October’s issue includes our annual 20 Questions feature. You can find this and 19 other questions–and answers–there.
It’s been six years since Local Motors debuted the Strati, a crude but drivable 3-D-printed car. At that point, the company was building a factory in Knoxville, Tennessee, and planning to take 3-D printing from prototyping to production—not just for its own vehicles but for the big automakers as well. That vision is being realized, if slowly.
Local’s main product, an automated shuttle named Olli, is 80 percent printed. The production and milling of Olli’s printed portions take about 9.5 hours to complete in Local’s 50,000-square-foot “Microfactory,” which is a fraction of the size of a typical assembly plant.
Though the law doesn’t require it, Local has nonetheless run crash tests to prove the energy-dissipation potential of printed structures and to refine its design. In the latest test, a crash at 35 mph showed a 253 percent reduction in the g-force spike and attenuation compared with a 25-mph crash test performed 18 months earlier. But the company is still struggling to convince OEMs that 3-D printing is the future of manufacturing and not just a means for cranking out prototype parts.
Local says its manufacturing process saves 40 percent in energy usage compared with stamping and welding a body. But the money saved in tooling and energy costs isn’t enough for carmakers to take notice, as 3-D-printed parts still take significantly longer to manufacture. In other words, printing cars has advantages in low-volume production, but the lure of additive manufacturing isn’t enough to overcome a century of assembly-line inertia. At least not yet.
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