Tesla Reveals 16,000 Ton Giga Press Is Coming!

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On today's episode, Tesla cracks the code on massive 1 Piece gigacasting, Pepsi's Tesla semis show off their impressive stamina during a hauling event, and Elon gets approached by Turkey for a new gigafactory.

Huge news has reached the Tesla community by way of a September 14th article from Reuters.

5 anonymous sources close to recent company projects say that Tesla has made a major breakthrough with their Giga Press technology, a breakthrough that could change everything about how the company manufactures their vehicles.

Currently, Tesla uses their Giga Press casting machines to simplify the production of the Model 3, Model Y, and the new Cybertruck.

This is done by casting large portions of the vehicle's underbody in enormously powerful presses, eliminating a process that normally requires many parts to be welded together.

This has saved Tesla as much as a reported 40% of manufacturing costs with just the Model Y alone, as they have replaced about 70 parts with 2 large castings and a structural battery pack.

It was no surprise then to learn that Tesla is looking to repeat this efficiency with their upcoming $25,000 vehicle platform, a more compact design that Tesla intends to leverage for both an affordable EV and a new take on the robo-taxi.

This is the vehicle that was teased during Tesla's Investor Day event on March 1st, alongside a lengthy presentation on the company's new approach to manufacturing.

This unboxed method of production would innovate the standard way of assembling a car, a process that hasn't seen much updating over the course of the last hundred years or so.

The idea was for various sub-assemblies of a vehicle to be put together at different stations simultaneously, allowing workers to more easily reach parts and work alongside robots with less difficulty.

Current car assembly is very linear with vehicles moving from station to station, while getting parts attached in a specific order, which often leads to some awkward working environments as the vehicle gets more complete.

In this proposed new system, all the pieces would come together at the end, the whole process saving time and money by efficiently spreading the work around.

However, as the Reuters sources tell it, some new technology as well as the lessons learned during Cybertruck's production has allowed Tesla to think bigger.

It looks like they want to cast the whole underbody for this new vehicle in 1 piece.

First off, the team learned a great deal about casting larger pieces with the Cybertruck.

The parts for this vehicle were so much larger than their previous work with the Model 3 and Y that Tesla was forced to get 2 new Giga Press machines with a pressure rating of 9,000 tons of force.

But this new vehicle is going to be smaller than even the Model 3, with the sources explaining that the new vehicle's current design has a very small front and rear, almost no storage space at all.

A perfect subject for testing this one-piece underbody casting idea.

However, it's not like Tesla's 9,000 ton presses could handle an entire underbody, even if the new vehicle is very small, so they need a bigger press.

About 16,000 tons if the sources are to be believed, and a press that big runs across a few problems, not least of which would be that their size alone would probably mean redesigning the buildings they go into.

But that's actually not the biggest problem either.

Making molds for casting machines is expensive, even on a small scale.

This makes it especially difficult when designing a vehicle for a casting system, as changes to the molds can run anywhere from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions depending on the size.

And here is where the new technology comes in.

Tesla needs to be able to have test molds that are cheap to create so they can freely play with the new vehicles designed during pre-production.

They also need to be able to make molds that incorporate hollows, something that cuts down on weight and increases a vehicle's safety during a crash, which is hard to accomplish with a normal casting mold.

No, really, sand is going to reportedly be a huge part of the new process.

Some new developments from casting specialists in Europe, Japan, and the United States have figured out how to effectively 3D print intricate and detailed structures with industrial sand, a high silica content sand that's normally used in things like glassmaking, insulation, and several other construction related processes.

As a large printer arm lays down layers of sand, they mix in binding agents to give the structure some stability.

Industrial sand is a widely used material, so it's fairly easy to work with and it can form complex shapes with intricate details, and it's easily reusable.

This means that new molds can be quickly made, discarded, and repurposed in order to design finished molds that can later be made in metal, for as little as 3% the cost of traditional mold making techniques and less than half the time.

Add to that the ability to form hollows in a mold by adding 3D printed sand cores, which can be easily removed afterwards.

However, There are a couple of problems that still need to be figured out.

For instance, the sand cores reportedly can't be used at the proposed 16,000 ton pressures that would be needed to cast a single body in the method that Tesla has been using.

They could switch to using injection mold techniques, slowly injecting molten material into the mold chamber instead of a high pressure squeeze.

This would make a higher quality cast, which could use the sand cores, but it's slower.

This is all part of the process when picking out a new production system.

Tesla will be making efficiency gains in some areas so they can hopefully make speed and quality gains in others.

1 thing for sure though, if Tesla can pull this off, they will be revolutionizing the way cars are built and proving what can be done with careful application of new technologies.

48 hours, 16,000 miles, 80,000 pounds of cargo, and only 5 charging stops.

Pepsi's Tesla Semi spent 2 days absolutely crushing the idea of what an electric tractor trailer can accomplish at the Run on Less event that has been running since September 11th.

Run on Less is a competition of sorts where several companies who own electric freight vehicles allow observers from the North American Council for Freight Efficiency to record data while the drivers make their deliveries.

The objective is to not only prove that electric freight vehicles can be a viable replacement for diesel-powered trucks, but also to help showcase the factors that make an electric fleet possible like charging infrastructure.

As 1 of the participants, PepsiCo put 1 of their brand new Tesla Semis up for consideration.

The company has had these vehicles since they took delivery of the first batch from Tesla during an event on December 1st, 2022.

And while it's safe to say that PepsiCo has been seeing some great success with their new electric fleet, its numbers from this event show a staggering amount of efficiency.

Pepsi's run began on the 13th, and over the next 24 hours you can see the truck only taking stops for deliveries and for a more minor charge that was meant to extend some range until the big charge just past noon.

Notice the steep line for the charge here, it will be important in just a moment.

Across both days the semi only stopped for deliveries, 3 major charges, and 2 smaller ones to extend the range a bit.

Other than that, the vehicle was almost in constant motion, and was almost always loaded with a full 80,000 pounds in the trailer.

Freight companies tend to take on new inventory at the places they deliver to in order to keep things efficient.

The semi would drop off a load of soda and pick up some water, then drop off some water and pick up some Gatorade, so it's important to remember that this test is being performed under a near constant full load.

Now, let's talk about that steep charge line.

The Semi is clearly able to hold a charge for a particularly long time thanks in part to its regenerative braking, which takes the engine's kinetic energy and uses it to charge the batteries while the accelerator is disengaged.

But the real efficiency gains are made while fast charging the truck at a mega charging station.

The 750 kW charger made very short work of topping up the Semi's batteries, but it couldn't have done so with just any battery setup.

According to observers, the Semi went from roughly 5% battery charge to 80% in under an hour.

This simply could not have been done with older technology.

The batteries would be fried by the intense heating that comes with charging at those speeds.

Luckily, both the Tesla Mega Charger and the Semi itself come with extra cooling, and the results are some amazing efficiencies.

We have been seeing a lot of great benefits for PepsiCo with their new Tesla Semi fleet this year.

In about 6 months, they've gone from taking delivery of their new trucks to making plans to change over most of their fleet, and of course events like the run on less competition really let us see why.

The Tesla Semi can easily go toe to toe with its more conventional peers.

More countries are lining up to get Tesla's attention, and hopefully their own Gigafactory.

On September 17th, Tesla CEO Elon Musk met briefly with Turkish President Erdogan in New York City.

Erdogan's hope was to convince Elon to make Turkey the new home of the company's next Gigafactory.

The pair also talked about increasing Starlink internet services for the country, but there was far more talk about making Tesla's vehicles available.

Tesla began importing their Model Y to Turkey just this May, but it's the only vehicle sold there out of their entire fleet, despite the company also opening a design studio and a series of supercharger stations there in April.

So it's clear that Tesla is going to be expanding their offerings in the Mediterranean country, but it's not clear that a Gigafactory is in the cards for them just yet.

Obviously the current Gigafactory project is just getting started in Mexico right now, with Tesla reportedly sending their letter of intent to begin putting up steel sometime around the 15th of September.

But Elon has been hinting that another location would be announced around the end of 2023, and just a couple of months ago, India came in hot with some very strong offers for their own gigafactory, which Tesla seemed to take very seriously, even purchasing a large office space for future development.

Not to mention Tesla's work with the Canadian government, and even rumors that he is in talks with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, though Elon has flatly dismissed the last 1.

There's nothing saying that the company couldn't pursue multiple places of course, but it would seem to be an odd choice to stretch Tesla's holdings so thin right when they start really recovering from the pandemic.

Regardless, Tesla and Turkey have a fairly strong relationship right now, so there's no telling what a little more time and a few more meetings will accomplish.

Turkey makes sense as a stable place to build a production hub near the Middle East, and Tesla still hasn't named their next Gigafactory location.

So, perhaps we'll be seeing an announcement with Erdogan around the end of this year.

Don't forget to give this video a thumbs up today if you liked it, that is so important for getting our content out to more people.

If you enjoy the content, then you'd probably also enjoy our weekly newsletter.

So sign up with the link down below at the Tesla space.com.

A huge thank you to all of our Patreon supporters who are listed on the screen.

Now, you help us make the best content we can and we really appreciate it.

Thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next 1.


Speaker 0: On today's episode, Tesla cracks the code on massive 1 Piece gigacasting, Pepsi's Tesla semis show off their impressive stamina during a hauling event, and Elon gets approached by Turkey for a new gigafactory. Huge news has reached the Tesla community by way of a September 14th article from Reuters. 5 anonymous sources close to recent company projects say that Tesla has made a major breakthrough with their Giga Press technology, a breakthrough that could change everything about how the company manufactures their vehicles. Currently, Tesla uses their Giga Press casting machines to simplify the production of the Model 3, Model Y, and the new Cybertruck. This is done by casting large portions of the vehicle's underbody in enormously powerful presses, eliminating a process that normally requires many parts to be welded together.

This has saved Tesla as much as a reported 40% of manufacturing costs with just the Model Y alone, as they have replaced about 70 parts with 2 large castings and a structural battery pack. It was no surprise then to learn that Tesla is looking to repeat this efficiency with their upcoming $25,000 vehicle platform, a more compact design that Tesla intends to leverage for both an affordable EV and a new take on the robo-taxi. This is the vehicle that was teased during Tesla's Investor Day event on March 1st, alongside a lengthy presentation on the company's new approach to manufacturing. This unboxed method of production would innovate the standard way of assembling a car, a process that hasn't seen much updating over the course of the last hundred years or so. The idea was for various sub-assemblies of a vehicle to be put together at different stations simultaneously, allowing workers to more easily reach parts and work alongside robots with less difficulty.

Current car assembly is very linear with vehicles moving from station to station, while getting parts attached in a specific order, which often leads to some awkward working environments as the vehicle gets more complete. In this proposed new system, all the pieces would come together at the end, the whole process saving time and money by efficiently spreading the work around. However, as the Reuters sources tell it, some new technology as well as the lessons learned during Cybertruck's production has allowed Tesla to think bigger. Much bigger. It looks like they want to cast the whole underbody for this new vehicle in 1 piece.

First off, the team learned a great deal about casting larger pieces with the Cybertruck. The parts for this vehicle were so much larger than their previous work with the Model 3 and Y that Tesla was forced to get 2 new Giga Press machines with a pressure rating of 9,000 tons of force. But this new vehicle is going to be smaller than even the Model 3, with the sources explaining that the new vehicle's current design has a very small front and rear, almost no storage space at all. A perfect subject for testing this one-piece underbody casting idea. However, it's not like Tesla's 9,000 ton presses could handle an entire underbody, even if the new vehicle is very small, so they need a bigger press.

About 16,000 tons if the sources are to be believed, and a press that big runs across a few problems, not least of which would be that their size alone would probably mean redesigning the buildings they go into. But that's actually not the biggest problem either. Making molds for casting machines is expensive, even on a small scale. This makes it especially difficult when designing a vehicle for a casting system, as changes to the molds can run anywhere from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions depending on the size. And here is where the new technology comes in.

Tesla needs to be able to have test molds that are cheap to create so they can freely play with the new vehicles designed during pre-production. They also need to be able to make molds that incorporate hollows, something that cuts down on weight and increases a vehicle's safety during a crash, which is hard to accomplish with a normal casting mold. So Tesla is going to use sand. No, really, sand is going to reportedly be a huge part of the new process. Some new developments from casting specialists in Europe, Japan, and the United States have figured out how to effectively 3D print intricate and detailed structures with industrial sand, a high silica content sand that's normally used in things like glassmaking, insulation, and several other construction related processes.

So here's how it works for the molds. As a large printer arm lays down layers of sand, they mix in binding agents to give the structure some stability. Industrial sand is a widely used material, so it's fairly easy to work with and it can form complex shapes with intricate details, and it's easily reusable. This means that new molds can be quickly made, discarded, and repurposed in order to design finished molds that can later be made in metal, for as little as 3% the cost of traditional mold making techniques and less than half the time. Add to that the ability to form hollows in a mold by adding 3D printed sand cores, which can be easily removed afterwards.

However, There are a couple of problems that still need to be figured out. For instance, the sand cores reportedly can't be used at the proposed 16,000 ton pressures that would be needed to cast a single body in the method that Tesla has been using. They could switch to using injection mold techniques, slowly injecting molten material into the mold chamber instead of a high pressure squeeze. This would make a higher quality cast, which could use the sand cores, but it's slower. This is all part of the process when picking out a new production system.

Tesla will be making efficiency gains in some areas so they can hopefully make speed and quality gains in others. It will be a balancing act. 1 thing for sure though, if Tesla can pull this off, they will be revolutionizing the way cars are built and proving what can be done with careful application of new technologies. 48 hours, 16,000 miles, 80,000 pounds of cargo, and only 5 charging stops. Pepsi's Tesla Semi spent 2 days absolutely crushing the idea of what an electric tractor trailer can accomplish at the Run on Less event that has been running since September 11th.

Run on Less is a competition of sorts where several companies who own electric freight vehicles allow observers from the North American Council for Freight Efficiency to record data while the drivers make their deliveries. The objective is to not only prove that electric freight vehicles can be a viable replacement for diesel-powered trucks, but also to help showcase the factors that make an electric fleet possible like charging infrastructure. As 1 of the participants, PepsiCo put 1 of their brand new Tesla Semis up for consideration. The company has had these vehicles since they took delivery of the first batch from Tesla during an event on December 1st, 2022. And while it's safe to say that PepsiCo has been seeing some great success with their new electric fleet, its numbers from this event show a staggering amount of efficiency.

Pepsi's run began on the 13th, and over the next 24 hours you can see the truck only taking stops for deliveries and for a more minor charge that was meant to extend some range until the big charge just past noon. Notice the steep line for the charge here, it will be important in just a moment. Across both days the semi only stopped for deliveries, 3 major charges, and 2 smaller ones to extend the range a bit. Other than that, the vehicle was almost in constant motion, and was almost always loaded with a full 80,000 pounds in the trailer. Freight companies tend to take on new inventory at the places they deliver to in order to keep things efficient.

The semi would drop off a load of soda and pick up some water, then drop off some water and pick up some Gatorade, so it's important to remember that this test is being performed under a near constant full load. Now, let's talk about that steep charge line. The Semi is clearly able to hold a charge for a particularly long time thanks in part to its regenerative braking, which takes the engine's kinetic energy and uses it to charge the batteries while the accelerator is disengaged. But the real efficiency gains are made while fast charging the truck at a mega charging station. The 750 kW charger made very short work of topping up the Semi's batteries, but it couldn't have done so with just any battery setup.

According to observers, the Semi went from roughly 5% battery charge to 80% in under an hour. This simply could not have been done with older technology. The batteries would be fried by the intense heating that comes with charging at those speeds. Luckily, both the Tesla Mega Charger and the Semi itself come with extra cooling, and the results are some amazing efficiencies. We have been seeing a lot of great benefits for PepsiCo with their new Tesla Semi fleet this year.

In about 6 months, they've gone from taking delivery of their new trucks to making plans to change over most of their fleet, and of course events like the run on less competition really let us see why. The Tesla Semi can easily go toe to toe with its more conventional peers. More countries are lining up to get Tesla's attention, and hopefully their own Gigafactory. On September 17th, Tesla CEO Elon Musk met briefly with Turkish President Erdogan in New York City. Erdogan's hope was to convince Elon to make Turkey the new home of the company's next Gigafactory.

The pair also talked about increasing Starlink internet services for the country, but there was far more talk about making Tesla's vehicles available. Tesla began importing their Model Y to Turkey just this May, but it's the only vehicle sold there out of their entire fleet, despite the company also opening a design studio and a series of supercharger stations there in April. So it's clear that Tesla is going to be expanding their offerings in the Mediterranean country, but it's not clear that a Gigafactory is in the cards for them just yet. Obviously the current Gigafactory project is just getting started in Mexico right now, with Tesla reportedly sending their letter of intent to begin putting up steel sometime around the 15th of September. But Elon has been hinting that another location would be announced around the end of 2023, and just a couple of months ago, India came in hot with some very strong offers for their own gigafactory, which Tesla seemed to take very seriously, even purchasing a large office space for future development.

Not to mention Tesla's work with the Canadian government, and even rumors that he is in talks with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, though Elon has flatly dismissed the last 1. There's nothing saying that the company couldn't pursue multiple places of course, but it would seem to be an odd choice to stretch Tesla's holdings so thin right when they start really recovering from the pandemic. Regardless, Tesla and Turkey have a fairly strong relationship right now, so there's no telling what a little more time and a few more meetings will accomplish. Turkey makes sense as a stable place to build a production hub near the Middle East, and Tesla still hasn't named their next Gigafactory location. So, perhaps we'll be seeing an announcement with Erdogan around the end of this year.

Don't forget to give this video a thumbs up today if you liked it, that is so important for getting our content out to more people. If you enjoy the content, then you'd probably also enjoy our weekly newsletter. So sign up with the link down below at the Tesla space.com. A huge thank you to all of our Patreon supporters who are listed on the screen. Now, you help us make the best content we can and we really appreciate it.

Thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next 1.

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Tesla Reveals 16,000 Ton Giga Press Is Coming!