- Slate won’t use gigacasting to build its upcoming $20,000 truck.
- Pioneered by Tesla, gigacasting is a new manufacturing technique that can reduce costs and complexity.
- The automaker says that its cost savings are so great elsewhere that it likely doesn’t need to do this.
Slate, the Saturn-like EV startup, is building a name for itself extremely quickly among EV aficionados. After all, it’s doing the thing that most automakers wouldn’t dare to attempt to do: launch a new EV brand with a $20,000 truck with as few features as possible. Sounds wild—especially in a world where BEVs are synonymous with expensive luxury cars.
Even still, Slate is dead-set on using its Jeff Bezos-bucks to accomplish its mission. And it’s going to do that without using jumping on the automotive manufacturing hypetrain of gigacasting. That might seem a bit odd, especially since gigacasting promises to revolutionize auto production by reducing costs and complexity. But Slate tells us that there’s a method behind its madness.
Photo by: Tim Levin/InsideEVs
Before we get too far into this, let’s talk about what gigacasting is and what it looks to improve on.
A car is built using a ton of stamped parts. To create these parts, a sheet of metal is fed into a machine that sandwiches it between a die and squeezes it until it forms a specific shape. This is great for smaller parts, but when you’re building something larger (like the underpinnings of a vehicle), these pieces may need to be fastened together using rivets or welding.
Gigacasting, on the other hand, is taking molten metal and using a High-Pressure Die Casting (HPDC) machine to force the liquid metal into a mold. Tesla pioneered this technology and remains arguably its most vocal proponent, but the rest of the auto industry is rapidly chasing it too.
It allows for the creation of complex metal parts without the need to manually fasten each individual stamped part one by one. In Tesla’s case, gigacasting allowed Tesla to eliminate 370 parts from the Model 3, all while reducing weight by 10% and improving efficiency.
Photo by: Tesla
171 stamped parts and 1,600 welds were eliminated by the use of two parts created by Gigacasting.
One key metric in automotive manufacturing is cost per minute. That figure is the time it takes a worker or piece of machinery to change the form, fit, or function of a vehicle. You know the saying “time is money”? It’s extremely true in manufacturing and is something that automakers are willing to pay industrial engineers big bucks to cut down on.
Gigacasting reduces that cost significantly by optimizing equipment (think reducing the number of robots needed to assemble panels or welders to fasten them together), factory space, and even enabling waste to be easily recycled.
That’s the good, but what about the bad? Well, that all comes down to cost—and that’s where Slate looked at the tech and shook its head
“Gigacasting takes out complexity in parts but adds complexity in engineering and cost,” a Slate spokesperson told InsideEVs. “Slate engineering and manufacturing focused on taking out what’s unnecessary and delivering a radically affordable vehicle.”
Translation: We don’t need a fancy metal-squirting machine to solve a problem we didn’t already have.
It turns out that gigacasting is really expensive, at least on a small scale. Think $7.5 million (or more) for a single machine and its associated tooling. It’s not just the cost of the equipment that adds to the expense, either. The engineering behind it is also a significant price driver, all the way down to the small army of metallurgists who babysit the exotic alloys used in the mold.
It’s not like you can just smelt down steel and feed it into the HPDC machine for casting. Well, you could, but the results might not be ideal. These machines need to use alloys that flow extremely well to avoid air pockets and other casting defects that could otherwise render a part unusable. According to Forbes, the cost of these alloys can be two to three times as high as regular steel used in stamped parts.
Slate says it can justify the added uptick in manufacturing complexity because its vehicle assembly is “inherently less complex.” A company spokesperson tells us that Slate has just 500 end-items—a manufactured component ready to install as part of the assembly process—delivered to its plant for vehicle production.
Most car factories have around 2,500 unique end-items for each vehicle, according to Slate. Fewer parts work out to a lower cost per minute, which means that Slate can repurpose some of that saved cost into the time that would be reduced by Gigacasting.
Admittedly, Slate’s minimalist approach feels borderline uncool by modern EV standards. No giant 48-inch screen, no origami metal folding exoskeleton, no zero-to-60 mph run in 1.9 seconds, and no gigacasting.
It certainly won’t win the new automaker any points with the tech bro manufacturing guild. But that’s not who this truck is meant to win over—it’s for the consumers.
It’s for the folks who want a minimalistic A-to-B commuter that just happens to be battery-powered and won’t break the bank. Or, maybe those who desire the capabilities of a pickup, but want the footprint of a Chevy S-10 from the late 1990s and not a modern Ford F-150 that barely fits in their garage. Sure, it’s not a revolutionary manufacturing process, but it doesn’t need to be.
And in today’s auto industry, well, that feels revolutionary.
