Tesla’s one-piece die-casting cost has been reduced. Why haven’t other car manufacturers made similar attempts?

Because most of them are traditional car manufacturers and most of them are conservative.

Tesla is an extreme radical. Traditional car manufacturers think that one-piece die-casting is not possible, or they have never thought about it at all. Tesla's cost has been reduced. High safety Tesla's one-piece cast body has almost no welding points and every surface is absolutely reliably connected, making the overall structure of the vehicle very strong. Compared with traditional welded bodies, Tesla's one-piece body The cast body is safer and can better protect the occupants during actual collisions.

The die-casting process has fewer parts and the aluminum is lighter. It also reduces the use of welding joints and bolts, greatly reducing the weight of the body. Once a vehicle becomes lighter, its range will certainly improve. Advantages of high maintenance costs for die castings include the dimensional accuracy of the castings. The internal structure can be cast directly. Production speed is fast. The disadvantage is that the cost is too high. It's just that for a car buyer, all I can think of so far is a mixed bag of good and bad. The upside: The one-piece cast body reduces costs, helping Tesla's price.

In addition, the aluminum body is likely to be lighter than the original body, which will bring energy saving effects, and the same power can run farther. On the bad side, I can only think of one thing at the moment: the entire cast aluminum alloy body. When there is a small accident that needs to be repaired, the original body does not need to be replaced. Some problems directly connected to the sheet metal processing may need to be replaced as a whole. It Will it lead to a significant increase in maintenance costs? Of course, not every car will be involved in an accident, but if insurance companies use this as a reason to increase the cost of insuring an entire model, I think there is a big opportunity. Simply put, the cost of insuring your car will increase.

The transformation of Tesla’s body parts from 70 to 1 is undoubtedly a simplification of its internal design. My answer is no, for the following reasons: the original 70 distributed assembly parts are a process with few changes and simplified complexity in production. From multiple machine tools at the beginning to single machine tools now, manpower and material resources have been liberated, and costs have undoubtedly been reduced.

From a professional point of view, supply chain control is simplified, the torsional stiffness of the product is improved (complete vehicle), manufacturing accuracy is improved (better appearance), and weight is reduced (lightweight coefficient improvement) range), simplifying the assembly process, improving production efficiency (lowering costs), and improving material utilization. The disadvantage is that it increases fixed investment (mold cost), which mainly depends on sales volume, and maintenance is simpler but the cost is better.