Science 3D-printed cars.

[RGClark]

3-D-printed car could hit streets next year.
Chris Woodyard, USA TODAY 4:48 p.m. EST November 12, 2015
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2015/11/10/3d-printed-car-local-motors-swim/75530830/

Several companies have come out with what they call "3D-printed" cars, but none have 3d-printed the most important part, the engine.

This would be difficult to do with an internal combustion engine, with its high temperatures, multiple moving parts, and high tolerances.

But it shouldn't be too difficult with an electric engine. In fact considering there are now miniature 3D-printers on the market for the home, an amateur could be the first to produce an entire, scale-size, 3d-printed car.

And then it could be scaled up to produce a full-size working fully 3d-printed automobile.

This would revolutionize the industry.

Bob Clark

 

[Interceptor]

A bit over priced for a dune buggy.

 

[jedidia]

Having previously shown cars to prove the concept, Local Motors CEO Jay Rogers says the company is now ready to start making cars for the masses.

Is it just me, or is somebody not getting that 3d printed stuff is exactly NOT for the masses? The strength of 3d printing is that it gives you considerable manufacturing capabilities for small series or even individual parts that would be prohibitive to produce in a factory line, and that it can do so on the spot if necessary.

It will never be able to compete with a factory line when it comes to mass manufacturing.

 

[Urwumpe]

It will never be able to compete with a factory line when it comes to mass manufacturing.

Exactly. But if you plan going the luxury car way, it could work out fine.

 

[Notebook]

Could be the start of a cottage-industry, thousands of people build unique parts on their own 3d printer, and send them off to a central assembly unit. After you have supplied a certain number of parts, you get your own car.
Sort of not crowd-funding...

N.

 

[Artlav]

Is it just me, or is somebody not getting that 3d printed stuff is exactly NOT for the masses?

Unless everyone gets a printer.

Or in case of cars, every dealership gets one.
You go in, relieve yourself of a 6-7 figure sum, watch a movie for a couple hours, then drive out on a new car that fits your butt perfectly.

 

[Urwumpe]

Unless everyone gets a printer.

Or in case of cars, every dealership gets one.
You go in, relieve yourself of a 6-7 figure sum, watch a movie for a couple hours, then drive out on a new car that fits your butt perfectly.

But even then, it would be better to have a mass-produced base chassis and only print those parts that are highly customer-dependent.

I want gothic leadlights as rear side windows. :lol:

 

[Notebook]

Customising would be easy, I was really thinking about all those small to medium sized plastic bits that go into any modern car. Must be hundreds of the little devils.

It'll never happen of course, no advantage to the manufacturer, quality control would be a problem, and its just undercutting the factor suppliers.

NN.

 

[Urwumpe]

It'll never happen of course, no advantage to the manufacturer, quality control would be a problem, and its just undercutting the factor suppliers.

I would say that only quality control is a real problem there. You would need an automated quality assurance then to make sure all your little micro-suppliers are fulfilling their SLAs.

But lets assume we are having small independent car shops, which only buy a base vehicle from the big car manufacturers and produce all other parts internally or by other small 3d print shops. Would this really be impossible? After all, the big classic car manufacturers would then compete with small local competitors, that are all better in their own field of expertize, instead of trying to do everything at once under one roof. For example a medium sized chassis factory could just be outputting a few types of a basic chassis 24/7, in simple line production. No need for special steps for later customization. No need to coordinate the production with other later production stages. You could implement a simple "pull"-type production process. Instead of selling cars to always-changing tastes of a consumer, you produce chassis that fit the slowly changing requirements of your commercial customers. Instead of annual facelifts, you produce long-term support versions of your chassis, with the promise that this chassis will be in production for a long period of time and spareparts will be available much longer.

And especially: You no longer need a volume model that fits all tastes equally bad. You can afford letting the local car sellers decide, what their customers want. Maybe an eye-blinding coloured, over-spoilered RWD compact car of a Korean young male would be using the same chassis as a European forest workers car and the same engine as an US pickup truck?

I don't think that this is not what the industry will eventually develop to, the current industry 4.0 trends all poke in this direction already. The big large standard model is already dead, if you look at the bigger projects: In the past, the companies fitted their production processes and products to the tools and machines. Now the companies use every opportunity to customize and tailor the machines to their processes and plan for tools, that can be adapted to new products ideally by a single tap of the finger on a touch display. Or only need a weekend of downtime to be placed in a different order in the production flow for optimization, by being highly modular and intelligent enough to notice their changes.

 

[jedidia]

After all, the big classic car manufacturers would then compete with small local competitors, that are all better in their own field of expertize, instead of trying to do everything at once under one roof.

I think we would run into compatibility problems awfully fast... The baseline of a car is an assembly of components that are tuned to each other. Sure, there's a lot of stuff that can be switched out because it's not directly related to the performance of the car, but the baseline of chassis, engine, transmission, suspension and brakes still have to be designed to work with each other for best performance.

 

[Urwumpe]

I think we would run into compatibility problems awfully fast... The baseline of a car is an assembly of components that are tuned to each other. Sure, there's a lot of stuff that can be switched out because it's not directly related to the performance of the car, but the baseline of chassis, engine, transmission, suspension and brakes still have to be designed to work with each other for best performance.

Not really that much, unless you treat every car as a high-performance race car. You can see that actually well at Volkswagen: Volkswagen offers many cars with different types of engines with their DSG brand dual-clutch gears. But they have only four types of DSG in production, that fit all types of engines, only categorized by the maximum torque of the engine and the number of gears offered (There is a single 10 gear version around now, more will follow)

And VW plans much more with their modular tranverse construction kit (MQB), which is essentially a Lego system for cars. Every component has now to be compatible to the MQB standards, and that makes it easy to create new cars from largely the same parts (though building the cars has become much more annoying, since you almost have to be Mr. Fantastic to install some parts in the cramped space)

I am pretty sure, it is possible and actually an economic necessity: All car manufacturer will have to find ways to modularize their cars and thus, it will become common in the industry to design such sets of standards for a new family of cars and every new family will allow a greater span of possible configurations to cover more of the market with the same production.

 

[Notebook]

http://3dprintingindustry.com/2015/11/13/faster-than-a-ferrari-and-it-was-3d-printed/
N.

 

[Fabri91]

 

[RGClark]

Why not?

Bob Clark

 

[movieman]

It will never be able to compete with a factory line when it comes to mass manufacturing.

But mass manufacturing produces a product someone else wanted. 3D printing will increasingly allow us to produce the products we want, when we want them.

To give a simple example, the mass-produced Ziploc containers we have are almost, but not quite, large enough for me to put a samosa in there to take to work for lunch. With a 3D printer not much more advanced than we currently have, I could make one exactly the right size, rather than having to hunt through all the different kinds of mass-produced containers that companies have produced to find one that works.

I think another thing people miss is that the low cost of mass-produced objects is driven in no small way by the low cost of shipping them around the world. As more and more production goes local, the economics of transport will change dramatically. Ships will shrink and become less economical, if they're carrying a small fraction of the number of containers they do today. Few places will want to maintain hundreds of miles of railway if they're only carrying one train a week. Few will maintain hundreds of miles of roads for a few cars and a couple of trucks a day. And, as teleprescense reduces the need to move people over long distances, few will want to maintain airports, either.

And that's before we consider living off Earth. We're not going to be colonizing other planets until we can produce most of the things we need from local materials. No-one will want to spend a billion dollars shipping a $10 widget to Mars because you used up all the spares much faster than expected.

 

[RGClark]

3-D-printed car could hit streets next year.
Chris Woodyard, USA TODAY 4:48 p.m. EST November 12, 2015
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2015/11/10/3d-printed-car-local-motors-swim/75530830/
Several companies have come out with what they call "3D-printed" cars, but none have 3d-printed the most important part, the engine.
This would be difficult to do with an internal combustion engine, with its high temperatures, multiple moving parts, and high tolerances.
But it shouldn't be too difficult with an electric engine. In fact considering there are now miniature 3D-printers on the market for the home, an amateur could be the first to produce an entire, scale-size, 3d-printed car.
And then it could be scaled up to produce a full-size working fully 3d-printed automobile.
This would revolutionize the industry.

A fully 3D-printed electric car is doable now. Indeed it should be doable by amateurs on scale-models to prove the principle. The most difficult parts would be the engine and transmission.

This video shows how you can make your own simple electric motor:

Looking at the steps in the video, it appears they all could be accomplished by 3D-printing.

Next up, the transmission.


Bob Clark