Tesla Reveals New Cybertruck Giga Press!
Elon Musk’s secret weapon for building the Tesla Cybertruck has been revealed, and it is the most powerful Giga Press casting machine in the world.
Using 9,000 tonnes of pressure, this new invention from the IDRA group will forge the entire rear underbody frame of the Cybertruck in one giant piece. This is a manufacturing process that Tesla has already used with the Model Y to great effect, but the giant Cybertruck giga casting will take that to a whole new level, a truly unprecedented accomplishment of design and engineering.
So let’s talk about this new machine and how Tesla will leverage the power of the Giga Press to make their Cybetruck a reality.
The Giga Press
We can start off with the machine itself before we get into what this means for the Cybertruck. The Giga Press is essentially just a die casting machine or injection molding on an epic scale. The name ‘press’ comes from the primary mechanism that presses molten aluminum alloy into a large mold, where the metal hardens into a frame section for a Tesla vehicle.
Like Elon Musk has said before, it’s basically the same process that they use to make Hot Wheels cars, or basically any other kind of toy. If you were a kid in the early 90’s you probably had some kind of an injection molding toy, like a Creepy Crawler or something where you plunged some goo into a plastic mold and then popped out a little rubber bug or Terminator or whatever. Same deal, just with full sized electric car bodies.
Every car manufacturer uses casting and stamping to make several components that are then attached together to create a frame, but Tesla was the first to scale that technique up to the point where they were casting the entire front and rear quarters of the frame in single, solid pieces of aluminum.
This obviously makes the car easier to build, because now we’re just dealing with one big, solid chunk instead of a couple dozen little pieces all stuck together.
It’s an idea that Elon Musk and Tesla have been working on for a long time. The biggest hurdle was finding a manufacturer who could actually produce a casting machine on the scale of the Giga press. During his Cyber Rodeo presentation at Giga Austin, Elon remembered the hunt for their eventual business partner, Elon said, quote, “When we were trying to figure this out, there were six major casting manufacturers in the world. We called six.six Five said’ no,’ one said ‘maybe.’ So with a lot of effort and great ideas from the team, we’ve made the world’s biggest casting machine work very efficiently to create and radically simplify the manufacturing of the car.”
That one company brave enough to take on the challenge was the IDRA Group, an Italian manufacturer that operates under the parent company LK Technology, based in Hong Kong.
Liu Siong Song, the founder of LK Technology talked about this development process in an interview with the New York Times. And according to Liu, Tesla actually worked side by side with LK and IDRA for over a year to make the Giga Press. Liu even referenced revisions that Tesla would make on their concept, which resulted in LK and IDRA rolling out revisions on their end as well. Liu said, “Every once in a while, they would ask us whether it was possible to do this or that. With each revision they made, we needed to make changes in our machine, too.”
LK Technology actually started out supplying machines for making toys, so this really is literally just a very small process that’s been scaled up to a very large process.
Tesla is already using this process to great effect in the Model Y - every Tesla factory is now equipped with multiple Giga Press machines that generate 6,000 tons of pressure to cast both the front and rear quarters of the Model Y underbody.
Now, IDRA has revealed their latest creation - a 9,000 ton Giga Press. In a video released by the company we see this absolutely colossal machine being assembled at their facility in Travagliato, Italy. IDRA is preparing their 9,000 ton press for an open house they are holding in early June.
Obviously the sight of this new machine got everyone wondering if this was also destined for a Tesla GigaFactory - could this be the Giga Press to finally build the much anticipated Tesla Cybertruck? Thankfully we weren’t wondering for long, because Elon Musk replied to the speculation within a day by simply writing “Cybertruck body” in a Tweet reply to the IDRA video.
We’ve known for a few months now to expect a more powerful Giga Press dedicated to the rear underbody of the Cybertruck. Elon Musk said that the 6,000 ton Model Y machines wouldn’t be strong enough to make the casting to support the truck bed. Based on hints at this time last year, we had been expecting an 8,000 ton Cybertruck press to be in the works - but we’re now confirmed that Cybertruck is going up to 9,000. Not over 9,000.
What’s obviously the most exciting about this development is that we can literally see the Cybertruck production line coming together in real time - and this epic Giga Press is probably the most complex and unprecedented component of that manufacturing process.
Building the Cybertruck
Probably the most interesting and important aspect of the Cybertruck is the simplicity of its design. The outer shell is just a big sheet of stainless steel that is bent into shape - no curves, just hard angles - so manufacturing that exoskeleton should be a very quick and easily repeatable process. In the same philosophy as the frame casting, they‘re taking something that would typically be made of many parts all stuck together and instead just using one solid chunk of metal. The battery pack of the Cybertruck will be essentially the same structural pack design that’s already been implemented in the Model Y vehicle at Giga Texas, just scaled up to meet the energy demands of the much larger and more powerful truck. The front section of the Cybertruck frame will likely be a casted section very similar to the Model Y as well, and can probably be done with the same Giga Press.
It’s just that rear section of the Cybertruck that has clearly taken some additional engineering. And that makes perfect sense, the back half of a pickup truck is drastically different from an SUV, the truck frame has to stretch farther while also maintaining its strength and rigidity without the benefit of a roof overhead - plus that frame needs to hold up under the weight of whatever the user decides to throw in the back of their truck or tow with their truck. No one is going to be buying the Cybertruck because it looks pretty - Tesla is pitching this as a hardcore, workhorse, utility vehicle - so it needs to be sturdy enough to hold up under extreme pressure.
Innovations like the new Giga Press are going to be critical for Tesla to follow through on their promise to mass produce this electric truck and deliver it for a reasonable price. We know that there has been a lot of new design iteration on the Cybertruck since its debut in 2019. We’ve seen all traces of specifications, option packages and pricing disappear from the Tesla website over the past year. All we’ve really gotten for information is unofficial Twitter updates from Elon Musk explaining the new changes. We know that rear wheel steering has been added to the spec sheet, likely as an answer to the GM electric Hummer. We’ve seen three motors turn into 4 motors, likely as an answer to the Rivian R1T. We’ve heard that Cybertruck will implement a new Full Self Driving Hardware Version 4 package with upgraded cameras and computer. Elon Musk has basically said that Tesla will be throwing the kitchen sink at this vehicle, making it a showcase for their cutting edge technology.
All of this in a vehicle that was supposed to sell for $69,000 at the top trim level. Of course we know that even if they had kept all of the specs the same, that price would have needed to be raised just to compensate for inflation and materials cost - but now there’s all of this crazy, extra stuff going in as well - how could the Cybertruck possibly cost anything less than like $200,000 at this point?
It’s going to be very interesting what the final price turns out to be. We can at least take some comfort knowing that for every very expensive thing that’s going into the Cybertruck, there is a cost saving measure being deployed as well. So, casting for example, we’ve seen video from Giga Berlin that shows the Giga Press casting process and it is a simple, automated function where the Giga Press opens to reveal a fully formed section, and then a giant robot arm just picks it up and hands it off to the next step in the production line - aside from that one guy in a fireproof suit poking liquid metal with a stick, it’s a hands off, automation that just just run all day, every day. So that obviously helps out with cost and efficiency. Then there’s the body. We know that stainless steel is expensive, but we can also see that by eliminating curves and panels the process for making these bodies will again be faster and more automated. Plus there’s no paint! We also saw from the Giga Berlin video the process that it takes to paint a car, the whole body has to be carried down a line where it’s dipped and dried and dunked and dried and sprayed and then it has to be sanded and buffed and inspected… With the Cybertruck, you can have any color you want, as long as it’s none. That’s a whole section of the manufacturing process deleted.
Then there are some hopeful cost savings in other areas like the battery packs and cells. I don’t think the 4680 production process is working out quite as well as Tesla would have hoped for just yet. But they’ve still got time to figure it out, and in theory the design and manufacturing of the 4680 should work out to be cheaper in the long run than their current nickel based cell. Financial analysts have recently come out to say that the market price of battery metals should come back down and stabilize by 2023, so here’s hoping.
Whatever the Cybertruck turns out to be, we’ve at least got a very real signal that the timeline for production is actually lining up with what we are being told will be the production date. Tesla and Elon are saying that Cybertruck deliveries start in 2023. It will obviously take IDRA some time to fully assemble this new 9,000 ton press, test it, take it back apart, ship it to Texas and rebuild it again - so a few months at least until that is up and running. And then after that, like we say, it should be relatively easy for the rest of the truck to come together.
So, as long as the state of the world doesn’t get any worse - and let’s be honest, if it does, then buying a new pickup truck is going to be the least our worries as society crumbles and burns around us - then as long as that doesn’t happen, we can’t see any real reason why the Cybertruck won’t be coming out next year, as planned.
Anyway, let us know what you’re the most stoked for about the new Cybertruck. Honestly, I think the rust free, paint free body is the best feature, that’s not super exciting, but it’s going to make owning the thing so much easier.
