3-D Printing And Electric Vehicles: A Match Made In Heaven

We hear plenty of news about 3-D printing, a.k.a. additive manufacturing (AM). We also hear a whole lot about mobility, and especially about electric vehicles (EVs) and how they’re transforming the transportation world. What we haven’t heard much about – yet – is how AM and EVs come together to create a whole new manufacturing and product landscape. Here are two examples to help illustrate the radical evolution that’s underway.

Local Motors Industries (LMI), of Chandler, Arizona, is a private company with 130 employees in its four locations, all focused on 3-D printed vehicles. They first pioneered the since-discontinued Strati, the world’s first 3-D printed car. Now they’re putting all their energies into Olli, their 3-D printed urban electric shuttle. More fundamentally, though, the company is pioneering Direct Digital Manufacturing (DDM). “Amortizing a car’s tooling and assembly line can cost $1 billion,” said Jay Rogers, CEO and co-founder of LMI. “What if I didn’t need tools? Wipe away tooling, forming, and so on, and you destroy the need for a prototype. All design becomes digital.”

Rogers started dreaming of this concept when he was serving as an Infantry Company Commander in the U.S. Marine Corps. “I had two friends killed in an ambush in their Humvee,” he said. “Their motor was in the center of the vehicle, and they were on the outside, exposed. Another friend was shot down in a helicopter and crashed in the water and drowned, because he was in an old CH-46 [a 1960s-era tandem-rotor transport]. I was inspired by these tragedies to figure out a way to get new technologies into vehicles as quickly as possible.”

With AM, that speed he was looking for is there for both the initial launch and product evolution. “With totally digital design, we can have a minimal viable product (MVP) in six months, and have the first vehicle unit out the door in the next six months, so we can launch in one year,” he said. “Then, when we want to change the design, the very next unit off the line has that design. It gives a very valid reason to 3-D print a car, if you have the technology. Well, we’ve been developing that technology.”

Olli is currently the primary face of the company. The autonomous shuttle is in trails in 13 locations around the world, including Peachtree Corners in Atlanta, the University of Buffalo, LG in Seoul, South Korea, and at the University of Western Australia in Perth. “With Olli, you can reclaim your commute,” said Rogers. “You lose productivity in your own vehicle. This is like a mobile living room or Starbucks. Nobody foresaw the smart phone as a productivity device. Well, this is an incredible opportunity to uncork that kind of technology innovation in transportation.”

The company is looking beyond ground transportation too. Last October LMI announced a partnership with Airbus to build Neorizon, a micro-factory on the Airbus campus near Munich, Germany. The new plant will use the DDM model to print not just ground mobility solutions for challenges like urban cargo, but also air mobility solutions such as drones.

More immediately focused on personal mobility is the partnership of Arcimoto of Eugene, Oregon, with XponentialWorks of Ventura, California, to help improve their urban electric vehicle, the Fun Utility Vehicle (FUV). Arcimoto (NASDAQ:FUV), which raised $19.5 million in its 2017 IPO, had begun delivering its first FUVs to retail customers last September. (The company delivered 45 retail vehicles by year’s end.) Then their CEO and founder, Mark Frohnmayer, ran into Avi Reichental at a fundraiser last fall. Reichental is founder and Executive Chairman of XponentialWorks, a venture investment, corporate advisory and product development company that specializes in AI, 3-D printing, robotics, and the digital transformation of traditional businesses. Their discussion led to a joint effort to lightweight the FUV. “I asked Mark, ‘How do you feel about putting the FUV on a diet?’” said Reichental. “It turned out he’d already decided he needed to cut the weight by 200 pounds.”

XponentialWorks received a FUV fresh off the assembly line in early December. “In a few weeks, we were able to design a new slate of parts,” Reichental said. “For each one, we were able to reduce the weight and enhance the performance. And the total cost of the vehicle was reduced as well.”

All this was done by redesigning such basic parts as the rear swing arm, knuckle, upper control arm and brake pedal. But it was the advanced methods used for that redesign that made all the difference. By combining the capabilities of their AI-driven ParaMatters generative design software with AM, they were able to manufacture these parts in a completely new way. “With generative design, you use Cloud-based software in which you just set up performance requirements, part loadings, and the weight to be cut, and in 10 to 20 minutes, it gives optimized, ready-to-manufacture designs, and also performs a full finite-element analysis of the part,” explained Reichental. With the parts redesigned thus far, the companies have delivered 120 of the 200 pound weight reduction target.

Reichental has no worries about reaching the final goal. And for him, that’s just the beginning. “We wanted to use Arcimoto as a case study on how an established company can come to our lab, and see real breakthroughs in just a few weeks,” he said. “And it’s not just for parts of products. Think about parts for production systems! In oil and gas, for example, the cost of downtime is huge – sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars a day! With the right blend of generative design and 3-D printing, companies could save tremendous amounts of money.”

The Arcimoto partnership is an example for him in another way as well. “We live in a world that’s moving a lot faster than ever,” he explained. “No single company can figure it all out anymore. But you don’t have to do it by yourself – you can go out and find the right tools to improve your uptime, optimize your products, and increase your customer satisfaction. We just need more collaboration.”