Additive Manufacturing Special Report - November 2023 - 4

3D-Printed Cars
The Divergent 3D factory part inspection area. Although Divergent is the
technology-development and execution company, the majority-owned
subsidiary, Czinger Vehicles, is using Divergent to manufacture the 21C.
and faster development times get an OEM into the market
more quickly.
Internally, one of our main objectives is how quickly we can
design from scratch something like a vehicle chassis and then
get it into production. We'd like it to come down from months
to days. That's going to become incredibly radical for the auto
industry. You're talking about multiple magnitudes of time
savings.
SAE: Can you do Class A finishes using 3D printing?
Czinger: Yes. Some areas of the interior: dash inserts, steering
column. We can get a very smooth surface and we can
anodize our material with different colors or you can paint it.
The rims of the 21C have printed, A-surface center spokes.
SAE: What about body panels?
Czinger: Given the amount of mass you would save versus a
composite panel, it probably wouldn't be the right business case
for 3D printing. There are unique sheetmetal bending and
forming technologies out there that we are looking at as
essentially a tool-free way of making the body structure as well.
SAE: Can you provide cost comparisons?
Czinger: Sure. Let's look at time, at what cost. Our assembly
system today is probably four to five times more costeffective
than body-in-white welding. So it actually balances
the slightly higher cost of 3D printing.
On the rate side, one 3D printer is capable of doing about
one to two kilograms of material per hour. This means within
12 to 16 hours, we can print a large rear frame for an OEM.
Today, our highest-volume builds are around 100 units per
year. By 2024, we will be in the single-digit thousands. By
4 NOVEMBER 2023
Czinger 21C's 3D-printed metal " brake node " is a brake caliper integrated
with an upright.
2025-2026, it will be tens of thousands and by 2027 hundreds
of thousands.
Today, printing two kilograms per hour is 10 times-plus faster
than what the rest of the industry is printing at. We have unique
printer hardware and software and materials that allow us to
print at that differentiated rate. We've gone through about a
15-times increase in rate and about a four-times decrease in cost
since I started six-and-a-half years ago.
The aluminum material used is critical. Our alloy is about 95
percent aluminum, which is one of the most abundant and
recyclable of metal alloys. The rest is elements that are readily
available and process-friendly.
SAE: What about energy usage?
Czinger: When we talk about sustainability, which is one of the
Czinger brand pillars, there are really three aspects to it. The first
is that we are literally using 30- to 40-percent less material input
to get the same performance.
Pillar number two is the actual energy usage designing
those parts using HPCs (High Performance Computers) and
cloud computing, printing those parts using lasers and
assembling those parts with robots, and how that compares
to body-in-white castings, stamping, extrusions and welding.
Our lifecycle analysis model says we are about 15 percent
more energy- efficient in just the manufacturing process than
a typical body-in-white shop.
ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING SPECIAL REPORT
FROM LEFT: DIVERGENT TECHNOLOGIES; CZINGER VEHICLES
Additive Manufacturing Special Report - November 2023

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