Tesla pioneers single-piece “Giga Press” megacasting

Starting around 2020, Tesla became the first automaker to use enormous high-pressure die-casting machines — “Giga Presses” built by IDRA, with clamping forces up to ~9,000 tonnes — to cast large sections of a car’s underbody as a single piece. The rear underbody of the Model Y, for example, replaced roughly 70 stamped-and-welded parts with one casting.

Megacasting cut weight, factory floor space, robots and complexity, and the technique was quickly studied and adopted by competitors including Toyota, Volvo and Chinese automakers. It was a genuine manufacturing innovation that reset how cars can be built, not just an incremental tweak.

Tesla addressed the trade-offs openly: a single large casting can be costlier to repair after a heavy crash, so the company iterated on alloys, casting design and repair procedures. The net effect still moved the whole industry toward simpler, lighter, cheaper body structures. It is a textbook example of Musk’s first-principles manufacturing — rethinking the physical process by which a car is built rather than accepting the century-old stamp-and-weld assumption.