BETTER PARTSToyota borrows technology from Tesla to reduce production time from hours to minutes
The production of cars becomes simpler and a lot shorter
More than ten million. That's how many cars Toyota wants to produce this year – and that's just one car brand. You may wonder how many new cars the world actually needs and how much less effort we would have to make to become more sustainable if we did not have such a great drive to produce. Well, that's not the topic at the moment. Toyota is busy working on a new technology to shave hours off production time. A technology that they copied from Tesla.
We wrote about it before, but this week Toyota shows some progress on the new gigacast machine. Thanks to these machines, the underbody of new cars consists of only three large aluminum parts. The rear part of the chassis alone at Toyota now consists of 86 parts that are assembled by robots in 33 steps. Thanks to gigacasting, the production time of these large parts is only a few minutes.
The Gigacast is in fact a large mold into which liquid aluminum at a temperature of 750 degrees Celsius is poured. While still in the mold, the metal is cooled to 250 degrees, Nikkei Asia reports. Toyota started this process a year ago, and it took another full day to change the mold in the machine. Now it only takes twenty minutes. Toyota's first electric cars should be produced with the Gigacast in 2026.
The cars drive themselves off the production line
Toyota also shows a new trick at the factory. As soon as a new electric car is assembled far enough to accommodate wheels, the car drives itself to the next station at 0.1 km/h. This eliminates the need for a conveyor belt. For example, the cars drive themselves to a test station to test the lighting there.
Tesla wants to go even further with gigacasting
The base plate of the Tesla Model Y now consists of three large parts that come from the Gigacast. The next step for Tesla is to make the base plate consist of only one part. This would save a lot of time and money, ultimately allowing Tesla to increase profits – or drive down prices even further.