“cast bodies might be more difficult to fix in the event of major damage, such as a crash.”
Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a car NOT be written off after “major damage”. The industry already doesn’t bother to fix cars, they just get scrapped, so I don’t see what the actual difference is.
That the car is written off doesnt mean it gets scrapped though. It usually gets auctioned, and if its fixable, some mechanic can buy it for peanuts and put it back on the market.
> So why the write off nonsense. Just send it to a repair shop directly and if it cannot be repaired, then initiate a write off.
Well to get the owner of the written-off car installed into a new vehicle of course! With a whole new loan and likely a higher insurance premium esp. if they "upgraded" in the process.
Risk mostly. Many of the vehicles won't be repairable and will just go to the scrap yard. Some will appear to repairable but after some effort end up scrapped too. And some will be repairable but only by guys who specialize in such things and have customers willing to buy a retitled salvage vehicle. For the insurance company, it's not worth the effort and added risk. That someone else can make some money off the missed margin isn't a big deal to the insurance company.
The original owner of the car has some ability to refuse the repair job. It may be impossible to (economically) bring the car back to its previous state. The insurance company prefers not to take the risk. They write a clean check and recover some cost by selling the salvage, which will likely be repaired and sold.
Writing it off is just the insurance company buying it from you for your insured amount because they owe you the value of the car and it'll be cheaper to just buy it from you than repair it. Normally you can then buy it back for what they expect to get at auction and do the repairs yourself with a salvage title.
At least in my country, insurance can only replace with original parts...
A newish car, a minor crash, bumper, hood, a front light or two, couple of airbags... at ~1500eur per light, 2-3k for original hood, 2-3k for airbags, body work, and low eurotax estimate of the price of the car, your repair cost is easily above 70% of the "car value".
A few trips to the dump, some aftermarket parts and someone to do the work for cheap, and you've got a drivable car.
- what it would cost them to repair it (including the risk of having to get additional work done, etc)
- what the car was worth minus what they can sell it for at auction.
If the values get close, they total the car. Then someone else buys it: maybe for parts, or maybe to repair it to a standard that the original owner wouldn't have been happy with.
Write-off is about insurance policies, and whether it is cheaper to repair damage to the standard committed to by the insurer within the parameters (e. g., new original manufacturer parts) in the insurance contact or to pay the amount the insurer is committed to pay in the alternative.
It is only tangentially related to whether it is econonically viable to restore the vehicle to usable condition.
When hail totaled my car, I kept it for another 4 years. Just "cosmetic" damage. It's still kicking around in New Mexico; I guess it's 17 years old, now.
My current car was an insurance write off and looks good if you look at it casually though looking closely the line is not quite straight down the side where it was hit and you can see a boundary in the paint where the respray finished. Works fine though.
Cars bought at auction have a salvage title, and they are not repaired to a level that would be considered acceptable by most people. Those cars are usually mechanics projects using junkyard parts and zip ties.
The other thing is that generally, a person is free to buy their car back from the insurance company instead of taking the cash from the totaling. That is when they will discover they can't just send it to a shop and get it repaired for any reasonable amount, plus the salvage title means no one else wants it.
Yeah I feel like this is the next stepping stone on a path we have been on for years. I remember Rich Rebuilds got rear ended in his Rivian and the total repair bill was somewhere around $30K if I remember right. I really do wish repairability was considered more not less, but with safety standards, manufacturing costs, etc it seems like cars are racing towards the cliff of just “discarding” if they have a problem just like the rest of consumer goods
With Cars I do believe there's a tradeoff between repair ability and crash safety to some degree. The Chassis has to deform to take the crash energy away from the passenger and the more it deforms the more energy gets absorbed.
With EVs this problem is getting a lot worse. In latest-gen EVs the battery pack is a stressed member of the frame. Any type of collision that distorts the frame will also imply a deformation of the battery module, which means instant write-off.
So if you think about it - if you first decide you need to go down the "structural battery" route to save cost and weight, you've already lost repairability if the frame is bent. Then moving to a cast frame doesn't really change anything.
The Ford Mach-E does the same thing. There's thin box frame rails as part of the traditional ladder frame, and the battery pack actually forms the floorpan and stressed crossmembers. Without the battery pack the frame will deform because there's no lateral reinforcement, making it this weird hybrid of a ladder frame and unibody that it shares with the Model X and Ioniq 5. Most EVs like the Bolt and the Ioniq 6 are unibodies however since they're just designed like regular cars with battery packs shoved where the fuel tank would normally go under the rear seat or rear hatch floor, and the battery pack simply reinforces the floor.
Its not actually the same. People constantly mix things up because the words people use are so wrong.
Structural packs are nothing new, lots of EV always had structural packs.
What Tesla is doing in the newer Model Y (called 'Structural Pack') is actually structural cells. That's the innovation. Where the cells themselves are glued together and sandwiched in a pack. So the cells themselves act as vertical enforcers. The whole back is basically filled with structural foam.
The only other company that is doing something like that is BYD but that is quite different as those are really big Prismatic cells stacked up.
The castings and frame are incredibly strong.
Or in other words; when those are damaged, the rest of the car is likely beyond economical repair. Even without insurance.
Tear it appart for parts.
Don't you lose repairability anyway if the frame is significantly bent?
AFAICT the actual batteries inside the "structural battery" are separate much smaller cells [1] that can at least be recovered from the bent frame and reused if undamaged.
Consider four factors: normal car performance, car's safety in a crash, car's repairability after a crash, and car's price. They all work against each other; no wonder that repairability is sacrificed to optimize the other three. (In a military vehicle the price is usually sacrificed instead.)
A salvage operation where you harvest raw cells is no where near repairability. That is one step removed from taking a crushed car selling it for scrap metal.
Indeed, not reparability but reusability. The cells are standard and can be readily reused in a variety of ways, unlike a badly bent frame / chassis that can only go to scrap metal.
Wonder if that's the same Rivian that was in a YouTube video that popped up a couple of days ago where some specialty repair shop was able to use nontraditional repair methods to fix the damage at a fraction of the quoted $41,000 repair cost.
Yeah iirc it happened twice to him, the first was a rivian authorized repair at the high price tag and the second was an alternate repair method they tried out at a much smaller price tag
There are body shops all over town here repairing collision damage every day. Yes a major crash is a write off especially on an older car, but the problem is that with cast frames, if they are more likely to be irreparably damaged in a collision, that's more write-offs. That means insurance premiums for these cars will be more costly as well.
It often does if it's severe, but if the frame is just "tweaked" it can often be pulled back into spec with specialzed jigs and equipment. Any comprehensive collision repair shop will have that equipment.
Not unsafe necessarily. The cost of labor is so high in the US that fixing even minor damage might not be cost efficient. Also consider the possible increase in the insurance fees if you continue driving a car after repairs. Other countries have lower cost of labor overall, so it's a profitable (and, hopefully, safe) business for them.
Lots of passed off vehicles to poorer countries tend to be body on frame style. Lots of ford/Toyota trucks, where frame damage can as "simple" as welding steel bar stock or straightening with a basic frame puller.
If a unibody vehicle is totaled from major damage in the US, they get scrapped of nearly every usable part, then crushed and melted down. Not even worth the shipping/hassle to send a smashed up Kia to Central America, let alone Africa. People aren't stupid. They're just as savvy at this, if not more, than we would ever be. Hence the amount of body on frame SUVs and trucks that get salvaged there. Sure, you'll see "beat up" cheap cars there, but they'll pass on anything majorly damaged, cuz even there, it's simply not worth it.
Yup, agreed. In the US the incentives are against repairs, not for. I don't know enough about cars to have an opinion on whether Tesla-style cast bodies will result in more cars being written off with similar damages to other fairly expensive cars.
There’s also enough people willing/able to do the repair themselves to get the car back into drive able condition.
I see this frequently driving through poor, rural communities. Very nice vehicles, with some sort of damage and repairs. You can get a super nice interior and high quality ride if you’re willing to deal with vanity flaws.
Even in the US there are enthusiasts who buy and restore super cars for cheap (relatively speaking). There are several crafty YT channels showing the process from start to finish.
I don't know tbh. I just drive a 10-15 y.o. US vehicle in Poland because the previous owner imported it. Who knows, when I'm done with it, it might even be exported on out of the EU.
i can't imagine what insurance company premiums are going to be when they figure out how much they're going to be paying out for each incident with one of these.
Of course, your question is basically a tautology if you define "major damage" as "that which causes a car to get totaled". The whole concern is that, with these cast bodies, damage that would have been considered fixable or minor in the past now becomes an instant write off.
Not really. Major damage would be damage to the subframes or wheel wells. It's a step right above getting entire axles ripped off. In most situations, for most cars, that will total the car.
I was rear-ended in a new Jeep Wrangler. Damage included a bent frame, crushed rear bumper, bent rear hatch, bent roll cage, bent rear fender, shattered tail light, and a bent floor.
It was nearly $20k in damage. It was repaired. [and I very quickly sold it because I had zero faith in the longevity of the repairs]
Hands down. I haven't personally experienced major damage, but I have bought and know folks to buy many of these written off cars only to have them repaired, certified by the state and put back on the roads.
That doesn’t mean it’s not fixed by someone else after auction and salvage titling assuming it’s a car that’s somewhat desirable. So this is just a move that generates more waste?
I mean, there's certainly rebuilt/salvaged cars, but more often than not people are scammed into buying those from shady AF places.
Lesson is, don't waste your time or money on a unibody car with major damage. Scrap em. It's pointless. And people arguing we need to repair everything even from major damage when it makes zero economic or ecological sense and from those with no experience in the industry is just tiring.
It does lower the bar for what is considered "major damage".
Having a car written off when you need to essentially take the entire thing apart is fairly reasonable, as is not wanting to repair the actual body part itself.
When the car is made out of multiple different parts, a low-speed bump into a bollard or another car might result in the bumper needing to be replaced. Not the cheapest repair, but definitely quite doable and probably not worthy of a complete writeoff. When the entire car is made out of a single cast that very same bump results in the entire body needing to be replaced - and that's just not going to happen.
Those castings have a slot for crush cans that are not welded. If you have a low-speed bump it would crush your bumper and the crush cans behind it, it would not effect the casting.
Literally nobody plans to remove crush cans from the vehicle, even if the whole body is cast.
In my 3rd world home country most cars are bought on copart as "salvage", they get fixed up and usually get ran well above the 100k miles, this change will undoubtedly reduce the opportunity to give new life to salvage cars while making it more dangerous for the people who have no other choice. In the end this will create a lot more waste than we had before, its a shame because Toyota's are the most highly regarded cars where I am from
They are scrapped but then usually resold/exported to a cheaper country where they get fixed up and sold there. Maybe the unicast cars will get a lot of duct tape and Bondo.
I had to fight with my insurance to not have my 2005 model car written off after a fender bender. Thankfully I did because this was just before used car prices skyrocketed.
My car got written off. 11 years old but in good condition, got hit on the rear left corner, sheet metal work was damaged. The tier 1 body shop that the insurance company sent me to quoted about 3/4 of the car's (undamaged) value in repair costs, including replacing most of the left side, the back window among other things, and even $600 worth of paint.
Shopping for a replacement vehicle in the damaged one, various tier 2-3 dealer types said, oh, we could fix that up real nice for $3K, and one of them would have been happy to have the car at the insurance company's quoted value in damaged condition. So you can bet that that thing has by now been auctioned off, fixed up like that and sold, possibly with a "rebuilt" title, at a modest profit, and continues to be used. It was too good to scrap and the damage, while a PITA to fix, was not even remotely structural.
So it's not that insurance companies consign all these written-off cars to the scrap heap. It's just that they don't want to deal with the repairs, and possible post-repair complaints. So just like bad debts, it's sent down the pipe to the people best matched to the job. A broken cast frame would short-circuit this process, causing the car to be scrapped for real and thus raising costs for everyone.
My mum had a 2004 Sonata and it got T-boned with like 3,000km on the odometer. It was like a $17k car brand new, with and they put like $15k of body work (and then hiring a loaner car for a month while doing it) into it. Ran fine for another 150,000km before she traded it in, but I was baffled that the other driver's insurance didn't just say "we're writing it off, go get another one." OTOH, she was so pleased by their willingness to pay without hassle that she switched to that carrier.
Cast metals are rather brittle, normally? Good for complex shapes that may be further refined by machining, and in compression loads, but not in shear or tension. I would think they would shatter in a collision rather than bend like steel.
Also when people hear "cast" they think "cast iron" or cheap appliance broken piece (mostly zinc). They're brittle because of material choice, not because of casting. (Though casting does influence the choice of materials)
Not necessarily. Tesla actually developed a proprietary alloy for their giga casting that removed the need for heat treatment, as the large castings tended to deform during it. On the plus side, also meant they could remove that process step.
Article didn't give any details how Toyota would handle it though.
Indeed, when I heard about the gigapress, I was like that is pretty neat, but when I read it was just casting, and not forging, I was like oh, it's not the *best* solution.
I assumed that the gigapress was a large stamping die. neither casting (melt the metal and pour it into a mold) or forging (shaping softened hot metal), but deforming cold metal in one or more steps using alot of pressure and a very hard mold.
They literally call them castings and have done so since the first time Tesla talked about them. And its still a 'press' its just a casting press not a stamping press. Is complaining about literally everything Musk related now just the default even when it doesn't make even the slightest amount of sense?
Crash safety is unrelated to the problem with "gigacasting", which is that "a huge cast part is almost impossible to repair whereas the traditional folds of stamped metal can be fixed using traditional methods".
Not all metals. The stronger aluminum alloys get their strength from precipitation aging, which gives a lot of similar benefits to forging (via different processes), and because of that cannot be forged very much. They do get stronger when forged, but only slightly, and they break apart if you form them too much.
Cast iron is already used in transmission cases etc, and it does indeed shatter. But it's not because its cast (although it can't be forged even a little; it breaks apart almost like sand), it's because it's actually just a name for an alloy. It's very high carbon (>1%) steel, which makes it very brittle but also very easy to cast. You can cast aluminum or low carbon steel and it will not be brittle at all, particularly if you let it cool slowly.
I'm not sure how it is currently but when I was working in the gigafactory like a year ago they had such a hard time making the cast unibody they just gave up and switched back to making Model Y's the traditional way.
It's interesting how the casting process produces a lighter, weaker, and impossible to repair or chassis. Why can't the blocks be modular and replaceable?
A casting isn't weaker. You can make much more complex shapes with castings. You have much more variety in the thickness on the right points and interduce structural cross members.
There is a reason Tesla cars do so well on safety while been pretty light comparatively.
> Why can't the blocks be modular and replaceable?
Everything is possible. But if you have many independent pieces that are all independently bonded that introduces a whole lot of complexity. Each connection is an additional place for failure. There is a reason every single car welds these pieces together. Its just not smart to try to use fasteners to connect these pieces. Its much harder to design, much harder (and more expensive) to produce, much error prone its likely also heavier.
Like I've said many times, until regulation mitigates the enshittification of vehicles, you will have to pry my dumbcar from my cold dead hands. You want me to buy an electric vehicle? Don't pull shenanigans that disempower me.
I really do miss physical keys. Replacement cost for an Audi key fob is over $700. And it extends to broader market brands. My mom's Mazda replacement fob cost $500. WTF is going on here?
That's the cost for integration with the immobilizer. Car keys and fobs have chips that signal to the onboard computer, and may use a variety of techniques such as rolling codes to make the cars harder to steal. Gone are the days when you can easily hotwire a car by yanking and touching random wires together from the steering column.
Kia and Hyundai are among the last brands to be selling cars without them, and that's the reason they've been targeted so heavily by car thieves.
If you have one key and lost one, you can use the one you have to more easily reprogram the other.
However, if you have lost all of your keys, a technician needs physical access to your car to reprogram everything together.
Add on top of that the licensing cost for the software to do the programming (you don't want random people having easy access to reprogramming your locks after all) . Reprogramming keys is a fairly low-volume sale, especially if you need access to the car to do it (hard to scale volume remotely) so the per-key cost is much higher as a result.
If I owned a Toyota and wanted to buy another Toyota in the future, except Toyota only now makes cars that serve me less than my old one, that's absolutely enshittification. Who said the term is restricted to software?
Because enshittification has a specific meaning. It's really about online services that start being "too good", possibly operating at a loss to gain users. And after they have enough users that are "locked in", they start to get worse to extract more profit from the existing users.
The car examples I gave is already pushing it. But if the new Toyota is worse than yours it's not really enshittification because your car still works just as well, and you're not locked into buying another Toyota next time. That's just them cheaping out.
Does anyone think 99% of the car buyers market cares about cast bodies? Just look at all the folks who bought Tesla's, they don't have a problem buying a car that costs more to insure, waiting for months to get repaired, at the same time happy with poor finishes, paying extra for every possible detail, and never being able to fix them on their own.
Most folks in the car market chase fashion and could care less about quality, dependability (Ford, GM, Chrysler still exist) and longevity. They just make their $600 a month payment and roll over the remainder every 3 years into a new vehicle.
No doubt it's projection on my part but I too assume the majority of car buyers are looking for cheap, reliable new cars and therefore that's where the greatest volume would be, right? Yet manufacturers are moving to higher profit cars. What surprises me is even Chevrolet is ending their low-cost EV which enjoys a hefty subsidy via purchaser tax break.
Instead their next EV will move to a different platform to be consistent with their newer cars which is good but also at a higher price point, which is not. Particularly with that subsidy they could own that low-end EV market; they've had to extend the retirement date of the current car several times due to demand!
But, they're not alone: from the linked article "Last month, 17% of new vehicles sold were under $30,000, compared to 44% five years ago." Which sucks for people who do just want a point-a to point-b vehicle and not a rolling status symbol.
Not to be too cynical about it, but if wrecking a car means totalling a car, that's also another potential sale. At the very least making them less repairable smacks of consumer-hostile moves we've seen in the electronics industry and similarly without right to repair legislation, the manufacturers can do whatever they want. At least for me it's frustrating.
> Toyota anticipates it'll generate 20 percent higher productivity than its competitors, and could halve body assembly time from 10 hours.
This is a nice efficiency gain, but they don’t seem to be constrained by how quickly they can produce cars…as far as I can tell, demand in the market for their product is more based on the cost of the supply, not how quickly they are producing units.
Or are they thinking that by producing units faster the supply will increase enough to reduce prices? Will they allow supply to increase such that individual units become cheaper?
In any case it is bothersome that they would back a group that is against repairing your car…cars aren’t like phones where you can just buy an entire replacement if the screen cracks and if you’re already eyeballing the new model……
Manufacturing cars currently still involves humans. Halving body assembly time also means you only need to pay half the wages for the humans. That's going to significantly reduce their expenses.
This isn't really true. The body assembly is overwhelming automated in any large volume car. Its basically a long assembly line with welding robots and robots holding the pieces. There are few humans involved.
Of course both the large casting machine and the fleet of welding robots need engineers and maintenance.
Its really just cheaper, and the resulting piece is higher strength while being lighter.
One large part is much cheaper to produce than the same section made out of several parts - chiefly because you don't have to spend time and resources on putting it all together.
Also, you can actually use less material since you don't have to reinforce the points where you weld/bolt.
Where I'm from there's a tired old joke, the punchline of which is that the mechanic calls back that the car will be ready in three weeks. Only issue being - the customer came in with a piece of bent aluminium roofing sheet.
My point is that mechanics deal with more challenging problems on a daily basis and it's actually easier to have one bent out of shape piece that costs X, instead of several pieces forming the same section of the car, each bent out of shape in a cascade of damage and costing e.g. 0.6X each.
Personally I paid the most for replacing parts that contained electronics - like a rear bumper with parking sensors.
A name-brand parking sensor can go for as much as a second-hand quarter panel.
Environmentally friendly my ass. Any minor damage and the car will be toast because the insurance company will total it. Even if it gets back on the road it'll have a salvage title, something that's poison to a car and ensures that it ends up either crushed or parted out. These are already problems with unibody cars thanks to how quickly insurance adjusters will take any deformation of the core unibody, even just cosmetic damage like the C-pillar having a dent, and call the car a total loss.
There are more than a few A-body Oldsmobile Cutlass Cieras and Buick Centuries from the late 1980s that I still see driven around where I live. The environmental impact they've had has been far less than any of these cast-body cars will be because an A-body is a cockroach that will never die no matter how many times you hit something with it. They were produced decades ago and have long since offset their initial production impact. Add in all the Chevrolet C-10s, Chevrolet S-10s, Ford Rangers, Suzuki Sidekicks/Geo Trackers, and XJ Jeep Cherokees I see daily and they still have less of an impact environmentally than these disposable cars will have because they can be repaired instead of requiring total replacement.
Eh, even now Toyotas have a low threshold for being totaled, the parts are just so expensive. My 2014 Tacoma was essentially sideswiped hard; repair was estimated at $12,000 but was deemed totalled, insu paid me $17,000. It is now rotting in a junk yard for the past 4 years (I check the old VIN time to time)
Don't feel too bad about your truck in a junkyard. It has probably donated enough parts to keep a dozen other ones on the road with economical scrapped parts.
> Any minor damage and the car will be toast because the insurance company will total it.
Another best part is our currently skyrocketing car insurance - even for people who don't carry collision. Even if you don't contribute to the problem, insurance companies force you to financially support everyone who does.
Don't forget part of the reason a lot of older cars can survive an accident is because they don't have crumble zones. That's great for the structural integrity of the car, not so much for the humans that interact with it. It's better for society to just write the car off and keep people alive than try to keep some smelters a little less busy by killing people off
That’s true of even older cars, but the cars listed above all have crumple zones as did almost all cars from the 70s on.
And older cars definitely fold in crashes just not in predetermined ways that minimize intrusion and injury like modern cars. Generally older cars have far less rigid chassis than modern vehicles.
> The environmental impact they've had has been far less than any of these cast-body cars
Most(85%+) of a car's environmental footprint comes from usage - namely fuel.
And no wonder - a car works itself through approximately 10x its weight in fuel during its lifetime.
A car from the 80s or even 90s will naturally have visibly higher fuel consumption that a modern car and thus keeping it running is actually the more environmentally impactful choice.
On top of that nowadays factories run on a much cleaner grid than in the 90s, so despite there being more tech and sophisticated materials inside, it's actually less environmentally damaging to produce a car than it used to be.
If you want cars made in the US by people making a living wage, something has to give. The demographics of manufacturing workers is already hollowed out, and will only get progressively worse as the years roll on.
I live in Seattle. If you drive a Tesla and get rear ended the wait time for repairs is 6 months. I know multiple friends dealing with this. It’s a major problem. So major that when we bought a new car Tesla was ruled out.
Minor accidents resulting in cars being totaled does what to insurance premiums? Makes them sky-high. There was an article earlier this week how some Tesla owners were facing extreme insurance premium increases and others had their insurance dropped altogether.
All the savings you hear about with regards to EV’s are going to be more than offset by insurance premiums - which means these gigacast vehicles aren’t going to sell well.
> which means these gigacast vehicles aren’t going to sell well.
The Model Y is one of the one of the most sold car in the world and uses more casting then any other vehicle in the world. But why bother with data when one can just make up stuff.
That article has noting todo with castings. It literally doesn't even mention castings. If this owner had damanged his casting it couldn't be repaired for 5k.
The article even talks about how this doesn't just apply to Tesla, so again, this has nothing to do with using castings.
This is also a British articles based no British concern and insurance companies.
Other articles are covering the irreparability of gigacast autos. Stainless steel is the icing on the cake for irreparability (technically it can be repaired, but it requires different tooling and skills - you're not going to be to take your Cyber Truck to a normal body repair shop). All that drives up insurance costs.
So I made an argument and then you sent an unrelated article as counter evidence?
I suggest you read my top level post, to get my overall position.
To make statement about CyberTruck before we have ever seen the internally design and a detailed tear-down talking about its repair-ability is mostly nonsense speculation that I will not take seriously.
It's not speculation that the CyberTruck is made of stainless steel. Tesla has stated as much and we've seen as much. It's not speculation that the CyberTruck utilizes the gigacast manufacturing technique. Tesla has stated as much and Tesla has been advising its investors concerning the new gigacast presses they're using for the CyberTruck (the largest of its kind in the world). We know gigacast vehicles are difficult to repair. We know stainless steel is even more difficult to repair. This isn't speculation, these are simple facts. The article I linked isn't unrelated - it noted that insurers are raising premiums for these kinds of vehicles in the UK and other insurers are downright cancelling their policies. They're simply too expensive to repair and the problem is getting worse. In light of that, I don't see why Toyota would want to follow down that path.
If it turns out that in order to make EVs cheaper to build than combustion cars right now you have to switch to castings because batteries are expensive, then when batteries become much cheaper, will we switch back to the current non-casting-based 'strut and fastener' model?
Also, because Tesla is so popular, is it possible that its attractions have far less to do with the environment and more to do with everything else about the car?
These concerns about the environmental impact of increased write-offs and increased insurance premiums are perfectly understandable, but I wonder if they will stop even a single sale?
No, casting is simply a better technology. Its better no matter what type of propulsion you use. Its just that other car companies, unlike Tesla, were not willing to make the massive investment it required to make truly huge castings. Smaller casting have been in use before on various cars, some Audi had a decently big one on the wheel well.
For Tesla to do this they had to work with a company that made the largest casting and task them with creating a massively larger casting. Tesla material teams also developed its own aluminum alloy that wouldn't bend as much during cooling. This allowed Tesla to not have to dip the castings into a fluid to cool them.
Castings had been used by car companies for a while, sometimes decent size ones around the wheel for example. But Tesla took the idea and put in the effort to take it way further.
They started with doing only half the back, and then bond the two sides. When the company finished development on the larger generation of machines they pioneered doing the whole back piece all at once.
> Also, because Tesla is so popular, is it possible that its attractions have far less to do with the environment and more to do with everything else about the car?
This is clearly the case. People never by things 'just of the environment'. Tesla produces the arguable the best price to return for EVs. At least unless you want a much smaller shorter range car.
Man why do people keep saying this. The normal parts that are replaced by a casting are LITERALLY WELDED TOGETHER. If there is an impact strong enough to bend that piece cast aluminum or welded steel then the car is most likely a right-off. And if not, you can in theory repair both, its just hard for both cases. Naturally the technology used to repair steel welded frames is much more common as its 80 year old technology. Body shops would need different tooling and methods to repair aluminum frames.
And in fact, the aluminum casting is actually more stable. With cast aluminum you can get it into the perfect shape and you can even cast rips and things like that in it. The final piece is a much more optimal shape then you could ever get from welded steel. Companies try to minimize the amount of welds in a design because its costly and increases the size of your body shop.
An just because this articles doesn't make this clear, Tesla still have crushcans integrated in the design and those are perfectly replaceable, just as they are now. So this really only matters when you have front impact so strong that it goes threw the crushcan and damages the massively strong casting.
In such a case, you should be happy for the extra stiffness provided by the casting, because it might make the difference between live and death.
At the end of the day this is a no brainer. You are replacing literally 100s of robots, lots of production time, lots more chance for error and it ends up costing far less. The waste majority of cars, never do repairs on their welded together body structure, this is the extreme minority of cases. Seems to me it makes a whole lot more sense to optimize for the majority of cases, not the vast minority.
> Car companies make their money from selling new cars, not keeping old ones on the road.
I'm interested in how this could be realistically changed. I'm convinced most of the environmental and societal problems caused by economic activity is inevitable at scale, where an organisation's behaviour becomes dominated more by underlying economic rules than any principles it's originators may have had at a younger age or smaller scale.
It also shouldn't necessarily be so specific as "must maximise vehicle life", it really depends, because it's not impossible that with the right manufacturing and recycling techniques shorter vehicle life could bring down the total environmental and societal cost. The question is how to make that economically interesting to the manufacturers, e.g what if each manufacturer was responsible, end-to-end, for the recycling of it's own vehicles... shorter vehicle life could mean more sales, but could also mean more recycling. If the process is optimised for that then it could be profitable and cheap for the consumer and good for the environment, but if not it will hurt their bottom line.
I think something missed in this discussion is the fact that an EV is so much simpler than an ICE vehicle* that costs will inevitably come down.
Many people believe that decent models will be considerably cheaper than today’s Tercels, Civics, Corollas, etc. in as little as 2-3 years.
Today you can buy a brand new Tesla Model 3 for $39,000 and with the U.S. tax credits that drops to $31,500. If you are in states like NY with additional credits, $26,500.
So it is already around the price levels of Accords, Camrys, etc. on the existing Tesla platform.
Tesla’s goal in their next platform is to cut the price to manufacture in HALF, and there is good reason to believe they will achieve that. The aspirational goals Toyota is claiming in this article, if achieved, will help them get closer to Tesla’s current architecture, which will be a great step forward.
As manufacturing becomes more efficient and prices drop, it will indeed make less and less sense to do major repairs, which are only getting more expensive.
* EVs are simpler when they have a proper hardware/software integration and over-the-air updates. Continuing the current industry practice of stringing together 150 off-the-shelf ECUs is one reason why most companies are losing money on their EVs and will never keep up with those who understand the software-defined car.
I've become really skeptical of all the auto magazines that find ways to criticize Tesla in every article.
The most easily imaginable conspiracy theory is that Tesla has pioneered techniques that let it manufacture electric vehicles with good range at a reasonable cost, catching other auto manufacturers flat-footed. By continually improving and lowering prices, Tesla makes it nearly impossible for others to keep up. So the traditional auto makers deploy FUD to try to buy time.
Better conspiracy theory: auto magazines/websites make most of their revenue from advertising and while car makers spend around $10B/year on advertising Tesla spends nothing.
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[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadRaise your hand if you’ve ever had a car NOT be written off after “major damage”. The industry already doesn’t bother to fix cars, they just get scrapped, so I don’t see what the actual difference is.
Sounds like extra steps for the profit of middle men
Well to get the owner of the written-off car installed into a new vehicle of course! With a whole new loan and likely a higher insurance premium esp. if they "upgraded" in the process.
The people who buy salvage titled cars are usually happy to drive a car that doesn’t work quite right if they get a killer deal for it.
A newish car, a minor crash, bumper, hood, a front light or two, couple of airbags... at ~1500eur per light, 2-3k for original hood, 2-3k for airbags, body work, and low eurotax estimate of the price of the car, your repair cost is easily above 70% of the "car value".
A few trips to the dump, some aftermarket parts and someone to do the work for cheap, and you've got a drivable car.
- what it would cost them to repair it (including the risk of having to get additional work done, etc)
- what the car was worth minus what they can sell it for at auction.
If the values get close, they total the car. Then someone else buys it: maybe for parts, or maybe to repair it to a standard that the original owner wouldn't have been happy with.
Write-off is about insurance policies, and whether it is cheaper to repair damage to the standard committed to by the insurer within the parameters (e. g., new original manufacturer parts) in the insurance contact or to pay the amount the insurer is committed to pay in the alternative.
It is only tangentially related to whether it is econonically viable to restore the vehicle to usable condition.
The other thing is that generally, a person is free to buy their car back from the insurance company instead of taking the cash from the totaling. That is when they will discover they can't just send it to a shop and get it repaired for any reasonable amount, plus the salvage title means no one else wants it.
You send it for an estimate. If that estimate is too high, insurance gives you a check then sells the car as a salvage.
So if you think about it - if you first decide you need to go down the "structural battery" route to save cost and weight, you've already lost repairability if the frame is bent. Then moving to a cast frame doesn't really change anything.
https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/tesla-structural-battery-pack...
Structural packs are nothing new, lots of EV always had structural packs.
What Tesla is doing in the newer Model Y (called 'Structural Pack') is actually structural cells. That's the innovation. Where the cells themselves are glued together and sandwiched in a pack. So the cells themselves act as vertical enforcers. The whole back is basically filled with structural foam.
The only other company that is doing something like that is BYD but that is quite different as those are really big Prismatic cells stacked up.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/next-s...
This would also lighten EVs, which has a tremendous number of benefits.
AFAICT the actual batteries inside the "structural battery" are separate much smaller cells [1] that can at least be recovered from the bent frame and reused if undamaged.
Consider four factors: normal car performance, car's safety in a crash, car's repairability after a crash, and car's price. They all work against each other; no wonder that repairability is sacrificed to optimize the other three. (In a military vehicle the price is usually sacrificed instead.)
[1]: https://insideevs.com/news/323682/rare-look-inside-a-tesla-m...
Do you think just because the pack itself is not structural it just not gone get unharmed?
And by the way, structural pack doesn't mean its not replaceable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKPfy5djvLc
If the damage is bad enough o require a frame fix, it’s very likely there’s significant damage to other parts of the car.
I see this frequently driving through poor, rural communities. Very nice vehicles, with some sort of damage and repairs. You can get a super nice interior and high quality ride if you’re willing to deal with vanity flaws.
Of course, your question is basically a tautology if you define "major damage" as "that which causes a car to get totaled". The whole concern is that, with these cast bodies, damage that would have been considered fixable or minor in the past now becomes an instant write off.
I was rear-ended in a new Jeep Wrangler. Damage included a bent frame, crushed rear bumper, bent rear hatch, bent roll cage, bent rear fender, shattered tail light, and a bent floor.
It was nearly $20k in damage. It was repaired. [and I very quickly sold it because I had zero faith in the longevity of the repairs]
Having a car written off when you need to essentially take the entire thing apart is fairly reasonable, as is not wanting to repair the actual body part itself.
When the car is made out of multiple different parts, a low-speed bump into a bollard or another car might result in the bumper needing to be replaced. Not the cheapest repair, but definitely quite doable and probably not worthy of a complete writeoff. When the entire car is made out of a single cast that very same bump results in the entire body needing to be replaced - and that's just not going to happen.
Literally nobody plans to remove crush cans from the vehicle, even if the whole body is cast.
See: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla...
Shopping for a replacement vehicle in the damaged one, various tier 2-3 dealer types said, oh, we could fix that up real nice for $3K, and one of them would have been happy to have the car at the insurance company's quoted value in damaged condition. So you can bet that that thing has by now been auctioned off, fixed up like that and sold, possibly with a "rebuilt" title, at a modest profit, and continues to be used. It was too good to scrap and the damage, while a PITA to fix, was not even remotely structural.
So it's not that insurance companies consign all these written-off cars to the scrap heap. It's just that they don't want to deal with the repairs, and possible post-repair complaints. So just like bad debts, it's sent down the pipe to the people best matched to the job. A broken cast frame would short-circuit this process, causing the car to be scrapped for real and thus raising costs for everyone.
Vehicle was repaired, frame was able to be straightened on a rack.
They claim that due to material advances and such, casting can meet or exceed the strength of typical 'forged' steel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forging
Model Y has been using casting for a few years now.
It's also among the safest cars in a crash: https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/956/tesla-model-y-receives...
In this particular test it was THE safest cars ever tested by Australian ANCAP.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/tesla-gigacasting-a-cars-entir...
Cast iron is already used in transmission cases etc, and it does indeed shatter. But it's not because its cast (although it can't be forged even a little; it breaks apart almost like sand), it's because it's actually just a name for an alloy. It's very high carbon (>1%) steel, which makes it very brittle but also very easy to cast. You can cast aluminum or low carbon steel and it will not be brittle at all, particularly if you let it cool slowly.
See: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla...
There is a reason Tesla cars do so well on safety while been pretty light comparatively.
> Why can't the blocks be modular and replaceable?
Everything is possible. But if you have many independent pieces that are all independently bonded that introduces a whole lot of complexity. Each connection is an additional place for failure. There is a reason every single car welds these pieces together. Its just not smart to try to use fasteners to connect these pieces. Its much harder to design, much harder (and more expensive) to produce, much error prone its likely also heavier.
Kia and Hyundai are among the last brands to be selling cars without them, and that's the reason they've been targeted so heavily by car thieves.
If you have one key and lost one, you can use the one you have to more easily reprogram the other.
However, if you have lost all of your keys, a technician needs physical access to your car to reprogram everything together.
Add on top of that the licensing cost for the software to do the programming (you don't want random people having easy access to reprogramming your locks after all) . Reprogramming keys is a fairly low-volume sale, especially if you need access to the car to do it (hard to scale volume remotely) so the per-key cost is much higher as a result.
p * (cost of theft via roll onto trailer) << $700
p = probability of roll onto trailer theft
Using these casts, regardless of how good or bad they are, is not enshittification.
The car examples I gave is already pushing it. But if the new Toyota is worse than yours it's not really enshittification because your car still works just as well, and you're not locked into buying another Toyota next time. That's just them cheaping out.
Most folks in the car market chase fashion and could care less about quality, dependability (Ford, GM, Chrysler still exist) and longevity. They just make their $600 a month payment and roll over the remainder every 3 years into a new vehicle.
Instead their next EV will move to a different platform to be consistent with their newer cars which is good but also at a higher price point, which is not. Particularly with that subsidy they could own that low-end EV market; they've had to extend the retirement date of the current car several times due to demand!
But, they're not alone: from the linked article "Last month, 17% of new vehicles sold were under $30,000, compared to 44% five years ago." Which sucks for people who do just want a point-a to point-b vehicle and not a rolling status symbol.
https://www.businessinsider.com/cheapest-cars-abandoned-by-a...
Not to be too cynical about it, but if wrecking a car means totalling a car, that's also another potential sale. At the very least making them less repairable smacks of consumer-hostile moves we've seen in the electronics industry and similarly without right to repair legislation, the manufacturers can do whatever they want. At least for me it's frustrating.
This is a nice efficiency gain, but they don’t seem to be constrained by how quickly they can produce cars…as far as I can tell, demand in the market for their product is more based on the cost of the supply, not how quickly they are producing units.
Or are they thinking that by producing units faster the supply will increase enough to reduce prices? Will they allow supply to increase such that individual units become cheaper?
In any case it is bothersome that they would back a group that is against repairing your car…cars aren’t like phones where you can just buy an entire replacement if the screen cracks and if you’re already eyeballing the new model……
Of course both the large casting machine and the fleet of welding robots need engineers and maintenance.
Its really just cheaper, and the resulting piece is higher strength while being lighter.
Its btw the official product name:
https://www.idragroup.com/en/gigapress
Also, you can actually use less material since you don't have to reinforce the points where you weld/bolt.
My point is that mechanics deal with more challenging problems on a daily basis and it's actually easier to have one bent out of shape piece that costs X, instead of several pieces forming the same section of the car, each bent out of shape in a cascade of damage and costing e.g. 0.6X each.
Personally I paid the most for replacing parts that contained electronics - like a rear bumper with parking sensors.
A name-brand parking sensor can go for as much as a second-hand quarter panel.
There are more than a few A-body Oldsmobile Cutlass Cieras and Buick Centuries from the late 1980s that I still see driven around where I live. The environmental impact they've had has been far less than any of these cast-body cars will be because an A-body is a cockroach that will never die no matter how many times you hit something with it. They were produced decades ago and have long since offset their initial production impact. Add in all the Chevrolet C-10s, Chevrolet S-10s, Ford Rangers, Suzuki Sidekicks/Geo Trackers, and XJ Jeep Cherokees I see daily and they still have less of an impact environmentally than these disposable cars will have because they can be repaired instead of requiring total replacement.
Another best part is our currently skyrocketing car insurance - even for people who don't carry collision. Even if you don't contribute to the problem, insurance companies force you to financially support everyone who does.
And older cars definitely fold in crashes just not in predetermined ways that minimize intrusion and injury like modern cars. Generally older cars have far less rigid chassis than modern vehicles.
Most(85%+) of a car's environmental footprint comes from usage - namely fuel.
And no wonder - a car works itself through approximately 10x its weight in fuel during its lifetime.
A car from the 80s or even 90s will naturally have visibly higher fuel consumption that a modern car and thus keeping it running is actually the more environmentally impactful choice.
On top of that nowadays factories run on a much cleaner grid than in the 90s, so despite there being more tech and sophisticated materials inside, it's actually less environmentally damaging to produce a car than it used to be.
No because cars with castings still have crush cans. Only a crash hard enough to go threw the crush cans and bend the frame will require totaling.
And that is not a small crash. The castings are very strong and hard to bend, being aluminum that is specifically cast in a shape to be strong.
You can see the crush cans here: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla...
All the savings you hear about with regards to EV’s are going to be more than offset by insurance premiums - which means these gigacast vehicles aren’t going to sell well.
That's not actually what's happening.
> which means these gigacast vehicles aren’t going to sell well.
The Model Y is one of the one of the most sold car in the world and uses more casting then any other vehicle in the world. But why bother with data when one can just make up stuff.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/sep/30/the-quotes-wer...).
The article even talks about how this doesn't just apply to Tesla, so again, this has nothing to do with using castings.
This is also a British articles based no British concern and insurance companies.
I suggest you read my top level post, to get my overall position.
To make statement about CyberTruck before we have ever seen the internally design and a detailed tear-down talking about its repair-ability is mostly nonsense speculation that I will not take seriously.
Also, because Tesla is so popular, is it possible that its attractions have far less to do with the environment and more to do with everything else about the car?
These concerns about the environmental impact of increased write-offs and increased insurance premiums are perfectly understandable, but I wonder if they will stop even a single sale?
For Tesla to do this they had to work with a company that made the largest casting and task them with creating a massively larger casting. Tesla material teams also developed its own aluminum alloy that wouldn't bend as much during cooling. This allowed Tesla to not have to dip the castings into a fluid to cool them.
Castings had been used by car companies for a while, sometimes decent size ones around the wheel for example. But Tesla took the idea and put in the effort to take it way further.
They started with doing only half the back, and then bond the two sides. When the company finished development on the larger generation of machines they pioneered doing the whole back piece all at once.
See: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla...
> Also, because Tesla is so popular, is it possible that its attractions have far less to do with the environment and more to do with everything else about the car?
This is clearly the case. People never by things 'just of the environment'. Tesla produces the arguable the best price to return for EVs. At least unless you want a much smaller shorter range car.
And in fact, the aluminum casting is actually more stable. With cast aluminum you can get it into the perfect shape and you can even cast rips and things like that in it. The final piece is a much more optimal shape then you could ever get from welded steel. Companies try to minimize the amount of welds in a design because its costly and increases the size of your body shop.
See here: https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla...
An just because this articles doesn't make this clear, Tesla still have crushcans integrated in the design and those are perfectly replaceable, just as they are now. So this really only matters when you have front impact so strong that it goes threw the crushcan and damages the massively strong casting.
In such a case, you should be happy for the extra stiffness provided by the casting, because it might make the difference between live and death.
At the end of the day this is a no brainer. You are replacing literally 100s of robots, lots of production time, lots more chance for error and it ends up costing far less. The waste majority of cars, never do repairs on their welded together body structure, this is the extreme minority of cases. Seems to me it makes a whole lot more sense to optimize for the majority of cases, not the vast minority.
For those that want to see the process in operations, this is a nice video: https://youtu.be/BwoiFC-HwPE?si=R9sRMEDkgDJqBMew&t=306
I'm interested in how this could be realistically changed. I'm convinced most of the environmental and societal problems caused by economic activity is inevitable at scale, where an organisation's behaviour becomes dominated more by underlying economic rules than any principles it's originators may have had at a younger age or smaller scale.
It also shouldn't necessarily be so specific as "must maximise vehicle life", it really depends, because it's not impossible that with the right manufacturing and recycling techniques shorter vehicle life could bring down the total environmental and societal cost. The question is how to make that economically interesting to the manufacturers, e.g what if each manufacturer was responsible, end-to-end, for the recycling of it's own vehicles... shorter vehicle life could mean more sales, but could also mean more recycling. If the process is optimised for that then it could be profitable and cheap for the consumer and good for the environment, but if not it will hurt their bottom line.
Many people believe that decent models will be considerably cheaper than today’s Tercels, Civics, Corollas, etc. in as little as 2-3 years.
Today you can buy a brand new Tesla Model 3 for $39,000 and with the U.S. tax credits that drops to $31,500. If you are in states like NY with additional credits, $26,500.
So it is already around the price levels of Accords, Camrys, etc. on the existing Tesla platform.
Tesla’s goal in their next platform is to cut the price to manufacture in HALF, and there is good reason to believe they will achieve that. The aspirational goals Toyota is claiming in this article, if achieved, will help them get closer to Tesla’s current architecture, which will be a great step forward.
As manufacturing becomes more efficient and prices drop, it will indeed make less and less sense to do major repairs, which are only getting more expensive.
* EVs are simpler when they have a proper hardware/software integration and over-the-air updates. Continuing the current industry practice of stringing together 150 off-the-shelf ECUs is one reason why most companies are losing money on their EVs and will never keep up with those who understand the software-defined car.
For a great deep dive on how Tesla has created their software-defined car architecture check out https://youtu.be/fUCgLCbX_18?si=X9-s_aNLyrunmGHi
The most easily imaginable conspiracy theory is that Tesla has pioneered techniques that let it manufacture electric vehicles with good range at a reasonable cost, catching other auto manufacturers flat-footed. By continually improving and lowering prices, Tesla makes it nearly impossible for others to keep up. So the traditional auto makers deploy FUD to try to buy time.
But that's just a theory.
Here’s a picture of the Ford casting machine under construction/testing at Idra:
https://twitter.com/lucagrecoita/status/1712112497673568738