Quote:
Originally Posted by soundman98
so what happens when an entirely-cast car is in even a minor accident? it's all garbage. just like your cast aluminum grille.
there's no way to repair cast and ensure the structural integrity. when cast anything has forces applied to them beyond the design specs, they fracture in a million different ways.
hit a curb, and chip an a-arm mount? car is garbage, because they can't repair the cast while ensuring the rest of the sub frame is not compromised.
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Sandy shows the evolution and talks mid way about the nature of the body in a crash. He tends to believe that a significant enough strike to the frame of a steel body will be just or more likely to be totaled. The other thing is that the car still has low speed crash bumpers, and it has frame rails seen a 3:00 that are bolted in and designed to be replaceable. I think most cars will be totaled with anything north of 25mph these days. The cars are made to absorb the impact and crumble, and with modern electronics, the cars in any type of significant impact will be scrapped. If anything, the motors in electric cars are less likely to be damaged.
You can check out a G20 BMW 3 series versus a Model Y gigacasting. The front impacts look similar to me and not worse for the Y. The front impact and front/side impact looks slightly better on the Y. The side impact is definitely better on the Y, thanks to the structure of the battery. These are all tests around 20-35mph, and the cars are mangled.
The reality is the gigacastings are literally replacing hundreds of machines with a single machine, so this should amount to huge savings. This is why the whole industry is moving this direction.