It went from one piece to three.
Car manufacturers typically assemble the underbody from hundreds of individual parts. But Tesla was a leader in using huge presses to die-cast large parts, with the goal of eventually producing the entire underbody in one piece. The aim was to simplify the process and at the same time drastically reduce manufacturing costs.
Tesla has also promoted its so-called “unboxed” manufacturing process, in which parts are assembled in special areas of a factory and then all put together at the end. It was promised that the process would speed up car manufacturing while cutting costs in half.
But now the company is reportedly sticking with the manufacturing process it uses for its Model Y crossover and Cybertruck vehicles, in which the underbody is composed of three parts: two Gigacast front and rear parts and an aluminum middle part Steel where the battery is stored, Reuters says.
The news is the latest low point in the roller coaster ride Tesla has been on since the start of the year, when the company’s CEO Elon Musk warned of slower sales amid increasing competition in its two main markets, the United States and China. Since then, the company has laid off more than 10 percent of its global workforce, lost several top executives and reported profits that fell short of even the direst forecasts of some Wall Street analysts.
High hopes have been pinned on the company’s upcoming affordable electric vehicle, the so-called $25,000 “Model 2.” But then Reuters reported last month that Musk had abandoned the project, preferring to put the company’s resources into a fully autonomous robotaxi.
Tesla has since reiterated its plan to make more affordable electric vehicles, but Musk declined to provide further details on the company’s recent earnings call. In its Q1 report, Tesla said its next-generation models will “leverage aspects of the next-generation platform as well as aspects of our current platforms and can be produced on the same assembly lines as our current vehicle lineup.”
It wasn’t clear whether the cheaper models would be an entirely new vehicle or just cheaper versions of the Model 3 and Y.
Asked about Tesla’s gigacasting innovations in the context of its plans for more affordable electric vehicles and whether he feared the process would be copied by its Chinese competitors, Musk turned to his favorite topic: autonomy.
“We should be viewed as an AI robotics company,” he said. “If you value Tesla the same way you value a car company… that’s just the wrong framework.”