It may be hard to believe, but it’s been more than a decade since we saw a car 3D printed at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS). That was back in 2014 (there’s a great write-up of the entire process by Gary Vasilash on the IMTS website) and, at the time, it seemed to presage a coming revolution in the automotive industry. One day soon, the promoters predicted, we’ll be able to walk into a dealership and order our very own 3D printed automobile.
Of course, that’s not how things have played out. Local Motors, which was central to the 3D printed car at IMTS, shut down in 2022. Today, the idea that our roads will soon be filled with 3D printed vehicles – even vehicles containing a substantial portion of 3D printed components – seems less likely than ever. Nevertheless, additive manufacturing (AM) still has an important part to play in the auto industry; it’s just not the one many of us expected.
Additive manufacturing uptake in the auto industry
Fadi Abro, senior director for transportation and mobility at Stratasys, distinctly remembers his first encounter with 3D printing. “I started at a company called Solid Concepts, which was acquired by Stratasys back in 2010,” he tells me. “It was literally my first day, and somebody handed me an SLA part. While they were explaining how it was 3D printed, I flexed the part ever so slightly, and it shattered. Things have changed dramatically in terms of material properties since then, but it was a quick lesson.”
No doubt there are many engineers who can recall similar early encounters with additive parts, though probably not quite so dramatic. And while additive materials have certainly advanced since those early days, those initial encounters likely shaped the perceptions of many engineers regarding the capabilities of 3D printed parts. As a result, the technology spent years largely confined to the realm of prototyping, where its lead times and capacity for iteration outweighed any issues with mechanical durability.
Of course, AM eventually found its way into other applications, specifically those involving high-value, low-volume components, chiefly in the aerospace and medical device industries. In contrast, the high volumes of the auto industry kept 3D printed parts from seeing end-use applications outside of the occasional luxury case.
As Abro sees it, part of what explains the slower adoption of AM in the auto industry versus aerospace or medical devices is that 3D printing as a technology is a double-edged sword. “The beautiful thing about additive is that it can do everything,” he explains, “The negative is that it can do everything, so people lose focus when they don’t get into it with a use case in mind.” That’s one reason that the AM industry as a whole has been shifting to emphasize specific applications of the technology over its general capabilities. In the case of the auto industry, many of the most promising applications involve jigs, fixtures, and tooling.
Automotive applications for 3D printing
“We use those terms,” Abro says, “but really it’s production support rather than production components. You can make production components on a Stratasys 3D printer but the volumes have to be low and the value of the part has to be high for it to make sense.”
However, when it comes to production support (i.e., jigs, fixtures, and tooling), the calculation of the potential value of 3D printing is different. Because the auto industry works in such high volumes, shaving seconds off of assembly times can result in six or even seven figure returns on investment. That’s why, according to Abro, “You’d be hard pressed to walk into a major OEM plant and not find a bunch of Stratasys-printed tools helping to put the cars together. Basically, the money’s in the tooling.”
What makes 3D printing such a good fit for tooling? It’s a combination of the usual advantages associated with the technology: flexibility, on-demand production, and rapid iteration. Automakers can potentially save hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of dollars in tooling costs by adopting additive manufacturing because these advantages enable them to manufacture the production supports they need and adjust them as needed without having to wait for the tooling necessary to produce them. Given that, it’s natural to wonder why, at least according to Abro, the proportion of additive tooling is still in the single-digit percentages.
“It really boils down to two things,” he tells me, “It’s awareness and confidence. Let’s say you have a Tier 2 job shop that makes a couple of different components for a Tier 1. They don’t really have the awareness that 3D printing can be industrial. They still think of it as a hobbyist’s toy. Then there’s confidence: recognizing that 3D printing can do the things that we’re saying it can do.” As an example, he cites Toyota using AM to produce plastic end-of-arm tools that would typically be fabricated in metal.
Looking a bit more closely at the automotive supply chain, the AM adoption rate is pretty much what you’d expect, with OEMs accounting for the majority, Tier 1s making up significantly less, and little to no adoption in the Tier 2s and beyond. If AM were being used for more end-use parts, that might not be the case, since the OEMs could push their suppliers more directly to adopt the technology. In the case of tooling, however, OEMs have less ability to dictate the manufacturing process, so adoption is naturally less widespread.
“It’s hard to say to a Tier 1 supplier, ‘Buy this half-million-dollar printer and you’ll recognize the revenue from it in your tooling,’” Abro explains. “They’re going to want to know that it works, and that’s what the Stratasys Tooling Center of Excellence is intended to support. If you’re a Tier 1 supplier and you have a couple of projects you want to try out, you don’t have to buy a printer. Instead, you can go to the tooling experts at the CoE to help you design and print it.”
The future of AM in automotive
Despite its 40-year history, there’s still a generational gap when it comes to how engineers see 3D printing as a technology. On the one hand, there’s the old guard who think of hobbyist machines churning out cheap plastic toys, and on the other there’s the younger engineers who grew up with 3D printing and see it as a tool that lets them tinker with designs.
As Abro notes, however, there are also the executives in between who don’t want their engineers wasting time putting glue on build plates or downloading free software to make a desktop machine work. “They want an industrial solution that just prints parts on demand,” he says, “They don’t want to see their engineers spending hours trying to make a $20 print work.”
Fortunately, we’ve come a long way from a young engineer accidentally shattering a 3D printed part on their first day. “Material development and the accuracy of the systems has been on a linear upward trajectory,” Abro claims, “especially when you look at the industrial systems.” The natural question to ask then is: What’s next?
“Our focus is going to be on size and throughput,” Abro says. “Making bigger parts faster opens up the aperture of applications, especially within the tooling space. And the specific use case in automotive will continue to be tooling, because every two to three years you have to have a brand new version of a car and that means you have to retool your plant. That’s a never ending need in the automotive industry. I’m seeing the suppliers starting to wake up and ask, ‘What’s GM doing?’ and ‘Why aren’t we doing that?’”
So, while we may never see showrooms filled with 3D printed cars, that doesn’t mean additive manufacturing won’t have a growing part to play in the future of the automotive industry.
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