Volvo has signed an agreement with Chinese-owned Italian press maker IDRA for two 9,000-ton gigapresses. It plans to install these gigapresses in the new Slovakian EV plant. Gigacasting aims to simplify component manufacturing and cost, but there are questions about the quality and safety of the process’s resulting parts.
In September of this year, news broke that Toyota would be using gigacasting to reduce the cost of its EVs, and now IDRA, the company that pioneered the gigapresses needed for the process, has announced that it has signed an agreement with Volvo to supply two 9,000-ton gigapresses for the carmaker’s new plant in Košice, Slovakia.
One of Tesla’s most notable achievements on the road to delivering affordable EVs is the advent of super-sized casting, which has become known as gigacasting. The idea is that by casting larger components of the car as one piece of aluminium, rather than welding a collection of smaller pieces together, car manufacturers can save on assembly cost and time.
It is estimated that gigacasting can reduce individual component manufacturing costs by up to 40% and reduce operating costs, since fewer machines need to be maintained.
That said, there are still questions about the quality of parts made with the gigacasting process, as complaints of Tesla Model Y vehicles with cracked castings and other manufacturing defects have become commonplace online.
Whether these flaws are inherent to the gigacasting process or simply as a result of lax quality control is unclear, but they will certainly be of concern to Volvo, a company that has to uphold a reputation around safety.
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Julian van der Merwe – Magazine & Specialist News Writer – 448 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2022
My interest in tech started in high school, rooting and flashing my Motorola Defy, but I really fell down the rabbit hole when I realised I could overclock the i7 930 in my Gigabyte pre-built PC. This tinkering addiction eventually lead me to study product design in university. I think tech should improve the lives of the people using it, no matter the field. I like to read and write about laptops, smartphones, software and trends in technology.
Julian van der Merwe, 2023-11- 9 (Update: 2023-11- 9)