Tesla Model Y Giant Casting Machine Already in Fremont Factory

A Tesla Model Y giant casting machine was spotted at Fremont factory, California. This indicates that the company will soon significantly accelerate the production of Model Y to meet strong demand.

Tesla strives to produce high-quality vehicles as efficiently as possible. One area of focus for the company is increasing efficiency in the car body manufacturing process.

The EV maker will employ its new aluminum casting process--for the first time ever for any vehicle--on Model Y. The automaker plans to wean from casting 70 parts to four parts, and then ultimately to just one. Tesla CEO Elon Musk says:

"We're moving to an aluminum casting instead of a series of stamped pieces. We'll go from 70 parts to 4, then 1 with a reduction in weight, improvement in MBH, reduction in cost, and a significant drop in capital expenditure for all the robots that used to put 70 parts together."

Tesla made several significant manufacturing improvements for the Model Y production program, including the creation of a gigantic new casting machine to produce most of the Model Y frame in one piece.

Fairly recently, the company published the patent “Multi-Directional Unibody Casting Machine for a Vehicle Frame and Associated Methods," which discloses a new casting machine that Tesla plans to use for Model Y.

This design will: “reduce build time, operation costs, costs of manufacturing, factory footprint, factory operating costs, tooling costs, and/or quantity of equipment.” The automaker notes that it will reduce the number of casting machines required to build a vehicle frame and that it could even build “a complete or substantially complete” frame itself.

Tesla has unveiled its giant Model Y casting machine in Giga Shanghai. A photo of the gargantuan piece of machinery, as well as robots for the upcoming Model Y production line, was included in the electric car maker’s recently-released Q2 2020 Update Letter.

Now the same machine has been spotted at Fremont. Tesmanian received an exclusive photo of the giant casting machine for the production of Model Y in the Fremont factory.

The same machine will be installed in every Tesla factory, which will significantly improve the quality of Model Y, increase production speed, and reduce costs. This will enable Tesla to lower the prices of its vehicles and accelerate expansion to all automotive markets in the world.

Article edited by @SmokeyShorts, you can follow him on Twitter