PRAGUE -- Italian supplier Idra wants to extend its huge, high-pressure aluminum die-casting machines to a new sector: pickups.
“There is an opportunity in this field,” Idra CEO Riccardo Ferrario told the Automotive News Europe Congress here.
The company has sold 24 of its so-called Giga Presses -- 12 are operational and the rest will be online by year-end -- to companies including Tesla, which uses them at its plants in the U.S. and Germany.
Ferrario is contractually prevented from talking about Idra's customers, but Tesla has shown photos of the Giga Presses where Idra's logo is clearly visible. Those presses are used to cast the front and rear underbodies in a single piece, saving time, money and weight.
Ferrario said Idra's 6,000-metric-ton presses can create front and rear underbodies for sedan cars while SUVs, light commercial vehicles and pickups would need larger casting machines of up to 9,000 ton.
Tesla's CEO Elon Musk indirectly confirmed on Twitter that Idra's forthcoming 9,000-ton Giga Press would produce the underbody of the new Cybertruck at the automaker's factory in Austin, Texas.
Ferrario said doing castings for pickup would be beneficial to the company given the forecast growth for the light trucks that will perform last-mile deliveries. For example, Amazon has placed a large order for electric pickups with Tesla rival Rivian.
Ferrario said a single-piece aluminum casting can be 30 to 40 percent lighter than a steel part made from dozens of different parts, as aluminum is less dense, and the dimensions of the single part can be optimized in the design phase. Switching to a Giga Press can also save 30 to 40 percent in tooling investments as one die, although expensive, replaces numerous dies, eliminates welding robots and saves quality controls after the stamping process, the company says.
Ferrario sees the Giga Press expanding beyond the automotive sector because they “give the designers more freedom to imagine aluminum parts in larger dimensions.”
Some examples Ferrario mentioned were the telecom industry, where 5G antennas need very large aluminum parts to dissipate heat, and motorcycles, where a chassis could be cast in one shot.