This article makes no sense. Tesla’s big thing isn’t sand casting, it’s injection molding metal on a huge scale. Its main partner for this is not in Britain, Germany or Japan, it’s in Italy.
I can find no evidence that TEI is instrumental in the gigacasting manufacturing process. They’re good at sand casting, which is a completely different tech from injection molding metal.
I can find no evidence that TEI is instrumental in the gigacasting manufacturing process.
…gigacasting takes a couple hundred pounds of material and makes chassis parts. cars have parts besides the chassis. lots of them. how many “small metal casings” are in cars in general?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand\_casting
Sand castings are produced in specialized factories called foundries. In 2003, over 60% of all metal castings were produced via sand casting.[1]
This is all covered in the article itself:
The specialists use sand casting in a process called rapid prototyping to help validate Tesla’s designs and engineering specifications for its giant molds quickly and cheaply.
According to all four sources, TEI began helping Tesla around 2017 to develop the Model Y and is considered in the industry to be one of the world’s top sand casting specialists.
Since then, TEI has been involved in gigacasting mold prototyping for Tesla’s Model 3, Cybertruck and its heavy-duty Semi truck, according to two of the sources.
TEI’s been doing the low-volume rapid prototyping required before you move to high pressure dies. You don’t go straight from CAD to volume production — you need low-volume mules, and you use sand casting (cheaper, faster to iterate) to make that happen.