Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Toyota Will Adopt Tesla-Style Cast Bodies That Might Be Impossible to Fix

thedrive.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 137 posts

Re: Toyota Will Adopt Tesla-Style Cast Bodies That Might Be Impossible to Fix

#51

Post by Tanoc »

vel0city wrote: post #21
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point to any references/examples of this? Not a challenge, but as an EV owner I didn't know this and I'm interested to learn more.

He's probably referencing Tesla's structural battery packs. Essentially the pack makes up the bottom part of the frame of the car. https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/tesla-structural-battery-pack...

The Ford Mach-E does the same thing. There's thin box frame rails as part of the traditional ladder frame, and the battery pack actually forms the floorpan and stressed crossmembers. Without the battery pack the frame will deform because there's no lateral reinforcement, making it this weird hybrid of a ladder frame and unibody that it shares with the Model X and Ioniq 5. Most EVs like the Bolt and the Ioniq 6 are unibodies however since they're just designed like regular cars with battery packs shoved where the fuel tank would normally go under the rear seat or rear hatch floor, and the battery pack simply reinforces the floor.

Re: Toyota Will Adopt Tesla-Style Cast Bodies That Might Be Impossible to Fix

#52

Post by gnicholas »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #2

“cast bodies might be more difficult to fix in the event of major damage, such as a crash.” Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a car NOT be written off after “major damage”. The industry already doesn’t bother to fix cars, they just get scrapped, so I don’t see what the actual difference is.

They sell the wreck and recover some money that way. If the new vehicles are essentially unsalable, this will cause premiums to rise.

Re: Toyota Will Adopt Tesla-Style Cast Bodies That Might Be Impossible to Fix

#53

Post by [deleted] »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #2

“cast bodies might be more difficult to fix in the event of major damage, such as a crash.” Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a car NOT be written off after “major damage”. The industry already doesn’t bother to fix cars, they just get scrapped, so I don’t see what the actual difference is.

[deleted]

Re: Toyota Will Adopt Tesla-Style Cast Bodies That Might Be Impossible to Fix

#54

Post by cypress66 »

ravenstine wrote: post #43
cypress66 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enshittification is subscriptions, software locked features, telemetry and always online systems, and so on. Using these casts, regardless of how good or bad they are, is not enshittification.

If I owned a Toyota and wanted to buy another Toyota in the future, except Toyota only now makes cars that serve me less than my old one, that's absolutely enshittification. Who said the term is restricted to software?

Because enshittification has a specific meaning. It's really about online services that start being "too good", possibly operating at a loss to gain users. And after they have enough users that are "locked in", they start to get worse to extract more profit from the existing users.

The car examples I gave is already pushing it. But if the new Toyota is worse than yours it's not really enshittification because your car still works just as well, and you're not locked into buying another Toyota next time. That's just them cheaping out.

Re: Toyota Will Adopt Tesla-Style Cast Bodies That Might Be Impossible to Fix

#55

Post by zdragnar »

jgalt212 wrote: post #33
ravenstine wrote: post #29

Like I've said many times, until regulation mitigates the enshittification of vehicles, you will have to pry my dumbcar from my cold dead hands. You want me to buy an electric vehicle? Don't pull shenanigans that disempower me.

I really do miss physical keys. Replacement cost for an Audi key fob is over $700. And it extends to broader market brands. My mom's Mazda replacement fob cost $500. WTF is going on here?

That's the cost for integration with the immobilizer. Car keys and fobs have chips that signal to the onboard computer, and may use a variety of techniques such as rolling codes to make the cars harder to steal. Gone are the days when you can easily hotwire a car by yanking and touching random wires together from the steering column.

Kia and Hyundai are among the last brands to be selling cars without them, and that's the reason they've been targeted so heavily by car thieves.

If you have one key and lost one, you can use the one you have to more easily reprogram the other.

However, if you have lost all of your keys, a technician needs physical access to your car to reprogram everything together.

Add on top of that the licensing cost for the software to do the programming (you don't want random people having easy access to reprogramming your locks after all) . Reprogramming keys is a fairly low-volume sale, especially if you need access to the car to do it (hard to scale volume remotely) so the per-key cost is much higher as a result.

Re: Toyota Will Adopt Tesla-Style Cast Bodies That Might Be Impossible to Fix

#56

Post by Tade0 »

Where I'm from there's a tired old joke, the punchline of which is that the mechanic calls back that the car will be ready in three weeks. Only issue being - the customer came in with a piece of bent aluminium roofing sheet.

My point is that mechanics deal with more challenging problems on a daily basis and it's actually easier to have one bent out of shape piece that costs X, instead of several pieces forming the same section of the car, each bent out of shape in a cascade of damage and costing e.g. 0.6X each.

Personally I paid the most for replacing parts that contained electronics - like a rear bumper with parking sensors.

A name-brand parking sensor can go for as much as a second-hand quarter panel.

Re: Toyota Will Adopt Tesla-Style Cast Bodies That Might Be Impossible to Fix

#57

Post by skullone »

metadat wrote: post #23

It's interesting how the casting process produces a lighter, weaker, and impossible to repair or chassis. Why can't the blocks be modular and replaceable?

Because the welding/bolting/etc joining processes are intricate and time consuming, and also equally as hard to repair.

Re: Toyota Will Adopt Tesla-Style Cast Bodies That Might Be Impossible to Fix

#58

Post by CharlesW »

kjksf wrote: post #32
SoftTalker wrote: post #3

Cast metals are rather brittle, normally? Good for complex shapes that may be further refined by machining, and in compression loads, but not in shear or tension. I would think they would shatter in a collision rather than bend like steel.

No need to speculate. Model Y has been using casting for a few years now. It's also among the safest cars in a crash: https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/956/tesla-model-y-receives... In this particular test it was THE safest cars ever tested by Australian ANCAP.

Crash safety is unrelated to the problem with "gigacasting", which is that "a huge cast part is almost impossible to repair whereas the traditional folds of stamped metal can be fixed using traditional methods".

https://www.thedrive.com/news/tesla-gigacasting-a-cars-entir...

Re: Toyota Will Adopt Tesla-Style Cast Bodies That Might Be Impossible to Fix

#59

Post by loloquwowndueo »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #20
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #2

“cast bodies might be more difficult to fix in the event of major damage, such as a crash.” Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a car NOT be written off after “major damage”. The industry already doesn’t bother to fix cars, they just get scrapped, so I don’t see what the actual difference is.

Hand raised. Of course, your question is basically a tautology if you define "major damage" as "that which causes a car to get totaled". The whole concern is that, with these cast bodies, damage that would have been considered fixable or minor in the past now becomes an instant write off.

Well the article says major damage, not me.

Re: Toyota Will Adopt Tesla-Style Cast Bodies That Might Be Impossible to Fix

#60

Post by 60Vhipx7b4JL »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #14
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With EVs this problem is getting a lot worse. In latest-gen EVs the battery pack is a stressed member of the frame. Any type of collision that distorts the frame will also imply a deformation of the battery module, which means instant write-off. So if you think about it - if you first decide you need to go down the "structural battery" route to save cost and weight, you've already lost repairability if the frame is b…

Maybe batteries will get good enough (hence small enough) to not become a stressed part of the frame in the near future. This would also lighten EVs, which has a tremendous number of benefits.

The castings and frame are incredibly strong. Or in other words; when those are damaged, the rest of the car is likely beyond economical repair. Even without insurance. Tear it appart for parts.
Post reply on HN