Musk was playing with a toy Model S, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), when an idea came to him:
It looked like a miniaturized copy of the real car, and when he took it apart he saw that it even had a suspension inside. But the entire underbody of the car had been die cast as one piece of metal. At a meeting of his team that day, Musk pulled out the toy and put it on the white conference room table. “Why can’t we do that?” he asked.
One of the engineers pointed out the obvious, that an actual car underbody is much bigger. There were no casting machines to handle something that size. That answer didn’t satisfy Musk. “Go figure out how to do it,” he said. “Ask for a bigger casting machine. It’s not as if that would break the laws of physics.”
Both he and his executives called the six major casting companies, five of whom dismissed the concept. But a company called Idra Presse in Italy, which specialized in high-pressure die-casting machines, agreed to take on the challenge of building very large machines that would be able to churn out the entire rear and front underbodies for the Model Y. “We did the world’s largest casting machine,” Afshar says. “It’s a six-thousand-ton one for the Model Y, and we will also use a nine-thousand-ton one for Cybertruck.”
The machines inject bursts of molten aluminum into a cold casting mold, which can spit out in just eighty seconds an entire chassis that used to contain more than a hundred parts that had to be welded, riveted, or bonded together. The old process produced gaps, rattles, and leaks. “So it went from a horrible nightmare to something that is crazy cheap and easy and fast,” Musk says.
The process reinforced Musk’s appreciation for the toy industry. “They have to produce things very quickly and cheaply without flaws, and manufacture them all by Christmas, or there will be sad faces.”
[…]
“Precision is not expensive,” he says. “It’s mostly about caring. Do you care to make it precise? Then you can make it precise.”
Except that a large, one piece casting has to be completely replaced when damaged (the structural integrity will be compromised, or it might even be completely broken) whereas a assembly made of sheet metal welded and stamped together can be, within reasonable tolerances, pulled back into shape in a body shop.
Elon needs to remember toy cars don’t go out on the road and get hit by other toy cars at 20, 30, 40 or more MPH.
The difference between high quality German and Japanese consumer products and mediocre American and Chinese consumer products is the German/Japanese culture vs. the American/Chinese culture.
There’s a good book, American Steel, about the early days of Nucor and their pioneering installation of the first continuous casting machine in a US steel mill.
Mack has it right. Being able to replace/service automobile bits comes in handy if you take them on the road.
Sykes perhaps has little experience with contemporary German automobiles. Absolute trash, reliability & repair-wise. That reasonably-priced German sedan with 50k miles? Run from it in financial terror. Nothing like the German autos I owned in the 1980s.
Affordable repairability of the kind of damage cars tend to receive from accidents has not been in the economic interests of manufacturers for a long time, being something they can pass on to the insurance industry which can pass on the costs easier due to mandatory coverage. The typical body shop price to get even minor cosmetic dings and scratches fixed has exploded in recent years, far above even the plentiful examples from all those “The Inflation Is Real” memes. I see a lot more purportedly “affluent” people just accepting the ugliness and driving around that way with the expectation that they were going to drive the thing until the end of its life anyway.