Key Points
Along the way customers would have looked through thousands of virtual AI-iterated colors and patterns, allowing them to personalize their cars in ways that are impossible in the current era of cookie-cutter mass production..
Consider the Toyota Camry, one of the most popular cars in American history: While the midsize sedan looks smooth on the outside, its metal structure is actually a collage of smaller steel, aluminum and mixed-metal parts, which are stamped out, extruded, forged or cast and assembled into resilient structures called unit-bodies, using a variety of mechanical fasteners, welds and adhesives..
However sincere legacy carmakers might be about getting to net zero, they have no chance" making cars the usual way, says Keven Czinger, CEO of Divergent Technologies, an advanced-manufacturing consultancy in Torrance, Calif..
In terms of total life-cycle emissionsthe upstream inputs of energy, mining, processing and manufacturing, as well as end-of-life recycling and disposalthe way we make cars has a greater impact on the environment than how we fuel them," he says..
. Czingers vision is to dematerialize automobile manufacturing"that is, to consume dramatically less material and energyby democratizing its production" in thousands of 3D-printing microfactories around the world..
