Czinger leverages AI-driven design in the auto industry

Yahoo Finance's Pras Subramanian reports on how Czinger is implementing new manufacturing technology to 3D print vehicle parts.

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AKIKO FUJITA: Well, we're taking a look under the hood with Czinger. That's an American car company pioneering a new design approach and manufacturing technology for the automotive industry, beginning with its advanced Hypercar 21C. Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Pras Subramanian, who went all the way out to my hometown of Torrance for this assignment.

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: That's right. I had the chance to go to lovely Torrance to visit the Czinger Vehicles factory outside LA, where the father and son team of Kevin and Lucas Czinger, right, they're father and son, are shocking the auto world with the record-breaking 21C Hypercar. It's very surprising tech under the skin. The duo have pioneered a 3D printing process using aluminum and AI-driven design to make the ultimate car. Here's Kevin Czinger on why that process is so revolutionary.

KEVIN CZINGER: So when you bring those together, they allow you to create structures like this frame that have never been seen before. What you're able to do is use that computing to literally create in three dimensions a perfectly optimized structure, use 3D printing to materialize that perfectly designed structure, and then use automation to have a universal assembler assemble any perfect structures together seamlessly.

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: So that secret sauce, if you will, is like AI-driven design leading the 3D-printed metal parts that are assembled by these robots in a circular assembly process. It's all very cool.

AKIKO FUJITA: So this comes at a time when, of course, we've heard so many carmakers had to deal with supply shortages. They've had some hiccups along their manufacturing process. How does this 3D printing allow this company to have a leg up potentially from the competition?

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: You know, all they really need is just this aluminum powder, right, that they then use lasers to sort of 3D print these parts in these massive 3D printers. They have, like, several of these in this facility. So you don't actually have to-- you only need certain parts and suppliers, right, to make some brake calipers, things like that. Everything else is made with these parts, with this 3D printing process. So essentially, you can-- in theory, if you have the schematics and the design, you can make any car ever made with these 3D printers, right, from, like, a chassis and skin-- metal skin point of view.

So-- but then, you know, they actually-- we talk about how this helps other carmakers. They actually have signed some deals with OEMs to make parts. So one of them is Aston Martin. They signed a deal to make parts like that rear assembly you just saw there. And this is a potentially big business for Czinger. And Kevin's son Lukas, who also I spoke to-- he's also the CTO there-- says it makes a lot of sense for automakers to outsource to them. Here's what he had to say.

LUkAS CZINGER: Compared to the capital bet you make in auto today where you say, I'm going to invest X hundreds of millions in a new stamping and casting facility, I'm going to amortize that off with X hundreds of thousands of sales per year over a Y number of years, that's a very CapEx-heavy bet to make. With us, you look to Divergent and Czinger, we will be your outsourced manufacturing partner. You pay us on a unit basis. That's a scalable, very attractive economic structure.

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: So that's the big bet, right? The company is investing heavily in more 3D printers, more assemblers, more factory space to make these parts for traditional OEMs as well as for Czinger cars. They say that they have more deals to announce in the coming months.

AKIKO FUJITA: How big is their scale right now, their reach?

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: So-- in terms of making parts? So they have about, like-- I think they have maybe 15 to 20 3D printers right now they can run kind of 24 hours a day. It takes about an hour to make a part. So we're thinking-- we're saying about maybe, if they make 10 parts an hour times 24, 240 parts a day. And that's running full-time. They don't run full-time. So they want to scale that up more and more with more printers.

The thing is that, you know, then you have to take the parts, they have to go to the assembly process, where they actually are glued together, screwed together with robots. So that also adds a bit more time to that. But they can actually-- I think the goal is to scale up tremendously from now.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah. It certainly could come in handy, especially at the rate that we're seeing some of these carmakers churn out these vehicles. Thanks so much for that, Pras.