The car in front is 3D printed

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In National Harbor Washington D.C., there’s a new mode of transport coming; passengers summon the vehicle using an app to take you from your location to desired destination, fares can talk to the driver; ask questions about where is good to eat or have a drink in the locale and even ask what the weather’s going to be like after they’ve finishing socialising.

No, this isn’t another lift-sharing company like Uber and Lyft, this is Olli – Local Motors’ self-driving, electric bus, powered by IBM’s Watson super-computer and made possible thanks to 3D printing. 

“Olli offers a smart, safe and sustainable transportation solution that is long overdue,” Local Motor’s CEO and Co-founder John B. Rogers said at the vehicle’s unveiling. “Olli with Watson acts as our entry into the world of self-driving vehicles, something we’ve been quietly working on with our co-creative community for the past year. We are now ready to accelerate the adoption of this technology and apply it to nearly every vehicle in our current portfolio and those in the very near future. I’m thrilled to see what our open community will do with the latest in advanced vehicle technology.”

Local Motors has been making waves in the automotive industry since 2007 and it was two years ago at IMTS that, in collaboration with Cincinnati Inc. and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the team 3D printed the Strati electric car in just 44 hours. Using Cincinnati Inc.’s Big Area Additive Manufacturing (BAAM) technology to directly print the car’s body in one go, adding the mechanical components by hand, it was a proof of concept, additive manufacturing can produce an entire car body but for Olli, 3D printing played a different role entirely.

“The Strati project was a study in manufacturing methods,” James Earle, Advanced Manufacturing Engineer at Local Motors, tells TCT. “Specifically to figure out if large-scale additive manufacturing could be used to produce complex structures like a car. We showed that it was indeed possible. From that point we were able to step back and figure out where else in the process of car production additive manufacturing would be beneficial.”

Unless you knew the story behind Strati, you’re unlikely to walk into a car showroom and comment on what a thing of beauty it is, strati is Italian for layers and layers are the first thing you notice, the Strati looks like an 8-bit version of a car. Olli, on the other hand, is sleek and despite not being on the road until late 2016 looks very much like something that would take pride of place in a showroom.

“The plastic panels on Olli were thermo-formed on 3D printed moulds,” explains Earle.  “We printed the moulds using BAAM, machined them on our 5-axis router, and then hand finished.”

This use of additive manufacturing is not uncommon, TCT has reported on numerous occasions on the use of 3D printing to make jigs and fixtures, Todd Grimm celebrated this with his talk on embracing the mundane at last year’s TCT Show and the Diamond Sponsor panel at AMUG 2016 unanimously agreed that tooling for 3D printing was ‘low-hanging fruit’. In few industries is this more applicable or beneficial than that of automotive, a report by Mold Making Technology suggests that spending by automotive OEMs on tooling is expected to grow to $15.2 billion by 2018.

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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.

One man who is uniquely placed to see the benefits 3D printing can offer to the automotive world is Jim Vurpillat, Jim spent the best part of two decades working at various divisions at General Motors, most recently as Director of Global Marketing at Cadillac, before moving to Stratasys in October last year.

“The automotive sector was one of the earliest adopters of 3D printing,” Jim tells TCT. “ What we've seen over the last few years is a wider adoption of 3D printing and additive manufacturing into the manufacturing operations, primarily in jigs and fixtures and tooling application but clearly the automotive space is looking for new technologies and new ways to reduce cycle-times, reduce tooling expense and investment and be able to bring to market lightweight alternatives.”

Pimping one’s ride

Henry Ford once famously said, “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” Although this quote from his 1922 autobiography is thought to be tongue-in-cheek it was a reference to the production-line quick drying paint that was only available at the time in black.

“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”

A vision for Local Motors Olli is that it will be used in theme parks and university campuses to ferry people to and from, the Ollis will be fully customisable to suit the brand and not just with a lick of paint, the whole system right down to the on-board computer will be fully customisable, want Olli to tell you the time of the next economics lecture? Just ask. Local Motors’ short run production methods using 3D printing means that tooling up for customisation is less expensive and easier than it would be to a company like Ford.

Customisation for mass-manufactured cars has moved on incrementally since that Model-T, yes we have a range of colours and trims now but take my car for instance; a ‘Limited Edition’ Vauxhall Corsa, in Phantom Grey with black trim alloys, the only thing individual about it is the scratch down the passenger door done by a creative vandal with a key, there are at least six more of the exact same car in the business park in which TCT towers stands.

“The difficulty in offering the customer the personalisation of the car is that typically means lower volume numbers,” explains the Worldwide Marketing Director for Automotive at Stratasys, Jim Vurpillat. “Put that against a financial business case of the tooling expense that is used to create that individual look you run into a lot of barriers.”

Jim and the team at Stratasys have been exploring ways to lower those barriers with Japanese automotive manufacturer, Daihatsu. Using Stratasys’ FDM technology the oldest automaker in Japan will offer customers customised design elements for the front and rear bumpers of the Copen 2-door convertible model called Effect Skins.

Customers will be able to choose and tweak more than a dozen base patterns in ten different colours created by renowned designer Kota Nezu and 3D modelling artist Sun Junjie. The Effect Skins are printed using a Stratasys Fortus 450mc machine in Stratasys’s ASA material, the material properties of which are extremely UV resistant – essential when it comes to end-use parts.  

“The project we did with Daihatsu is a great example of 3D printing providing the solution to customisation,” said Vurpillat. “Doing it cost effectively, quickly and be able to offer the customer something unique to them. AM is solving a lot of the solutions to allow automakers to meet the trend of customers wanting something a bit more unique than the guy down the street.”

Time to spare

3D printing has now proved its worth at various stages of the automotive manufacturing process, from the early days of rapid prototyping, to tooling and customisation, the technology is now being applied to after-sales life of a vehicle.

We’ve all seen the Jay Leno videos in which a broken classic car part is scanned, remodelled, 3D printed and moulded in order to make a new part. The manufacturing of spare parts has just gone from Jay’s garage to worldwide adoption as Mercedes-Benz Trucks announced that it would be supplying more than 30 spare parts directly from a 3D printer.

The available spare parts consist of high-quality plastic components printed using EOS SLS technology. Covers, spacers, spring caps, air and cable ducts, clamps, mountings and control elements are just a few examples of economical spare part production in top quality made possible by using the 3D printing process.

“Additive manufacturing gives you the ability to minimise inventory and be able to print the parts off where and when you need the,” explains Stratasys’ Jim Vurpillat. “Anytime you can fulfill a request quickly but limit inventory is beneficial, especially when you have to keep spare parts for model year upon model year, that can get pretty cumbersome from both an inventory and warehousing stand point.”

As one of 3D printing’s early adopters the automotive sector is showcasing just how many aspects of a business the technology can touch from design to repair.