Auto industry uses 3-D printing heavily in product development

Ford Motor Co. builds more than 12 vehicles around the world every minute. Local Motors needed six days to build just one car during a recent demonstration in Chicago.

Both are heavily dependent on technology known as 3-D printing, which takes raw materials and forms them into objects one ultrathin layer after another. Ford uses it to build prototypes and make product testing more efficient, but Local Motors is going even further by making the chassis and body of its cars in giant, $1 million printers.

"Instead of having one manufacturing location, like Detroit or Japan, we'll have microfactories all across the world so people come in and customize their auto-buying experience," said James Earle, Local Motors' lead engineer on the project. "It allows the consumer to interact a lot more with how their car is made."

Local Motors hopes to begin selling its car, called the Strati, in low volumes next year, though the car still has to pass crash tests and clear a lot of other hurdles before that could happen. It says the finished car -- which includes a powertrain, wheels, suspension and other internal components sourced from Renault -- will sell for between $18,000 and $30,000, with the printed portion costing more than $5,000 to make.

The novelty of a 3-D printed car has created a lot of publicity for Local Motors, which showed off the Strati on NBC's "Today" show this month, but 3-D printing is a well-established part of the auto industry. As the cost declines and capabilities improve, automakers and suppliers increasingly are relying on 3-D printing to shorten product development cycles, cut prototype costs, reduce mechanical failures and test new ways of raising fuel efficiency.

It's not having much impact on the production process itself, however, because costs would be too high and volumes too low.

Ford, which bought the third 3-D printer ever made nearly 30 years ago, now operates five labs that take anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days to form parts out of resin, silica powder, sand or even metal.

In 2010, Ford says, it avoided what would have been a costly, four-month delay in rolling out the Ford Explorer when it used one of the labs to quickly diagnose and resolve a brake-noise problem discovered shortly before launch. It also used 3-D printing -- also called additive manufacturing or rapid prototyping -- to maximize the efficiency of its EcoBoost engine lineup, including the new 2.7-liter engine going into the upcoming F-150 pickup.

"That engine was prototyped from bottom up using these technologies," said Harold Sears, a Ford additive manufacturing technology specialist. "These processes are touching every part, from bumper to bumper and roof to ground."

Inside a nondescript industrial building 5 miles from Ford's Dearborn, Mich., headquarters, Sears showed Automotive News a variety of machines that printed a combined 20,000 parts last year, about four times the lab's output five years ago. One row uses blue lasers to harden resin into engine part prototypes such as a cylinder head water jacket, which used to cost Ford $20,000 to produce and now can be done for about $2,000.

Nearby, printers filled with white silica powder can assemble intake manifolds and other parts strong enough to install on running test vehicles in a matter of days, compared with months through other methods. In another room, a trio of printers vaguely resembling oversized inkjets that goes through 15 tons of fine sand a week forms a series of molds. Ford then pours liquid metal into the molds, rather than using a traditional, more expensive die that would need to be thrown out if the design changed.

"It allows flexibility to go through the design iterations without committing money to tooling and without having to wait for it," Sears said. "Dollars are an important thing for us to save, but time is the big thing."

Explained Karen Owens, who supervises the lab: "It doesn't take us as long to freshen a product. It can exponentially reduce the time to market."

Today, nearly every automaker and many suppliers have made 3-D printing an element of product development. A Toyota Motor Corp. spokesman said it's "widely used" to assess the ergonomics, feel and response of parts -- qualities that can't be easily replicated on a computer model. Many companies began exploring the technology at least 10 or 20 years ago, while Mitsubishi said it bought a 3-D printer just last year after seeing how much the cost and performance of the machines had improved.

Experts say 3-D printing also has potential for customized aftermarket parts or replacement parts in cases where the originals are no longer available. Collectors of classic cars, for instance, could use it as an alternative to searching for a hard-to-find item.

But it's unlikely that 3-D printers ever will have much of a role in mass-market production because today's methods are faster and more cost-efficient for anything more than extremely small volumes.

"Because of the price per part and the materials involved, it's not just going to allow us to build 200,000 parts for one particular car model," said Kevin Ayers, manager of additive and 3-D printing for the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. "It's cost-prohibitive, and that's a barrier we're never going to quite overcome."

Koenigsegg's 1,341-hp One:1 supercar contains some 3-D printed parts, including the turbocharger assembly and a titanium exhaust tip that takes three days to make and shaves off less than a pound of weight. Designers of Nissan Motor Corp.'s Delta-Wing race car used 3-D printing for brake inlets, ducting and gearbox side covers.

Among more mainstream vehicles, the next-generation Mercedes-Benz S class coming in 2018 could have printed trim pieces such as air vents and speaker grilles, Mercedes' chief designer told a British website, AutoExpress, in August.

For making prototypes, though, automakers and suppliers say 3-D printing has been transformative.

Ayers said 3-D printing has greatly reduced the number of recalls needed to replace faulty mechanical parts because engineers can test parts earlier in the development process. Many recalls these days are for malfunctioning electronics and sensors rather than poorly designed parts, he explained.

Lower costs and quicker production time compared with other prototype manufacturing methods mean automakers and suppliers can try out multiple designs at once, rather than starting with one version and reacting to test results.

"You can come up with seven or 12 different options to see what works the best. Before, you were limited in what you would try," Ayers said. "There's a lot more creativity being used and demanded by management."

Chrysler Group does that with sideview mirror shells, putting a variety of designs through wind-tunnel testing to settle on the version that looks and performs best.

"You're able to have multiple iterations at a lot less expense," said Thomas Sorovetz, a casting engineer in the Chrysler Technology Center's cast metals lab. "Our quality achievement is much greater because we can look at something and say, 'This isn't going to hold up well enough.' And we have plenty of time for modifications before we kick off production."

General Motors said 3-D printing helped speed the changes it made in last year's freshening of the Chevrolet Malibu. The Malibu development team used the technology to evaluate various surface treatments on the console and center stack, conduct aerodynamic testing on the redesigned front fascia "without expensive production parts" and resculpt the back panels of the front seats to create 1.25 more inches of rear-seat knee room, GM said.

The technology allows for new ways of validating designs, such as forming test parts out of clear plastic to demonstrate what happens inside the part more easily. Sorovetz said Chrysler evaluates differential housings and transfer cases by printing a see-through version and running it with oil inside to ensure that the gears stay properly lubricated.

Johnson Controls uses a similar approach to test seats. It can print clear side shields, back panels or covers, then watch how a seat design performs for different body types.

Brennon White, manager of new technologies for additive manufacturing at Johnson Controls Automotive Seating, said the increasing capabilities of metal printers also are proving valuable. It's much easier to print metal parts accurately, particularly ones with complex shapes, than to make them by cutting and welding metal.

"The more complicated something is, the harder it is to prototype it with cut-and-weld," White said. "Using a 3-D printed part gets you closer to what your real production part will look like."

The printed-metal prototypes are so good that White said when he shows one to colleagues and reveals how it was made, "the first thing they do is smack it on the table to make sure it's real."