- It can take a major auto company years, in some cases,
a decade to design, engineer and build a car
from the ground up.
There're thousands of hands working
together to make it happen.
So I thought in the year 2020,
is there a better way to make a car?
Yeah.
Turns out there is.
And it's called the CCzinger 21C.
(edgy music)
The Czinger 21C is an American made hypercar designed by AI
and built using 3D printers.
Is this foreshadowing the way
the automotive industry is going to operate in the future?
Or is it just a gimmick to sell cars?
Why don't we find out?
(mellow music)
(sign buzzing)
Thanks to Raycon for sponsoring this episode.
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- Jerry, we gotta shoot.
What are you doing?
He's at it again, he calls it a Raycon spot
or something like that.
Now with all that bass and compact noise isolating design,
he's probably at a jazz club right now.
- Tony is tickling away my ear holes.
- He usually finishes by telling you
to click the link in the description
or go to buraycon.com/bumper for 15% off.
But who knows when that'll be.
- Oh, Tony, don't tickle my air holes so good,
that should be illegal.
Manufacturing a car has more or less been the same
for the last 120 years.
Manufacturing facilities are expensive
and take up loads of space.
For example, Volkswagen's flagship assembly plant,
and Wolfsburg Germany is bigger than the attire district
of Monte Carlo.
And the methods have largely remained the same
for manufacturing since manufacturing
in the automotive industry existed.
As technology grew,
these processes got more refined and more efficient,
but they still require a lot of bespoke machinery and a lot,
I mean, a whole lot of space,
but with the growth of refinement and efficiency,
there comes a new thought process
and brand new technologies,
namely artificial intelligence
and something called computational engineering.
(suave music)
Kevin Zinger, CEO and founder
of Czinger is tapping artificial intelligence
in a room full of 3D printers into the ring to make an
all American 1,250 horsepower, 270 mile per hour
hypercar called the 21C,
which stands for 21st century.
And Czinger decided to completely reinvent the process
of making a car and instead work
from an inside out methodology,
letting the engineering dictate the design of the car,
and then drape the body parts over the structure
to make a sleek yet aggressive machine.
And a byproduct of this is that Czinger AI eliminates
a huge portion of the production process.
First, we gotta get a little crash course
on artificial intelligence,
which consists of two main ideas,
machine learning and decision making.
Machine learning is essentially what it says on the label.
It's a computer that learns things the same way people learn
by watching YouTube videos.
Okay, also it learns through experience
and the more experienced a machine has,
the more data it has to interpret and analyze,
thereby learning more information.
And the second part is called decision-making.
Programmers will give the computer certain parameters
to follow that are set out by the engineers
and the creators of the car.
And these are things like mounting points
in size restriction, as well as strength properties.
There are a ton of parameters that have to be factored in.
So many in fact, that when you build a car
in the real world,
it takes thousands of people spending thousands of hours
in millions of dollars to do what a computer can do
at a fraction of the time.
You're basically defining the rules of the game
and then pressing Enter. - Tada!
- It's very simplified, but you get my point.
Now AI can even account for external factors,
things like wind resistance and gravity
and other natural phenomena,
and a result of this is
that artificial intelligence produces
some crazy looking designs.
- Nature, you know, obviously through trial and error
and evolution is very viciously competing for material
and energy, which is why, you know,
those structures have material where it's needed,
no material where it isn't,
and it looks like a leaf structure or, you know,
the internal structure of a bone marrow,
other things, right?
That you have say a major automotive company will have all
of its own load cases, you know, road durability cases,
and other things.
Say the machine is running those cases,
selecting materials out of a database
that have already been correlated,
meaning physically tested against all of these
different load cases and is generating a structure.
So then you have the most efficient structure
for the case that's needed
that uses the minimum amount of material, meaning, you know,
you're reducing mass to the max
and still meeting a performance set out requirements.
- And this sort of super efficient design
also comes into play
with the normal non-structural parts of a car.
Typical car contains about a mile of wiring to keep
all of the pieces and parts connected
and talking to each other.
Now a mile of wiring is going to take up a lot of space.
And with this computational engineering
and artificial intelligence, finding the most sufficient way
to design a car, it's not out of the question
that Czinger can incorporate all of the pathways
for that wiring,
not to mention all of the ducting for the things
like the air flow and the AC vents.
Normally cuts and holes have to be made
to accommodate those sorts of things.
But with this method,
they can incorporate it directly into the chassis
of the car.
This allows for huge portions of the assembly process
to be handed off to software programs,
not only to diagnose the inefficiencies
in the engineering process,
but also build around those inefficiencies
with the structural informative design of the car.
Basically AI is learning the shortest route
to route that wire so that it's using the least amount
of wire and taking up the least amount of space.
It's just way smarter than a bunch of people.
This means that a human being could
never really manufacture the parts
that are being designed by Czinger,
which is the other component
of how this hypercar gets built.
That's additive manufacturing,
better known as 3D printing.
(mellow music)
Now this method directly contrasts
to subtractive manufacturing process used in the majority
of the automobile space.
It eliminates any and all waste
associated with manufacturing
because the process only uses the necessary amount
of material needed.
A 3D printer doesn't print out extra material.
Now the 21C is primarily manufactured out of aluminum alloy,
titanium and carbon fiber.
So how do you print out things like that?
Well, Czinger uses a method of additive manufacturing
that incorporates atomized, powdered metal,
in a high powered laser
that essentially melts the individual grains of the material
together and builds the product one layer at a time.
Once the first layer of material is created,
the printer pushes a new layer of atomized metal material
across it and the laser goes back to work
making the second layer of material.
It's like building a cake.
Okay, you put one layer on,
then you friggin put another layer on.
Then you put another layer.
The 3D printing is the only viable method
for this sort of manufacturing because of the fact
that the materials are designed computationally.
There's no sort of tooling out there that can make
these designs with the strength
and structural integrity that's required
for them to work optimally,
it's just not humanly possible,
which is why Czinger doesn't use humans.
In the Czinger method, we're sort of obsolete.
They took our jobs!
Czinger doubled down on the obsolescence
of the current car creation process
and developed something called the automated unit or A.U.
And that uses a bespoke assembly method
called vertical assembly.
One A.U. is a 50 foot by 50 foot set of robotic arms
that work in total harmony with each other
to fully assemble a car.
Some of the robots hold the chassis of the car up
and rotate it as needed while the other arms take
all of the pieces and parts of the chassis,
and then assemble them.
The 3D printed parts get incorporated
into the A.U. and assembled with insanely low variance.
We're talking about four, 1,000th of an inch of precision.
So there's no frigging door gaps on this computer car.
It's tight baby.
Now the car as a whole takes about 3,000 hours to assemble,
which if you're wondering, that's 125 days,
but the assembly of the structure of the 21C takes less
than an hour.
And the reason that Czinger can assemble the base of the car
so quickly is because of all
of these different bleeding edge technologies working
together at the same time,
each robot can move at up to five miles per hour,
which doesn't sound fast,
but when you consider that the robotic arm can do that
while holding an entire car,
it sounds just a bit more impressive.
And also each arm is operating within its own set
of objectives while taking into account the objectives
of the other robotic arms,
each one of the A.U.s operate
as an independent manufacturing cell.
It's totally autonomous,
it needs little to no input from people or other processes.
Other than actually getting the parts,
both 3D printed and otherwise there's little that needs
to be done with the A.U.,
other than pressing go on the computer
that runs the fricking thing.
A side effect of this sort of assembly is
that the robots can be very easily reprogrammed
to accomplish a new task or make a new product.
Unlike the dyes and presses currently used to make parts
and the current manufacturing process,
Czingers A.U. simply gets reprogrammed
to incorporate the new pieces or new process
into the vertical assembly.
Making the process essentially as simple
as clicking a button.
Again, this is a computer that's doing all the work for you.
The robot in the A.U. itself are designed agnostic,
which allows for the assembly line to be changed
in a matter of minutes, rather than a matter of hours.
There's no additional tooling that needs to be installed.
This is why a conventional assembly line can cost
$500 million or more.
Czingers' vertical assembly method is estimated
to only cost about 3 million.
Imagine being able to save $497 million in expenses,
not to mention nine miles of space,
what would you do with $497 million?
Put a link in the comment, I would,
I'd buy Noland. (laughing)
This closed loop of manufacturing makes the A.U. scalable,
which is where this concept really starts
to show its potential impact as a manufacturing process
as a whole.
So as it stands,
one A.U. can theoretically pump out 10,0000
21C vehicle structures each year,
and it costs a small fraction
of what a conventional assembly line costs.
However, the A.U.s are limited by the amount
of space that's available for them, obviously,
and as it stands,
one A.U. takes up 2,500 square feet.
Now, if we scale that up
to say 100,000 square foot warehouse,
we're looking at 40 A.U.s all working at the same time,
which in their current state could make
400,000 car structures a year.
That's almost double the amount
of Corollas made just last year.
Now Czinger's approach
to making a car small scale right now,
they only plan to build 80 models, but that's okay though,
because the net result
of all these bleeding edge technologies colliding
underneath one roof is arguably one of the most advanced
and insane hypercars that has ever been built like ever,
like ever like- - Ever!
- As a car, this thing it's just as bonkers
as the methods used to make it.
The Czinger team is constantly talking
about how the71 SR Blackbird was a massive point
of inspiration for this car, which if you didn't know,
it's probably the most amazing plane ever built
in the history of making planes.
Even down to the front view of the car,
it's meant to mimic the front view of the SR 71
and be a slick possible to cut through the air
like a razor blade.
And from the front, it basically looks just like three humps
in a few vents, which is remarkably similar to the plane.
This copycatting comes as no surprise
considering the plane can go over 2,000 miles an hour.
Czinger is coming out with two versions of the 21C.
The first of which is a track only variant
that's meant to just absolutely smash a bunch
of track records, which is yet to be seen, but we'll see.
And the second variant is going to have less downforce
and be a road legal car,
and now because it has less downforce,
it gets super duper slippery and can achieve a top speed
of 270 miles an hour
from a 2.88 liter, twin turbo V8,
and two little batteries powering the front wheels,
not to mention, it can go zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds.
That's pretty quick.
If computational engineering allows us to design cars
that were otherwise impossible to design,
and then 3D printing actually allows for those cars
to be built, then cars are going to start getting crazy.
And you can think of the 21C as the world's fastest proof
of concept car.
Thanks to everyone over at Czinger
for letting us pick your brain.
I got to speak to another CEO of a car company, that's two,
thanks to Jens, the chief commercial officer
for all your help.
Thank you guys for watching B2B.
Follow us on Instagram at donut@donutmedia.
Follow me at Jeremiah Burton, 'til next week, bye for now.