How 3D Printing is Impacting the Automotive Industry?
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How 3D Printing is Impacting the Automotive Industry?
While there are no fully 3D-printed cars yet, the influence of 3D printing in the car manufacturing industry cannot be underemphasized. It has made the production process less expensive and faster. Apart from its cost and time implications, we’ve explained some of its other impacts below:
Spare Part Production
Cars consist of numerous parts, some not even in production by the manufacturing company. It is understandable why these companies would not produce some parts as the demand isn’t that high. Even if they produce these parts, it only slows the cycle time of the production process.
However, you could produce the parts you need which are not readily available by contracting the part to a small-scale 3D service. Also, this opens up a business initiative for many. You could decide to become a distributor for these parts by outsourcing the low volume production to companies, While 3D printing car spare parts aren’t so common, it is only a matter of time before it takes over the industry.
Rapid Prototyping
Making prototypes are vital to the production process in cars. However, using the actual car components to make the prototypes could be cost-prohibitive. Coupled with the fact that the prototypes require various versions, the process would take more time. This is where 3D printing car parts come in. Unlike the traditional prototyping process, 3D printing makes the prototyping process fast and less expensive.
With 3D printing, rapid prototyping has actually become more flexible. It can take as little as a day to produce a prototype using this technology.
Custom Parts and Tools Production
Car customization is a common feature of car production nowadays. Apart from people upgrading their cars themselves, manufacturers also make limited editions of cars that could have various custom parts. However, sourcing the custom parts to use could be a literal struggle. However, 3D printing the car parts needed for the custom car could save the time and expense of other manufacturing processes.
Also, the tools needed for making these cars sometimes are not available. The manufacturers could also use 3D printing to make the jigs and fixtures needed. A large manufacturer that uses 3D printing for tooling production is Volkswagen.
