You can often find meaning in what a car manufacturer not Participation. If you haven’t heard it yet, Ford has just announced that by 2027 it will make a whole new, Moonshot Electric Pick-up that will cost $ 30,000 and will use much fewer parts and only needs 60 percent of the time to produce the F-150 and the expedition on the same Louisville, Kentucky, Assembly Facility. But there is no reason to think that Ford has invested in reinvestment for several years to only renew how they build cars in that one facility.
As General Motors did in its factory NUL facility outside Detroit, Ford’s idea will have to reconsider the assembly process in Louisville, have overflow effects on everything that Ford has. It must absolutely. And the reason has much less to do with GM and much more to do with Chinese brands that eat in the sale of every car manufacturer worldwide. This is not about American buyers. It is about the global car industry and its survival.
Available models
Ford
- Set up
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June 16, 1903
- Founder
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Henry Ford
- Headquarters
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Dearborn, Michigan, USA
- Ownership of
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Publicly traded
- Current CEO
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Jim Farley
Job 1: Make it simple. Stupid simple.
Complexity is expensive. I have toured the huge Louisville Assembly Plant from Ford. It is a labyrinth. There are robot wassers and lines that swing hundreds of meters, with workstations always for assembly and subassemblage. The plants of most old car manufacturers are just as Byzantine. So I don’t throw a shadow to Ford. But every stop on the road costs Ford money. Ford officials said that the most expensive part of their EVs is currently the battery. That is incorrect. It’s people.
To compete with Chinese car manufacturers such as BYD and GEYY, Ford must increase the production speed and reduce labor in every phase of assembly. Ford cannot say that because the trade union employees would get angry. But the core is that Ford – like every global car manufacturer – reduces the production time and the complexity of every car they build.
Ford’s solution is Tesla’s solution
How do you make a car faster? Reconcil the number of parts for one. Tesla calls how they make chassis gigacastering because: silicon valley. But the essence of the idea is to unite a complex series of welding and rivets or binding in a single, cast unit. It is more difficult than you would guess, because it requires a series of complex forms that normally require only a small amount of tooling per section and absorb all these contours in a single cast.
According to ReutersTesla’s solution was to print the casts 3-D. That also allowed rapid iteration during development.
Remember: Tooling is incredibly expensive. Carm makers like to “freeze” a design far before production, to prevent them from having to change tools. But that can also lead to a car that is already outdated when it finally goes on sale, because planning and production tools are so time-consuming. If you can print 3D printing changes in the cast, you can continue deeper with the production of the production date. And you can make run Changes. This is really radical: imagine a world where a new model debuts every few years, and even an existing model is slowly but surely, constantly better.
The Toyota Way
Toyota is fairly famous because it constantly adjusted his “just-in-time” production process. The whole of the car manufacturers in the world has chased this model to lower their own costs. Now Toyota works with BYD and how they get their bodies gigacast. Toyota is for Ford for Ford. In 2023 they announced that their future EVs (the first will debut this coming year) will be assembled with the help of gigacasting and, no surprise, they have a main body that is completely cast. As an example, Toyota says that the rear part of the outgoing BZ4x uses 86 plate metals and 33 press processes. But their new BEV -Montage is cast in one piece.
The Ford Way … is the slate way
Ford says that the upcoming pick -up will use a quarter of the parts of a typical pick -up and only 33 percent of the number of welding, and half of the fasteners. It is no coincidence, when I visited Slate earlier this summer, they explained that they had ruthlessly studied the versatile nature of forms in a legacy car. Their goal was to make every part of the slate as simple as possible. Although they will not (yet) get the frames of their truck Gigacast, both Ford and Slate attack the same idea: asking why a facet of the vehicle should be complex and first think of the tools and assembly, instead of working back in the puzzle of how to connect part of a supplier.
The enormous advantage of Ford and Toyota
Unlike Slate, or even Tesla, who are currently well established, Toyota and Ford have a completely different mindset. As car manufacturers with a long history, they think of existing customers and brand value. When I spoke with Ford’s Josh Blundo, designer of Ford’s F-150 Lobo, he called “the preservation and honor of Ford’s heritage and inheritance.” You won’t hear that from a designer at Tesla.
Ford and Toyota come from a different place. It is not their end goal to ‘move quickly and break things’, just to be different. It is to make what they make better, more cost-effective, while maintaining the heavily fought feaalty customers have their brands. This is a built -in advantage for a few reasons. We have seen Tesla -loyalty of a cliff fall, thanks to their outspoken CEO. Do you know who Ford’s CEO is? Do you have to? No. Ditto, Toyota.
Both car manufacturers can reinvent their production processes without having to pay attention. Both also have very deep pockets and can dictate what they need from their respective supply chains. That will also save money and reduce costs.
Gigacasting gas cars? Why not!
Ford explained that they perform this exercise to hack parts counts, production time and complexity. But who says that this cannot work for hybrids? Honors, which use gas engines to load batteries on board, do not connect that engine to the powertrain. It is a generator on board. And there is zero reason that you could not have the three parts of the car gigacast, contain a gas engine on the front or back and connect the wiring to charge.
I increase this point because both Toyota and Ford want to stay in the gas car business, especially for large SUVs and trucks. And all car manufacturers learn that customers want their proven RAV4 or Bronco to look like what they expect. No cyber truck – or a comparison. Speaking of Mercedes and the upcoming CLA and GLC, multiple drive lines for a car that looks no different on the outside, helps on both the sales floor and on the factory floor. And that can very well be the golden solution that Ford chases.
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