Tesla Cybertruck Metal Forming
I was brought on to the Cybertruck Metal Forming team at Giga Factory Texas in September 2023. This was a critical time in the Cybertruck development cycle. We were three months before first deliveries, and most of the metal forming equipment was still being installed and comissioned.
My role was to manage, track, and correct dimensional and visual quality issues across stainless steel blanking, deburring, and bending manufacturing lines.
Regardless of what you think of the looks (or Elon), flattening, bending, and deburring the strongest and hardest cosmetic material ever used in automotive manufacturing is no small task. To this day, bringing up the quality of the Cybertruck outer panels is the single most challenging engineering project I have ever worked on.
Crazy engineering requirements combined with even crazier expectations is what made working at Tesla so much fun.
Flattening and Blanking Hard F*cking Stainless (HFS)
(yes, that is the real internally used term for the outer panel material)
By far, the biggest challenge with manufacturing the stainless steel outer panels was taking them from a roll of steel to a flat and precisely cut panel. In development with Schuler, we designed and installed the most accurate laser blanking line ever produced.
Before the Cybertruck blanking line, the state of the art blanking lines had cut line tolerances between ±0.8-1.0mm. The Cybertruck line was designed to produce tolerances within ±0.3mm.
However, since the elastic modulus of the material was so high, flatenning the stainless sheet was the major challenge. It was a balance between flattening too little and having wavy panels, or flattening (and work hardening) the material too much and creating cracks at the bending line.
Ultimately, the flatness of the panels came down to a lot of trial and error. For the first three months of production, I purchased a Hexagon RS6 3D laser scanner and introduced an inspection protocol of scanning the first panels off the line to monitor flatness and make adjustments. As the line ran, additional scans were taken at 30%, 60%, and 90% down the spool of stainless to monitor if the incoming flatness of the material changed throughout production.
I also developed the inspection programs and procedure for the trim-line of the material.
Shown is an example of a report from the program I developed that shows how much different regions of the trim-line deviate when aligned to the part level datums.
I also set up a system that imports both the trim-line data and flatness data to track Cp/Cpk for the process and alert downstream process engineers of problematic batches.
Munro Live visited and made a great video going through the Blanking and Bending processes in detail.
If you have a keen eye you can find me in the video ;)