Tesla Cyber Truck (Most Hideous Truck/Tank Ever)

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by soundman98

i didn't know the truck was going to have 4-wheel steering. seems they didn't do their homework on why gm dropped it...

still wins the title of ugliest suv-masquerading-as-a-truck ever.

Did you?

https://www.gmc.com/support/quick-st...wheel-steering

[wbradley]

I have to admit, that Tesla truck in white stainless looks like it is supposed to accomplish some revolutionary task with the triangular roofline, symmetrical front to rear. Aside from avoiding any curves, what does it accomplish? And I won't even begin to try to understand the rear cargo area. Will it take a 4x8 sheet of drywall and 1/2 ton cargo? Maybe they plan to injection mold the whole thing, incorperating a few hundred components into a single step.

Can Elon Musk switch off Starlink in your area if he wants? He really wants to show his support for Russia if he can, no doubt there is some big payback he is anticipating in the future if he does. North Korea has nukes, maybe he should kneel down and prostrate himself before Kim Jong Un as well?

[Irace86.2.0]

Tesla reinvents carmaking with quiet breakthrough

https://www.reuters.com/technology/g...gh-2023-09-14/

In a bid to extend its lead, Tesla is closing in on an innovation that would allow it to die cast nearly all the complex underbody of an EV in one piece, rather than about 400 parts in a conventional car, the people said.

Two of the sources said Tesla's previously unreported new design and manufacturing techniques meant the company could develop a car from the ground up in 18 to 24 months, while most rivals can currently take anywhere from three to four years.

The five people said a single large frame - combining the front and rear sections with the middle underbody where the battery is housed - could be used in Tesla's small EV which it aims to launch with a price tag of $25,000 by the middle of the decade.

The breakthrough Tesla has made centres on the how the giant molds for such a large part are designed and tested for mass production, and how casts can incorporate hollow subframes with internal ribs to cut weight and boost crashworthiness.

In both cases the innovations, developed by design and casting specialists in Britain, Germany, Japan and the United States, involve 3D printing and industrial sand...

So far, automakers have shied away from casting ever-bigger structures because of the "gigacast dilemma": creating molds to make parts of 1.5 metres squared or more boosts efficiency but is expensive and comes with myriad risks.

Once a large metal test mold has been made, machining tweaks during the design process could cost $100,000 a go, or redoing the mold altogether might come to $1.5 million, according to one casting specialist. Another said the whole design process for a large metal mold would typically cost about $4 million.

That has been deemed prohibitive by automakers - especially as a design might need half a dozen tweaks or more to achieve a perfect die from the perspective of noise and vibration, fit and finish, ergonomics and crashworthiness, the sources said.

To overcome the obstacles, Tesla turned to firms that make test molds out of industrial sand with 3D printers. Using a digital design file, printers known as binder jets deposit a liquid binding agent onto a thin layer of sand and gradually build a mold, layer by layer, that can die cast molten alloys.

According to one source, the cost of the design validation process with sand casting, even with multiple versions, is minimal - just 3% of doing the same with a metal prototype.

That means Tesla can tweak prototypes as many times as needed, reprinting a new one in a matter of hours using machines from companies such as Desktop Metal (DM.N) and its unit ExOne.

The design validation cycle using sand casting only takes to two to three months, two of the sources said, compared with anywhere from six months to a year for metal mold prototypes.

The subframes in a car underbody are typically hollow to save weight and improve crashworthiness. At the moment, they are made by stamping and welding multiple parts together leaving a void in the middle.

To cast subframes with hollows as part of one gigacasting, Tesla plans to place solid sand cores printed by the binder jets within the overall mold. Once the part has been cast, the sand is removed to leave the voids.

The aluminium alloys used to produce the castings behaved differently in sand and metal molds and often failed to meet Tesla's criteria for crashworthiness and other attributes.

The casting specialists overcame that by formulating special alloys, fine-tuning the molten alloy cooling process, and also coming up with an after-production heat treatment, three of the sources said.

[strat61caster]

Originally Posted by wbradley

Will it take a 4x8 sheet of drywall and 1/2 ton cargo? Maybe they plan to injection mold the whole thing, incorperating a few hundred components into a single step.

Those two things were literally design goals from the outset of the Cybertruck, you're literally 4 years late to asking those questions.

https://insideevs.com/news/386046/te...its-4x8-sheet/

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/23...len-part-deux/

That being said, I wouldn't trust a Tesla-cast made car for this decade. They do not have tight enough QC for it.

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by strat61caster

Those two things were literally design goals from the outset of the Cybertruck, you're literally 4 years late to asking those questions.

https://insideevs.com/news/386046/te...its-4x8-sheet/

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/23...len-part-deux/

That being said, I wouldn't trust a Tesla-cast made car for this decade. They do not have tight enough QC for it.

IDRA was building the gigapress before Musk even asked for it. Tesla's materials team is shared with SpaceX and is one of the best in the world in metallurgy and innovations in new alloys. They xray the castings for quality control. The process is so good the parts don't need to be heat treated and are corrosion resistant without the need for coatings, and they go in the car raw.

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by strat61caster

...

That being said, I wouldn't trust a Tesla-cast made car for this decade. They do not have tight enough QC for it.

Sandy is old and doesn't go to town equally or well in the video below, but here he is taking a sledge hammer to the castings. Aluminum tends to crack over deforming, so I don't know how they compare in a crash. Porsche had some cast aluminum body pieces fail at the strut, but the pieces were fairly thin and not part of a giga casting, so it isn't an apples to apples comparison. Other people mentioning GT4s and GT3s crashing without such cracks like that on the failed struts, so I feel that was a design flaw, but it does show the difference between cast aluminum fracturing and steel warping. The second video is a cool cost and strength breakdown.

https://rennlist.com/forums/gt4-spyd...r-failure.html

[Dadhawk]

Originally Posted by Irace86.2.0

Sandy is old and doesn't go to town equally or well in the video below, but here he is taking a sledge hammer to the castings.

Is anyone really surprised that there is a difference between the two pieces in the first video, given the minimal force he is applying and the fact that one was more secure than the other allowing the applied force to impact the piece differently? All he's really doing with the casting is sending sliding across the floor.

I didn't watch much of it after that, so if he did something more similar later I missed it.

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by Dadhawk

Is anyone really surprised that there is a difference between the two pieces in the first video, given the minimal force he is applying and the fact that one was more secure than the other allowing the applied force to impact the piece differently? All he's really doing with the casting is sending sliding across the floor.

I didn't watch much of it after that, so if he did something more similar later I missed it.

You missed the second one then when he swings at the strut tower of two pieces. The steel dents a centimeter. The cast one chips. The two blows weren't apples to apples, but it was stationary. He also responds to exactly what you said about the moveable piece. He then talks about cast aluminum engine blocks and cylinder heads being strong and tells people they don't know what they are talking about in a rant. You missed the funny parts.

Most higher end cars change out stamped steel suspension for cast aluminum. There are other examples too. I don't think he is wrong that aluminum can be stronger in this form factor. Why? The piece can be engineered to be thicker and thinner in places, and it can have support webbing and bracing, but stamped steel needs to be welded or glued together and tends to be flatter.

Plus, having the whole body made of aluminum has to lighten the car.

[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.

[Dadhawk]

Originally Posted by Irace86.2.0

You missed the second one then when he swings at the strut tower of two pieces. The steel dents a centimeter. The cast one chips. The two blows weren't apples to apples, but it was stationary. He also responds to exactly what you said about the moveable piece. He then talks about cast aluminum engine blocks and cylinder heads being strong and tells people they don't know what they are talking about in a rant. You missed the funny parts.

I reloaded my Sandy Tolerance Fluid and watched the rest of the video. Again, no real surprises, but in the end I knew going in the results were going to be better with the castings for all the reasons Sandy gave.

But, as @soundman98 states, once it is compromised and it needs repair, but the entire frame is a cast? I definitely see the benefit of it, and if I had my pick I'd rather be in the cast car than not, until it has to be repaired.

[Irace86.2.0]

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.

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.

[Irace86.2.0]

Posted these before too. Tesla does a lot for vehicle safety, but I think overall EVs will prove to be safer on average in impacts and avoiding rollovers. Tesla's cast rails are made to crumple progressively because the rails aren't uniform, as the first video shows. You can watch tons of videos to compare, but overall, I think the car will do better than the competition, and its crash safety rating reflects that.

As it pertains to Tesla, they use the vision system and fleet data to design algorithms for modifying the safety system. This means that the car can predict an impact before it happens, as apposed to just sensing an impact after it has happened, and it will know what object is hitting it and from what angle. If you weigh a certain amount, are a certain size, have the seats reclined a certain distance, are a certain age/size/weight, etc., the car can time when the airbags are deployed to catch you better.

Cool shot under the car of a crash.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OxU7ukt19jI

[Dadhawk]

No doubt Tesla is doing some great things in manufacturing and safety. My biggest problem is they don't make a single model I would drive. If they did, I would likely already own one.

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by Dadhawk

No doubt Tesla is doing some great things in manufacturing and safety. My biggest problem is they don't make a single model I would drive. If they did, I would likely already own one.

I'm debating on selling my k24 turbo swapped BRZ for a Model 3 Highland, but I might wait until after we buy a house in the next year or so, and I'm reluctant because what I really would want is an electric Miata, Cayman or 86 sized sports car, but it just doesn't exist yet. How long do I have to wait? The next Cayman is electric, but will be too expense new for what I would send on a car. The next Miata is likely electric, but that won't come with everything I would like from a Tesla, but it could work. It is the most likely option. Will Toyota make a MR electric sports car? Maybe, but I doubt it is a priority for them. The 86 will likely have longer before it makes a switch. The Roadster is far into the future and just too expensive, so yeah, I'm in a similar boat as you.