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Tesla’s Last Advantage Is Waning

The market is catching up with Musk.

Will Lockett

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Published in

Predict

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4 min read

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5 days ago

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A few years ago, Tesla was miles ahead of any of its competition, but today, that really isn’t the case. There are EVs that charge faster, have longer ranges, better driver assist systems, nicer interiors, more internal space and even accelerate harder for the same price or cheaper than the equivalent Tesla. Even Tesla’s famous charging network isn’t as big of an advantage as it once was, as it is being opened up to other manufacturers, and third-party superfast EV charging stations have become increasingly common. However, there is still one last area in which Tesla still leads: manufacturing. Their gigacasting technology has enabled them to produce EVs faster and cheaper than anyone else, allowing them to have the most profitable EVs on the market. But all of this is about to change. Here’s why.

The manufacturing technology in question is gigacasting. Tesla didn’t invent it; instead, they were merely the first to adopt it.

The idea is to make the chassis production far more simple and cheaper. Regular car chassis are effectively a 3D puzzle of welded-together shapes stamped out from metal sheets. As you can imagine, this process is arduous and lengthy. In contrast, Gigacasting uses casting machines to force molten metal into moulds under high pressure to produce large aluminium body parts and, in some cases, entire sections of the frame. Casting such huge parts with high enough quality and tolerance levels to be automotive-grade is incredibly difficult. As such, these casting machines use thousands of tonnes of pressing force to ensure the molten metal fits and forms to the mould perfectly, hence the name “giga”.

Tesla first used gigacasting back in 2019 for the Model Y production line. This first gigapress produced the rear floor section of the car’s chassis with a pressing force equivalent to 9,000 tonnes!

Okay, so why did Tesla use this technology?

Well, it is significantly quicker than welding, and as this chassis fabrication stage is a production bottleneck, speed improvements here can dramatically speed up the entire production line. This, in turn, means a factory can be way more efficient. Gigacasting is also far more automated than welding, reducing the number of highly…