Mass Customization

[freebeard]

I'm halfway through this so far:

Is Digital Sheet Metal Forming a Threat to Traditional Fabrication ft. Saltworks Fab

They are already producing entire car bodies. What it brings to mind for me is an old thread from 2012 (still number Three on the Forum's front page!): CarBEN EV5 Full Sized Prototype Construction - 5 Seat Electric Car From Scratch. ecomodder.com/forum/member-neilblanchard.html made an heroic effort to realize his dream car --- literally, the garage roof collapsed with snow and every thing. His last post in that thread was in 2022.

Today, with an .STL file they can produce the pieces and parts to stitch together to make an entire car body. This is the mass customization that was predicted in 2009:

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

The concept of mass customization is attributed to Stan Davis in Future Perfect,[5][6] and was defined by Tseng & Jiao (2001, p. 685) as "producing goods and services to meet individual customers' needs with near mass production efficiency". Kaplan & Haenlein (2006) concurred, calling it "a strategy that creates value by some form of company-customer interaction at the fabrication and assembly stage of the operations level to create customized products with production cost and monetary price similar to those of mass-produced products".

So an era of one-off coachbuilts and concept cars may be upon us. This in aluminum would be nice:

[Isaac Zachary]

Mass customization would be nice. But I bet it will stay very expensive, at least for what you get.

It seems the masses have decided they all want basically the same kind of vehicle. That's good in the sense that more of one thing means more mass-production, which in turn means cheaper vehicles. Although, at the same time, most of the cars being sold these days are more than $70,000 USD.

[freebeard]

It reminds me of PCBWay and SendCutSend.

Whole cars will be expensive, but something like a custom radiator shroud or partial bellypan would likely be competitive with a handcrafted part.

[Piotrsko]

So you don't buy the claims that making many will drastically reduce the price?

[freebeard]

I hadn't heard the claim.

Stamping is faster but requires forms, so the advantage is with producing unique pieces.

[Isaac Zachary]

Unique pieces and mass production aren't the same thing.

Stamps and molds are very expensive for the very first part. But all the rest are extremely cheap since you don't have to make another stamp or mold. So, the more that are made the cheaper they become overall.

With custom, unique parts, you could build a stamp or mold for manufacturing it, but you'd use the stamp or mold only once. So yes, other forms of fabrication end up being necessary, which are always going to be more expensive than mass produced parts.

[freebeard]

If you look at it from the point of view of finished product, yes; but if you consider the tooling required it levels the playing field.

100 of one thing costs as much as 100 different things. And takes as long.

[Isaac Zachary]

Originally Posted by freebeard

but if you consider the tooling required it levels the playing field.

No it doesn't, because if it did, there would be ultra customizable cars being sold by car companies.

And it's not just the tooling, but also the research and development. If the R&D and the tooling cost a million dollars, but you make a million parts with 10¢ of materials per part, then each part costs $1.10. But if you hire a guy making even minimum wage at $7.25 per hour, and he takes on hour to turn your 10¢ of material into a custom part, and he used x amount of time on a piece of equipment that was a few thousand dollars in cost, then your $1.10 part becomes a $10 part.

[freebeard]

I choose not to rebut your hypotheticals.

[Piotrsko]

If you figure in fixed overhead, that alone takes you over $10 unit price anymore on a $1 part