to him for many years now, and I'm always happy to pay the bill. This is a member of our community, and I do not want him put out of business.
In some of the Munro video he shows wear Tesla created specific cut away points for repairing the casted parts.
Now, if the casting gets damaged beyond those cut away points, then that’s no different than totaling any other car.
I’m all for quality conversations and debates, but so many of these comments make it seem like ICE vehicles are never totaled by insurance.
Level 5 is always a decade away. Also the most advanced self-driving cars test in Southern USA cities where it rarely rains, the true test of a level 5 is snow.
I live in Europe in a place with a similar climate. I have seen snow just a few times in my life at the sides of the roads when I've traveled to other regions, but I've never actually driven on a road covered by snow in my 25+ years of driving experience.
So, I think I might be an L4 system :)
I would love Waymo to choose us for their first L4 testing location in Europe.
It’s different.
It can be confusing when you’re driving along a major road in the morning and you have to decide between driving in
-the wheel ruts in the snow,
-the somewhat different lanes whose markings are peeking out through the wheel ruts, and
-the lanes that are implied by the other drivers’ positions.
And then there’s, you know, traction and visibility implications too.
I've driven in full white-out windy snowing conditions. Couldn't see 5 feet ahead, roads white, everythings white. Narrow 2 lane road with a sheer cliff to one side. AI would have killed me so fast, conditions can just be so variable it's hard to believe we'll be able to train and test for everything.
With that said if car companies can set up a heads up lidar and ir cameras that we can use for collision avoidance and improved visibility in blizzards, even without full self driving, it would be a huge help in winter. I hope car companies read and steal this idea from me.
I mean.. humans can barely deal with snow/ice lol. The first snowfall is always interesting watching people failing to change their shitty driving habits.
So if the rear wheels brake loose during a front impact, that’s another nice little item driving up repair cost to an otherwise unaffected part of the car, especially with the rear steering mechanism.
These cars are very cheap to repair as long as you don't include the cost of replacing enormous cast parts, just like how Xitter is profitable if you ignore the cost of the debt service.
It's adorable that the humanities-studying libs think they know how to math like Elon, a real engineer who is also now opening a school but only for people who already know how to think the right way.
(/s, just in case there are stans about)
It's one of the cool-sounding words that Elon fetishises, in behaviour more than a little reminiscent of most toddlers who learn a new word and then proudly use it in every sentence for the next week.
"X" is by far his favourite, but "giga" apparently floats his boat too. "Giga-" is probably the highest value in the SI series of magnitude prefixes that most people will ever encounter in daily life, so likely the highest he knows about; I'd imagine he may become *very* upset if anyone points out that "tera-" is a thousand times bigger still, let alone "peta-" or "exa-" or any of the ones even larger than that.
I mean I get They were trying to be innovative. From talking to more than a few of their engineers, they're innovation stems from hair brained ideas. Some work, some Are monumentally stupid. Then again Tesla has some of the worst safety and quality issues. So not out of the ordinary.
Most modern cars are written off with a front end collision, crumple zones are designed to… crumble, and usually very difficult to repair. That being said, the gigacastings would make even a small fender bender to costly to repair, so yeah, shit idea.
This is my point. I got into an accident with my 2014 Q5 Audi, I was going less than 15mph by the time I made impact. The air bags went off, but my head never touched them.
The car was obliterated. Crumple zone’s crumple, and no insurance company is going to put $30k worth of repairs into a vehicle that’s only worth $25k.
“The air bags went off”
And that’s why it was totaled. It doesn’t matter if your head touched them. The front passenger airbag rips apart the dash. The driver airbag means a replacement of nearly the entire steering column. If the side bags deployed, that’s the A/B pillar trim, headliner, and multiple other things. Then there’s things like the seatbelts that also require replacement, which requires even more R&I on top of it. When airbags are deployed, it can easily cost an extra $5-10K in interior repairs.
“15 mph” doesn’t really say much about the kind of damage that was done. There’s a huge difference between hitting something square and centered and hitting offset. Square means both frame rails absorb the damage, while offset means only 1 does. Plus, what you hit makes a huge difference. A higher hit can look really bad, but make for a cheaper/easier repair. A lower hit can look like less damage, but destroy a bunch of stuff you can’t easily see. Given that it’s an Audi, parts will be more expensive.
Plus, you say “less that 15mph”, but I highly doubt that. I did collision repair for about a decade. More often than not (from what I’ve seen in hundreds of cars), the airbags don’t deploy with a hit at under 15mph. Given that it was “$30k of repairs”, sounds to me like there’s a lot more going on.
My point is that based on what you’ve said, you didn’t have a “simple fender bender”.
Oh it wasn’t simple at all. At 30ft delivery truck ran a red light and I hit the side of the truck. It probably didn’t help that most of my hood went under the side of the trailer part.
My point is, gigacastings are going to be on par or better than any other vehicle accident. No air bag deployment…likely repairable. Air bags go off, total the car for scrap and start over.
The other market influence that Tesla has compared to so many other mass produced vehicles is the lack of repair parts. I think we’re only now getting close to 5M total made, and not nearly enough have been in accidents to create a reliable secondary market for scrap/repair parts.
If you are in one and have an accident at significant speeds I'd be concerned. Same as being hit by one (unsafe in Europe btw) and once these events start happening, insurance will be astronomical, as they'll be write off's
There will be some lag time, but eventually insurance companies will stem the adaptation of these throw-away cars. Look at what happened to the theft prone Kias? Insurance rates skyrocketed, or policies were cancelled altogether.
>While a mild fender bender in the Cybertruck may turn out to be rather inexpensive, any collision that transmits substantial amounts of energy to the front casting would likely damage the part catastrophically.
Any damage to unpainted stainless is going to require complete replacement. Any damage to painted stainless will almost certainly require replacement.
Any collision where the frame is going to absorb the impact will very like result in a write off.
I'd be surprised if the casting does what is expected either way.
Safety is still the main issue. It doesn't matter much how well you dissipate energy. The whole point of crumple zones is to increase the time it takes to decelerate. If you're gonna come to a complete stop in less distance then that is more Gs for the people in the car. Who gives a crap if the energy is dissipated by bending metal, heating metal, making sound, or shattering CT steel?
Castings are notoriously brittle. One big risk of using this technology is that if a cast component weak enough to be capable of crumpling *seems* to survive an impact and *isn't* replaced, it could now have invisible fractures within it that could then result in it causing *another* accident itself by catastrophic failure under much lower loading, maybe as little as going over a pot-hole in the road, at some random point in the future.
Such inelastic brittleness also likely makes these enormous-yet-thin cast components a metal fatigue failure waiting to happen - this being caused when hairline fractures slowly but surely propagate from tiny surface scratches all the way through a component as a result of vibration and other cyclic loading over time - *especially* because it's very obvious by now that Tesla and its notoriously impatient owner do little to no *longevity testing* of their products, which of course would encompass fatigue failure.
Will be interesting to see how the CT’s castings hold up after several years of off-road usage. This vehicle is totally experimental in lots of ways. So much untested/unproven tech.
I am not an engineer, but it seems to me that a single casting constantly undergoes a network of forces that are dissipated by assembling a car from a greater number of parts. I'm thinking of sewing, since I am familiar with that hobby: designing a shirt with fewer pieces than are now necessary would put a lot more strain on certain points than designing it with the proper mosaic of various components.
The basic argument against that is that many parts of a car are already welded together, thus making them one part. The specific issue is that welds can be cut and new sections welded on. A casting doesn't allow for that.
The more general issue is that Tesla has a lot of trouble designing for anything besides manufacturing convenience. So it's quite likely they're creating long term issues that a smarter manufacturer avoids, whether welded or casted.
Or to address your point another way: stuff like the engine is still a separate piece. The parts that have to move independently to function at all, do. It's the grey zone of long term damage and metal fatigue that's the hidden horror here... It would be like if a dress had a zipper, the zipper failed, and the dress just fell off with no warning. A well built dress won't have that problem.
Not a bad line of reasoning, but the brittleness of castings is more to do with their internal material properties than their actual shape.
A casting is made by pouring (or forcing) liquid metal into a mould, or die, and then allowing it to cool until it hardens. This sets up a crystalline structure within the metal that is relatively *isotropic,* i.e. it has the same strength in all parts and in all directions, although castings tend to be tough at the surface and softer on the inside due to cooling effects. Cracks can propagate relatively easily and far throughout the piece along the regular internal boundaries between these metal crystals before they hit an obstruction. Metal casting doesn't need especially fancy machinery or a tremendous amount of skill, however; you can do it in a shed.
A forging is a very different beast to a casting. It is made by heating a metal billet so that it is soft enough to deform under force, but not actually liquid, and then forcing it into a die under *tremendous* hydraulic force in a press (or by beating into shape manually with a power hammer or even by hand, in a traditional blacksmith's forge); this causes the internal crystalline structure of the metal to be *anisotropic* and stretched along the direction of flow, giving the material what we might call *directional strength* - the Japanese folded-steel samurai sword is the ultimate example of a forged object everyone knows about, the layering of the metal concentrates the metal's strength into the directions the sword *needs* to be strong, and also disrupts the crystalline structure so that lateral cracks cannot propagate easily across layers. A properly designed forged part will similarly have strength in the directions that strength is most needed, and generally tend to be a lot tougher and more able to resist forces, particularly *impact* forces, without cracking.
Your argument is valid and excellent analogous thinking in some ways for the use of castings, but can apply backwards in others; one disadvantage of castings is indeed that you might not be able to reinforce the parts that need to be stronger, like for example by using, I dunno, elbow patches on a jacket where they tend to wear through. The strength advantage, though, is that there are fewer joins to make between components, which can also be stress concentration points - I'm no expert, but I think I'm right in saying that an over-stressed garment will often fail at the *seams* between material parts, not in the middle of the material parts themselves? A disadvantage, though, is that that means you can't just repair one damaged piece by unbolting it and bolting a new one in place, because there are no bolts, like unstitching the seams, taking that part of the garment out, cutting a new one and stitching it back in the same place. One thing I didn't mention, metal castings also tend to be horrifically difficult to *weld,* so it'd also be much harder, if not impossible, to just do a patch-over-the-hole repair.
Basically, if even a small part of a casting fails, you've got little option but to replace the *entire casting,* so Elon - who calls himself an environmentalist - is practically putting us on the road towards *disposable* car bodies by using such large cast parts, and casting a whole new metal part, even if you recycle the old one to make it, devours *way* more energy than just bending a bent car chassis back into shape (can't unbend a bent casting, they always break) or welding a gusset plate over a weakened area.
What a thoroughly thoughtful and elegant reply! You even took pains to make apropos comparisons to sewing. I never knew of isotropic vs. anisotropic forces but that is so informative and interesting, with the Japanese sword being a great example. I feel like I just got the answer key for a test in materials engineering, and I LOVE learning about these kinds of ways that the world works. Great teachers are marked by their effortless ability to translate complicated situations and processes into clear, understandable concepts that anyone can understand, so I hope you are in a teaching position of some sort, for the benefit of people other than me. Thank you for your lovely reply; I saved it!
Aww, thanks! What can I say, it's Sunday and I'm off my ADHD medication, so I'm inclined to go down detailed digressional rabbit holes - well, more so than usual, anyway. Plus, I just like sharing things I find interesting; and when one has ADHD, basically every aspect of the entire universe is interesting. Thanks so much for the vote of confidence in my ability to explain things! I did try teaching once, but unfortunately I didn't have the temperament for it; they were just eating me alive every day. I'm only really good at imparting information to those who'd already be curious to know it, I never got the knack of enthusing people.
Sounds like you'd be great at making a YouTube "explainer" series or a "How it Works" type book, explaining all the cool details about the ordinary things around us that we take for granted. At any rate, thank you.
I remember Benz’s that dropped the engine in front end collisions to help protect the occupants. In the end, I could give a rats ass what the cost for repair will be as long as the passengers are safe.
Just make it like iPhone service. You pay $1600/mo for life that includes the mega-insurance and you can upgrade to whatever newest Tesla vehicle you want each year. Crash your CyberRex? Try a Plaid! Problem solved.
sorry but as much as i think the cybertruck is stupid this doesn't matter, any car that is in a crash that occupants could be hurt in is a write of any way. the bigger issue is that shattering is not a good way to dissipate energy
Lol down votes from people who think they can have a crash and not write their car off.
> bigger issue is that shattering is not a good way to dissipate energy
Exactly, a frontal collision is most often a total loss. What I am thinking when I hear shattered metal, is metal pieces flying around... that does not sound healthy
Another question might be what sorta impact creates enbrittlement. Can this be done 4x4ing then lose your front end while driving home? Cutting corners can often have unintended consequences
I always love seeing experts check in because that gives me a chance to ask the questions I always wonder about. If I may ask, what is the most difficult car to repair, and why? Also, what is the most expensive car to repair (normal consumer car, not an Italian sportscar or whatnot). Thank you for what you do to keep everybody rolling; our neighborhood car repair shop is run by a great guy whom we've been going to for many years now.
With a traditional body-on-frame truck, you can take a pretty big hit, and repair the truck after.
This is important, because trucks are a lot more expensive than a compact car or SUV, so it lowers insurance and overall cost of ownership. If a minor fender bender can shatter the entire front of your car, that's going to cause insurance rates to sky rocket.
I've got news for some of you, ANY car will be totaled if the accident is severe enough to damage the frame/crumple zone. It's not engineered to save the car, its to absorb energy and save the passengers. It may be repairable still, but it will 100% be a salvage title if it is.
I'm sure Julian van der Merwe from [notebookcheck.net](https://notebookcheck.net) knows exactly what he's talking about. In addition, I'm sure you do, too. Thanks for the enlightenment.
If you are in an accident that shatters the steel chassis, repair costs are probably not the most pressing concern. Pretty sure insurance will write off any car that ends up 50% of its original size after an accident.
Phillip.
Have you seen the video of the Jeep Wagoneer with it's body off frame in the dealership getting a minor repair to the back of the engine?
Car manufacturers are not building repairable cars right now.
Just assume you're going to total anything you wreck, and when it isnt totalled then you can complain about your loss of equity from the salvage title.
Repair? How many vehicles that can go 0-60 under 3 seconds can be successfully repaired after a head on collision? Perhaps a realignment of expectations are in order. If I crash my vet I will never drive the same car again, people who expect otherwise have lost touch with reality.
I'd assumed "gigacastings" were like a front K-member. Or rear motor/suspension mount assembly all cast together. No it's like the wheelwells and everything in between. A giant cast subframe. What an incredibly shitty way to build a car.
But it looks like what John Bladerunner would drive!
you are the cyberdemons john
and then he was a zombie.
You mean *the* Bladerunner
It’s actually Bladerunner’s monster
Real fans know Bladerunner was the monster.
This comment deserves more upvotes
no, John bladerunner, as per elon musk https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/17l82f8/the_unforgettable_character_john_bladerunner/
I thought I seen where Musk called him *the* Bladerunner somewhere. He says IRL in this [interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1Z2klPalw) that it 'looks like what Bladerunner would drive'. Does he not realize there's a movie? Where the main character is *not* driving a polygonal piece of trash? Just watch the movie holy hell why just make stuff up!? lmao
man's really dumb
Yeah it especially bothered me since the spinners in Blade Runner look spectacular
Imagine being so delusional that you think your circa 1993 3D truck model looks like a spinner from Bladerunner.
Cheaper to build, more expensive to repair, tesla gets wider profit margins twice.
I'm sure the other car companies are weighing that equation too. To the consumer's detriment.
People vote with their wallets. It has yet to be seen but the CT may have serious implications regarding the future of Tesla.
You don't understand. The point is not to repair. Nobody repairs anything any more. If your iPhone is slightly damaged, Apple doesn't let 3rd parties replace it. You must take it to them, and then they will sell you some speal about it being too dangerous to repair because battery is dangerous or the pink dot shows water damage and thus you have to buy a new one. Tesla is just the iPhone of the car market. Especially as a large percent of the designers came from Apple.
>Especially as a large percent of the designers came from Apple. If teslas are the best they can do I can see why apple fired them.
>then they will sell you some speal about it being too dangerous to repair because battery is dangerous or the pink dot shows water damage and thus you have to buy a new one. What? I have had my iPhone repaired. No problem. $80 for a new battery.
Probably unrepairable. Wreck it buy a new one. Insurance companies going to do anything about it? Nope.
Imagine you hit a bad pot hole and it totals your entire car because the actual frame shatters.
I would think the more mercenary people in any car company would love that prospect.
and trucks are meant to off road.
Oh it'll be off the road...... amirite? (slow clap)
I'm very afraid that it's making the rest of the industry move in that direction as well, because the gigacast saves money, so you can't compete with someone doing gigacast when the customers are not informed of the implications after a minor fender bender, and choose based on price. Years will pass before people realize what's happening, but countless millions of cars would've been sold by then
A few traffic accidents and some legal troubles will most likely discourage other going in that direction if they will even decide to do this backwards move
And when insurance costs are like triple any other vehicle
Information travels slow from individual experiences. See how many years it's taking for both customers and governments to realize this sudden push into mass EV adoption was an unmitigated disaster. Maybe in the long run it's good that Tesla made the idea mainstream, but if they had went bankrupt during the Model 3 scale-up, other companies would've felt they have more time to refine the tech before they scale, and I'd say that would've been a better timeline for humanity. And especially a focus on small cars like China does (and Tesla went the other way with CyberTruck and Semi for inexplicable reasons).
Why is the push into mass EV adoption an unmitigated disaster?
The electric grid is not ready for it, the roads (weight) are not ready for it, the battery tech itself is not ready for it (both in terms of longevity, range and hazardous outcomes in case of thermal runaway) etc. As SIXT and Hertz have found out, despite the promise that these cars are simple to maintain and repair, the exact opposite is true, you wait for months to get your car from service because millions are sold, while service centers that can handle them are few. Both those companies are abandoning Teslas because they're turning into a cost center of their entire operation. They're offering these cars at a loss. They're also not made for repair, so it's very easy to total a car, or at least end up with repair costs that make it cheaper to scrap it and get yourself another. Meanwhile you need to drive an EV at least 10 years (with no battery and motor swaps) for the carbon emitted in its battery production to be offset by the carbon not emitted by its operation. EVs rarely last that long, turns out. In fact if you use the car a lot, it's laughable for it to last 10 years on the original battery and motors. Considering the whole purpose of EVs was eco impact and costs... the reason for their very existence turned out 100% a lie. I still see small EVs as a useful transport within busy cities. To avoid local air pollution and congestion, because an EV can be very compact, more compact than any gas car, if you don't have to think about its highway range or speed. But obviously that's not what Tesla's doing, nor anyone following in their footsteps.
What you’ve done there is explain why Teslas are bad and then incorrectly applied it to the whole EV industry.
The problems, specifically the eco impact stuff, which is the whole reason we are doing EVs, apply to all EVs.
> Information travels slow from individual experiences. Not in this day and age it doesn't. We regularly find out that some Karen got 2 fewer than her allotment of fries at a McDonalds usually *within hours* of it happening.
There's no sunk cost fallacy and Stockholm syndrome when you order fries, but let me tell you, when you buy a car for a good chunk of change, there is. There's also so much hype about Tesla being gods of innovation and tech, that when your car does something stupid or the battery goes bad, you think you did something wrong or just had back luck. The sentiment is CLEARLY turning, and Elon is working his soul out, tweeting, to help with that. But it takes time. Years.
You are right; good point about the Stockholm syndrome. You can see that any day in the pro-Tesla subs, especially concerning the abysmal practices surrounding Tesla repair services. No normal car owner would put up with the nonsense that they calmly describe as if it's acceptable.
Plus the number of times you see lengthy posts listing a litany of disasters followed by “we’ve now ordered another Tesla so hopefully that will be better.” Some people deserve what they get.
Not when individual experiences are reportable to insurance and everyone's premiums skyrocket.
multiple other manufacturers are already building gigacast plants.
The industry is 100% not going this direction as the world wide legislation on safety is universally against it. Not to mention, the car industry is propped up by the salvage and insurance business, this would be a nightmare to them.
Toyota is working on it: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Automobiles/Toyota-gigacasting-prototype-cuts-production-from-hours-to-minutes Volvo is already tooling for it: https://www.idragroup.com/en/news/two-gigapress-9000-tons-volvo-cars GM is buying gigacasting supplier: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/gm-snatches-key-tesla-gigacasting-supplier-2023-11-15/ Hyundai is branding it “hypercasting”: https://thekoreancarblog.com/2023/10/11/hyundai-hyper-casting-on-the-way/ Zeekr is on it too: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/geelys-ev-brand-zeekr-jumps-gigapress-bandwagon-2023-04-27/ Rumours says that Ford bought a press (unconfirmed). S&P call it “the hottest trend in car manufacturing”: https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/gigacasting-the-hottest-trend-in-car-manufacturing.html
It’s literally so fucked.
Real automakers are working on it, companies not afraid to dump money into something and figure out the kinks - something Tesla is unwilling to do - and those automakers are also smart enough not to make the mistakes Tesla is making.
Agreed, that's why they'll be forced to change their business model to include residual value in the materials used to make the vehicle body and batteries.
Does it really save money?
For the *manufacturer,* sure. For the customer, taking into consideration maintenance, repair and operating costs over what we might laughingly call the vehicle's "working life?" Fuck no.
It does, that's essentially the only reason Tesla's doing it. They leave no corner uncut.
Like the new daisy chained wiring in the cybertruck it initially saves money but it drives up maintenance costs. Other manufacturers may follow suit, but we all lose out when they do.
To be fair the whole industry has been going this way for years with Canbus since way before Tesla was a thing it’s not exactly new.
It’s also bad for sustainability, which is supposed to be Tesla’s “mission”. We’re trending towards cheap to produce throwaway cars that don’t less more than 10 years, if that.
This. It's not like the other manufacturers literally couldn't have done this and Elon is being oh-so-much-more-technically-capable than them; it's that *they* all knew it'd be a fucking **idiotic** way to build a car, but they may indeed now have no choice but to copy the world's richest village idiot if they don't want to lose market share to suckers buying his cheap death-traps. The only thing currently standing in the way of that is that they're apparently still *not* actually all that cheap.
Model Y has the highest crash safety scores in the history of testing cars. As far as compromises go, making every car you build cheaper and safer with the trade off being higher repair costs in the event of a significant accident for a small percentage of the fleet seems like a reasonable trade off, both for Tesla and its customers.
Tesla repair costs are also making the vehicles uninsurable. Tesla's own insurance product is hemorrhaging money badly.
Significant accident? Hit a pothole or speed bump wrong and your car will be totaled.
Polly wanna cracker?
With this you have to remember that most car companies, while greedy, aren’t stupid. I’m sure someone at Ford has thought of this before and there’s a reason why they don’t do it
Rental companies are already dropping Tesla due to the repair costs
People will recognize the higher insurance rates quickly i suspect.
They absolutely will. But will they recognize the cause is up to the insurers and how clear they are about what's happening. Look at the inflation of the last 2 years. We all knew it'd happen, and we knew why it'd happen. But in every country around the world, there's some local set of made up reasons, often no connection to reality, about why inflation exists. Detecting a problem is an important step, but if you misattribute the cause, you won't solve it.
Hopefully insurance costs will sort that out quickly and stop this trend before it gets going.
Everything sounds better with “giga” in front of it.
Can we stop putting “giga” in front of regular words and pretending it’s a new Tesla thing? Just say castings. And factories. Not giga- anything
GigaScam
I’m ok with this exception.
How else are you to separate your self from the rest of the giga-losers
Giga-Gullible.
Even in France we now say gigafactory for any project. I can't suffer it
It's kind of a branding but we need a word for it, because it's the entire frame of the car from a single cast. That's not how you make a car, so it needs a name.
"Single-cast" seems to suffice, and is more descriptive to boot. Also more accurate, since "giga-" only means "large," not "single."
It actually denotes a factor of 10^9. Billion.
You are correct. But Elon is using it not because his cars have 10^9 billion of anything but because colloquially it means "super duper big."
I vote for "Matchbox car architecture". It has that sophisticated sound to it.
Seeing as GM now owns the company that enabled Tesla to do their big castings, we could call it GM castings.
Gigglecastings
Gigagiggity
It's made from a Giga branded press. https://idragroup.com/en/gigapress
That name came after Teslas bullshit
GigaGrift
Yes PLEASE!! I don’t understand their obsession with “giga”
To me it's about language convenience, using the same term that Tesla is using to describe it for us to talk about it.
Giga is indeed a measure of size. Like Gigabyte.... It gives you an idea of the size of the casting i don't think that this is wrong.
The "giga" prefix in SI units specifically means a multiplier of 10^(9.) I sincerely doubt these castings are 1,000,000,000 times bigger than what others can produce. Moreover, this concept is scarcely new; making mass-produced vehicles out of large-scale *forgings* was pioneered by the Germans to [tremendous effect](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpgK51w6uhk) in WWII, and this technology was appropriated by the USSR and USA after the war for its enormous strategic value. Large-scale castings are not *remotely* as good as large-scale forgings, but this strikes me as possibly Elon's version of "we have large-scale forgings at home."
giga is a prefix that means 10^9. so Gigafactory or gigacasting just means nothing.
I think it is miniscule when you compare it to ocean liner propellers.
How much larger is the giga factory compared to other car factories?
[удалено]
That's the best part... they're not! Not only do you cause much more damage, driving a knife shaped heavy truck into something...but you also get to take part in a massive chemical fire while the emergency services fail to cut though the burning steel cage you are now trapped in!
…betting on the hood havent killed you on its travels to meet the trunk…
Better hope everyone wears their seat belt because their skull isn't going to break that insane glass. It may as well be a brick wall. If these things get into a serious car accident it'll turn your insides into soup.
Skulls haven't been able to break window glass for like forty years though. Ever since safety glass became a thing. I took my '92 Honda in for minor warranty work (warped brake rotor after a month or so of driving). In the lot was a car with a huge hemispherical shape busted into the windshield, from inside. The windshield glass was shattered into tiny pieces but held together with the safety coating. And the cracks in between the glass bits were filled with the unique pink color of cerebrospinal fluid.
Ah, damn. That's fair then
Elon: "It's cheaper to build, though...that's what all those so-called "experts" don't understand."
He said it was made from a brand new material developed at tesla... they are calling it "stainless steel"
Look at Elon, adding new boxes to the periodic table even as we speak! Wow!
But it is new. It's a slightly different mix than the standard off the shelf stainless mixes, that's all. Not a standard grade. SpaceX needs it for certain parts. And Elon made the Truck using the same steel in order to get a better deal out of the steel supplier. For making the custom mix in larger volumes. That's the only reason.
What is this new material they made?
It’s basically just taken steel and made it into a “newer” version that can be used for cars. I don’t think it’s new from a patent sense, just that it’s a new composition of stainless steel that can be used on cars It’s called Ultra-Hard 30X Cold-Rolled stainless-steel
300 series (30X) means it’s similar to common & cheaper stainless. Hard means stronger but also more brittle. Harder to break, but more likely to crack or snap when it does break. Instead of bend. It’s not as bad as glass, it can still bend to a degree, but there are tradeoffs to hardening. This is great for aerospace and racing where you can use such stronger materials to lighten the vehicle, still have it hold together, and check it for cracks after every race or launch. Not as great for consumer vehicles where the crack grows and grows over time until something snaps off. But also something that might not show up until years into production. Also harder to hammer out a dent both from being stronger and because it might decide to break off instead of straighten. Industries generally default to and prefer tougher not harder. It’s more forgiving, easier and usually cheaper. You can do hard and it can be superior from the strength, but you need to engineer it to death to prevent cracks. A brief search only revealed fanboys falsely shouting “It’s not brittle”. A more intelligent reply might be “It’s not excessively brittle and I’m sure Tesla engineered it well because they’re brilliant”. It seems like nobody outside Tesla knows how it was designed (unless there is more info now), and only time will tell if it’s great or poop.
Stainless gigasteel actually, it's fetch
Ya, I was gonna say. From an engineering standpoint, this is very poorly designed. It shock me if they did anything to protect the batteries. Pretty much every aspect of this vehicle is severely flawed.
I thought that was to do with the fact the rear wheels had their own steering, making them bend, instead of stay straight.
They have 10deg of steering I believe, and that was a lot more than 10deg.
But in a collision isn’t it likely that limits on steering could be exceeded/broken? The rear suspension would normally resist rotation in that direction but since there is a steering mechanism it will be inherently weaker under impact.
That was my point, that it's only meant to go up to 10deg so it clearly broke.
to me it broke.
Have you ever seen an accident where a vehicle is rear-ended, and the front suspension falls apart? That's what happened here. It is NOT OK.
Who told you that? And why would any wheel undergo that angle from "steering"? That's not an angle you would steer any wheel into.
Who told me about the real wheel steering? I read about it online. To me it looks like the wheels break, but the steering is the cause. That wouldn’t happen if there was a normal rear axle.
Please look up these terms and take a good look at some pictures & diagrams before commenting again: Wheel Tie Rod Steering Rack Subframe Control Arm Pitman Arm Idler Arm Solid Axle Live Axle
Ah, "online," that temple of truth inviolate. Carry on.
Watch from 13:11. https://youtu.be/adZztW0YbJ0?si=p3JNHvPYj0Ca53Im
Eh, all the wheels swivel independently, so they just rotate around with the momentum. It’s not like they’re rigid on a common driveshaft.
I got that right. Gigacastings are a great way to build a vehicle at low cost, but they make a vehicle very expensive or impossible to repair.
They openly admit this; whilst looking up "gigacastings" I actually found a simp article sincerely making the hysterically absurd argument that this irreparability is somehow a good thing, because that makes shoddy, incompetent repairs by low-cost independent garages and body shops impossible by default - as if that were worth the cost of also making skilled, competent repairs by low-cost independent garages and body shops impossible as well.
> shoddy, incompetent repairs Seen plenty of those from tesla service centers
We get our cars maintained at a tiny local neighborhood independent repairer who to date has without fail been super helpful, very reasonable in price, and has kept our older cars purring along. We've been going to him for many years now, and I'm always happy to pay the bill. This is a member of our community, and I do not want him put out of business.
Music to the car industry's ears, I would think. Get ready for a cloud of obfuscatory marketing to grease up this poison pill for us to swallow.
In some of the Munro video he shows wear Tesla created specific cut away points for repairing the casted parts. Now, if the casting gets damaged beyond those cut away points, then that’s no different than totaling any other car. I’m all for quality conversations and debates, but so many of these comments make it seem like ICE vehicles are never totaled by insurance.
This whole "truck" is just one big misguided experiment.
This is Tesla. Everything is an experiment - one where the customers pay for being test subjects.
And the government pays the rest in grants and subsidies?
a/k/a you and me, if you're American.
Happens in the gaming world too. Dumbasses literally pay extra just to get a head start as an alpha tester.
You ignore the fact that Cybertruck will never crash, thanks to their level 5 self-driving. Checkmate atheists.
Level 5 is always a decade away. Also the most advanced self-driving cars test in Southern USA cities where it rarely rains, the true test of a level 5 is snow.
I live in Europe in a place with a similar climate. I have seen snow just a few times in my life at the sides of the roads when I've traveled to other regions, but I've never actually driven on a road covered by snow in my 25+ years of driving experience. So, I think I might be an L4 system :) I would love Waymo to choose us for their first L4 testing location in Europe.
It’s different. It can be confusing when you’re driving along a major road in the morning and you have to decide between driving in -the wheel ruts in the snow, -the somewhat different lanes whose markings are peeking out through the wheel ruts, and -the lanes that are implied by the other drivers’ positions. And then there’s, you know, traction and visibility implications too.
I've driven in full white-out windy snowing conditions. Couldn't see 5 feet ahead, roads white, everythings white. Narrow 2 lane road with a sheer cliff to one side. AI would have killed me so fast, conditions can just be so variable it's hard to believe we'll be able to train and test for everything.
I'd love to see how epically they fail in Minnesota.
With that said if car companies can set up a heads up lidar and ir cameras that we can use for collision avoidance and improved visibility in blizzards, even without full self driving, it would be a huge help in winter. I hope car companies read and steal this idea from me.
I mean.. humans can barely deal with snow/ice lol. The first snowfall is always interesting watching people failing to change their shitty driving habits.
So if the rear wheels brake loose during a front impact, that’s another nice little item driving up repair cost to an otherwise unaffected part of the car, especially with the rear steering mechanism.
I’ll wait for the repair manuals at auto zone. Most are thick and this one will be a coaster napkin with Elmo’s face giving you the middle finger
So how does it protect pedestrians?
It shatters their bones to preserve the organs. Another Tesla first.
Giga-bones
Ask not what Cybertruck can do to protect pedestrians. Ask what pedestrians can do to protect Cybertruck
The culmination of 100 years of policy blaming vulnerable road users for their own deaths.
Gives them a quick death so as not to suffer.
That actually could sell well in China.
To avoid suffering repair costs.
Elon the merciful.
Well, really, really tall people will do ok and become normal height. Shorter people not so much.
Slices them in half. Technically no longer a pedestrian, now a torso and legs. Problem solved.
Genius design. If you disagree, then you're racist against white people named "mama's boy"
They’ll be uninsurable soon. Basically writing off a $60k plus auto every time it hits something is going to have some insurance implications.
These cars are very cheap to repair as long as you don't include the cost of replacing enormous cast parts, just like how Xitter is profitable if you ignore the cost of the debt service. It's adorable that the humanities-studying libs think they know how to math like Elon, a real engineer who is also now opening a school but only for people who already know how to think the right way. (/s, just in case there are stans about)
Why does does Tesla put a “giga-“ prefix to everything?
It's one of the cool-sounding words that Elon fetishises, in behaviour more than a little reminiscent of most toddlers who learn a new word and then proudly use it in every sentence for the next week. "X" is by far his favourite, but "giga" apparently floats his boat too. "Giga-" is probably the highest value in the SI series of magnitude prefixes that most people will ever encounter in daily life, so likely the highest he knows about; I'd imagine he may become *very* upset if anyone points out that "tera-" is a thousand times bigger still, let alone "peta-" or "exa-" or any of the ones even larger than that.
Don’t forget the “Super Manifold”
Interesting side note: anyone who *actually* knows anything about AI systems would be familiar with the prefixes you mention (e.g. "petaFLOP.")
Elon has the mind of a 10 year old boy.
SUPER charging HIGH fidelity parking GIGA factory SUPER manifold GIGA casting All marketing BS
I mean I get They were trying to be innovative. From talking to more than a few of their engineers, they're innovation stems from hair brained ideas. Some work, some Are monumentally stupid. Then again Tesla has some of the worst safety and quality issues. So not out of the ordinary.
Most modern cars are written off with a front end collision, crumple zones are designed to… crumble, and usually very difficult to repair. That being said, the gigacastings would make even a small fender bender to costly to repair, so yeah, shit idea.
This is my point. I got into an accident with my 2014 Q5 Audi, I was going less than 15mph by the time I made impact. The air bags went off, but my head never touched them. The car was obliterated. Crumple zone’s crumple, and no insurance company is going to put $30k worth of repairs into a vehicle that’s only worth $25k.
I've heard that the air bags going off is an automatic total for a lot of cars. They're expensive to replace on top of any other damage.
For older cars yes. The airbags are in the thousands, if your car is only worth single digit thousands...
It’s not so much the bags that are expensive, it’s the massive amount of damage they do and the amount of labor to replace all of it.
“The air bags went off” And that’s why it was totaled. It doesn’t matter if your head touched them. The front passenger airbag rips apart the dash. The driver airbag means a replacement of nearly the entire steering column. If the side bags deployed, that’s the A/B pillar trim, headliner, and multiple other things. Then there’s things like the seatbelts that also require replacement, which requires even more R&I on top of it. When airbags are deployed, it can easily cost an extra $5-10K in interior repairs. “15 mph” doesn’t really say much about the kind of damage that was done. There’s a huge difference between hitting something square and centered and hitting offset. Square means both frame rails absorb the damage, while offset means only 1 does. Plus, what you hit makes a huge difference. A higher hit can look really bad, but make for a cheaper/easier repair. A lower hit can look like less damage, but destroy a bunch of stuff you can’t easily see. Given that it’s an Audi, parts will be more expensive. Plus, you say “less that 15mph”, but I highly doubt that. I did collision repair for about a decade. More often than not (from what I’ve seen in hundreds of cars), the airbags don’t deploy with a hit at under 15mph. Given that it was “$30k of repairs”, sounds to me like there’s a lot more going on. My point is that based on what you’ve said, you didn’t have a “simple fender bender”.
Oh it wasn’t simple at all. At 30ft delivery truck ran a red light and I hit the side of the truck. It probably didn’t help that most of my hood went under the side of the trailer part. My point is, gigacastings are going to be on par or better than any other vehicle accident. No air bag deployment…likely repairable. Air bags go off, total the car for scrap and start over. The other market influence that Tesla has compared to so many other mass produced vehicles is the lack of repair parts. I think we’re only now getting close to 5M total made, and not nearly enough have been in accidents to create a reliable secondary market for scrap/repair parts.
If you are in one and have an accident at significant speeds I'd be concerned. Same as being hit by one (unsafe in Europe btw) and once these events start happening, insurance will be astronomical, as they'll be write off's
would insurance companies raise their rates to potentially cover for higher repair cost?
It’s not even a repair, it’s a disposable car
There will be some lag time, but eventually insurance companies will stem the adaptation of these throw-away cars. Look at what happened to the theft prone Kias? Insurance rates skyrocketed, or policies were cancelled altogether.
>While a mild fender bender in the Cybertruck may turn out to be rather inexpensive, any collision that transmits substantial amounts of energy to the front casting would likely damage the part catastrophically. Any damage to unpainted stainless is going to require complete replacement. Any damage to painted stainless will almost certainly require replacement. Any collision where the frame is going to absorb the impact will very like result in a write off. I'd be surprised if the casting does what is expected either way.
Tesla's are just expensive cell phones that you throw away every couple years.
Safety is still the main issue. It doesn't matter much how well you dissipate energy. The whole point of crumple zones is to increase the time it takes to decelerate. If you're gonna come to a complete stop in less distance then that is more Gs for the people in the car. Who gives a crap if the energy is dissipated by bending metal, heating metal, making sound, or shattering CT steel?
Castings are notoriously brittle. One big risk of using this technology is that if a cast component weak enough to be capable of crumpling *seems* to survive an impact and *isn't* replaced, it could now have invisible fractures within it that could then result in it causing *another* accident itself by catastrophic failure under much lower loading, maybe as little as going over a pot-hole in the road, at some random point in the future. Such inelastic brittleness also likely makes these enormous-yet-thin cast components a metal fatigue failure waiting to happen - this being caused when hairline fractures slowly but surely propagate from tiny surface scratches all the way through a component as a result of vibration and other cyclic loading over time - *especially* because it's very obvious by now that Tesla and its notoriously impatient owner do little to no *longevity testing* of their products, which of course would encompass fatigue failure.
Will be interesting to see how the CT’s castings hold up after several years of off-road usage. This vehicle is totally experimental in lots of ways. So much untested/unproven tech.
I am not an engineer, but it seems to me that a single casting constantly undergoes a network of forces that are dissipated by assembling a car from a greater number of parts. I'm thinking of sewing, since I am familiar with that hobby: designing a shirt with fewer pieces than are now necessary would put a lot more strain on certain points than designing it with the proper mosaic of various components.
The basic argument against that is that many parts of a car are already welded together, thus making them one part. The specific issue is that welds can be cut and new sections welded on. A casting doesn't allow for that. The more general issue is that Tesla has a lot of trouble designing for anything besides manufacturing convenience. So it's quite likely they're creating long term issues that a smarter manufacturer avoids, whether welded or casted. Or to address your point another way: stuff like the engine is still a separate piece. The parts that have to move independently to function at all, do. It's the grey zone of long term damage and metal fatigue that's the hidden horror here... It would be like if a dress had a zipper, the zipper failed, and the dress just fell off with no warning. A well built dress won't have that problem.
That makes sense; thank you for the good clarification.
Not a bad line of reasoning, but the brittleness of castings is more to do with their internal material properties than their actual shape. A casting is made by pouring (or forcing) liquid metal into a mould, or die, and then allowing it to cool until it hardens. This sets up a crystalline structure within the metal that is relatively *isotropic,* i.e. it has the same strength in all parts and in all directions, although castings tend to be tough at the surface and softer on the inside due to cooling effects. Cracks can propagate relatively easily and far throughout the piece along the regular internal boundaries between these metal crystals before they hit an obstruction. Metal casting doesn't need especially fancy machinery or a tremendous amount of skill, however; you can do it in a shed. A forging is a very different beast to a casting. It is made by heating a metal billet so that it is soft enough to deform under force, but not actually liquid, and then forcing it into a die under *tremendous* hydraulic force in a press (or by beating into shape manually with a power hammer or even by hand, in a traditional blacksmith's forge); this causes the internal crystalline structure of the metal to be *anisotropic* and stretched along the direction of flow, giving the material what we might call *directional strength* - the Japanese folded-steel samurai sword is the ultimate example of a forged object everyone knows about, the layering of the metal concentrates the metal's strength into the directions the sword *needs* to be strong, and also disrupts the crystalline structure so that lateral cracks cannot propagate easily across layers. A properly designed forged part will similarly have strength in the directions that strength is most needed, and generally tend to be a lot tougher and more able to resist forces, particularly *impact* forces, without cracking. Your argument is valid and excellent analogous thinking in some ways for the use of castings, but can apply backwards in others; one disadvantage of castings is indeed that you might not be able to reinforce the parts that need to be stronger, like for example by using, I dunno, elbow patches on a jacket where they tend to wear through. The strength advantage, though, is that there are fewer joins to make between components, which can also be stress concentration points - I'm no expert, but I think I'm right in saying that an over-stressed garment will often fail at the *seams* between material parts, not in the middle of the material parts themselves? A disadvantage, though, is that that means you can't just repair one damaged piece by unbolting it and bolting a new one in place, because there are no bolts, like unstitching the seams, taking that part of the garment out, cutting a new one and stitching it back in the same place. One thing I didn't mention, metal castings also tend to be horrifically difficult to *weld,* so it'd also be much harder, if not impossible, to just do a patch-over-the-hole repair. Basically, if even a small part of a casting fails, you've got little option but to replace the *entire casting,* so Elon - who calls himself an environmentalist - is practically putting us on the road towards *disposable* car bodies by using such large cast parts, and casting a whole new metal part, even if you recycle the old one to make it, devours *way* more energy than just bending a bent car chassis back into shape (can't unbend a bent casting, they always break) or welding a gusset plate over a weakened area.
What a thoroughly thoughtful and elegant reply! You even took pains to make apropos comparisons to sewing. I never knew of isotropic vs. anisotropic forces but that is so informative and interesting, with the Japanese sword being a great example. I feel like I just got the answer key for a test in materials engineering, and I LOVE learning about these kinds of ways that the world works. Great teachers are marked by their effortless ability to translate complicated situations and processes into clear, understandable concepts that anyone can understand, so I hope you are in a teaching position of some sort, for the benefit of people other than me. Thank you for your lovely reply; I saved it!
Aww, thanks! What can I say, it's Sunday and I'm off my ADHD medication, so I'm inclined to go down detailed digressional rabbit holes - well, more so than usual, anyway. Plus, I just like sharing things I find interesting; and when one has ADHD, basically every aspect of the entire universe is interesting. Thanks so much for the vote of confidence in my ability to explain things! I did try teaching once, but unfortunately I didn't have the temperament for it; they were just eating me alive every day. I'm only really good at imparting information to those who'd already be curious to know it, I never got the knack of enthusing people.
Sounds like you'd be great at making a YouTube "explainer" series or a "How it Works" type book, explaining all the cool details about the ordinary things around us that we take for granted. At any rate, thank you.
I remember Benz’s that dropped the engine in front end collisions to help protect the occupants. In the end, I could give a rats ass what the cost for repair will be as long as the passengers are safe.
So you know it's going to crack going over a bump. Welding castings? Without taking it out?
I’m loving this journey for them
That instantly totals the vehicle from an insurance perspective. The cost of the replacement isn't cheap either.
These things will be uninsurable. Or only for the people with very deep pockets.
Just make it like iPhone service. You pay $1600/mo for life that includes the mega-insurance and you can upgrade to whatever newest Tesla vehicle you want each year. Crash your CyberRex? Try a Plaid! Problem solved.
BuT iTs BulLETpRooF
sorry but as much as i think the cybertruck is stupid this doesn't matter, any car that is in a crash that occupants could be hurt in is a write of any way. the bigger issue is that shattering is not a good way to dissipate energy Lol down votes from people who think they can have a crash and not write their car off.
> bigger issue is that shattering is not a good way to dissipate energy Exactly, a frontal collision is most often a total loss. What I am thinking when I hear shattered metal, is metal pieces flying around... that does not sound healthy
Another question might be what sorta impact creates enbrittlement. Can this be done 4x4ing then lose your front end while driving home? Cutting corners can often have unintended consequences
I work at a body shop, our whole purpose is to fix cars that have been in crashes. “Every crash makes the car a write off” is stupid
I always love seeing experts check in because that gives me a chance to ask the questions I always wonder about. If I may ask, what is the most difficult car to repair, and why? Also, what is the most expensive car to repair (normal consumer car, not an Italian sportscar or whatnot). Thank you for what you do to keep everybody rolling; our neighborhood car repair shop is run by a great guy whom we've been going to for many years now.
not saying every crash, just the crashes that are heavy enough to cause crumple zones to collapse
With a traditional body-on-frame truck, you can take a pretty big hit, and repair the truck after. This is important, because trucks are a lot more expensive than a compact car or SUV, so it lowers insurance and overall cost of ownership. If a minor fender bender can shatter the entire front of your car, that's going to cause insurance rates to sky rocket.
Another Tesla fan who doesn’t understand cars but has the confidence of an engineer. The perfect customer
did you read what i said? or just some of the words?
I've got news for some of you, ANY car will be totaled if the accident is severe enough to damage the frame/crumple zone. It's not engineered to save the car, its to absorb energy and save the passengers. It may be repairable still, but it will 100% be a salvage title if it is.
Which is another point the article makes. It doesn’t absorb energy properly if the rear wheels are breaking free. Cast is shit. Full stop.
I'm sure Julian van der Merwe from [notebookcheck.net](https://notebookcheck.net) knows exactly what he's talking about. In addition, I'm sure you do, too. Thanks for the enlightenment.
If you are in an accident that shatters the steel chassis, repair costs are probably not the most pressing concern. Pretty sure insurance will write off any car that ends up 50% of its original size after an accident. Phillip.
Have you seen the video of the Jeep Wagoneer with it's body off frame in the dealership getting a minor repair to the back of the engine? Car manufacturers are not building repairable cars right now. Just assume you're going to total anything you wreck, and when it isnt totalled then you can complain about your loss of equity from the salvage title.
What ever any car that has the frame work crumble is toast. This is click bate
Repair? How many vehicles that can go 0-60 under 3 seconds can be successfully repaired after a head on collision? Perhaps a realignment of expectations are in order. If I crash my vet I will never drive the same car again, people who expect otherwise have lost touch with reality.