Editor's note: This is part of an Automotive News special report on new trends in advanced manufacturing across the auto industry for automakers and their supply chains.
YOKOHAMA, Japan — Nissan will follow electric vehicle leader Tesla in adopting advanced manufacturing techniques to slash the cost and weight of its own upcoming lineup of EVs.
By shifting to gigacasting for large aluminum parts, a technique pioneered by Tesla, Nissan wants to cut the cost of EV parts by 10 percent and shed weight by 20 percent.
The advancements will debut around 2027, when Nissan plans to introduce a new generation of modular EVs that make big strides in performance and cost reduction. The new production techniques will contribute to an overall 30 percent reduction in cost, Nissan said.
Nissan joins a growing roster of automakers turning to gigacasting. The production method, originally harnessed to great effect by Tesla Inc., is being adopted by automakers such as Volvo — starting in 2025 for its next-generation EVs — as well as Toyota, Ford and Hyundai.
For starters, Nissan plans to use the massive giga presses to form the rear underbody of its new EVs, said Executive Vice President Hideyuki Sakamoto, Nissan’s global manufacturing chief.
The module consists of as many as 100 parts. They can be combined into one through aluminum casting in a heavy-duty press. Nissan has opted for 6,000-ton presses, Sakamoto said last month in a briefing about the company’s advanced manufacturing strategies.
Kerrigan Advisors’ proprietary annual OEM Survey of over 100 executives reveals that the majority of respondents are worried about the financial impact of Chinese automakers’ growing global market share, and most expect that the EV transition to be slower than expected. The survey also queried executives on their outlooks for dealership valuations and profitability, as well as their expectations for the future of dealer networks and facility requirements.
That size is still a little smaller than the biggest 9,000-ton behemoths being manufactured by leading giga press maker Idra of Italy. But Nissan’s would be bigger than the 4,000-ton presses undergoing verification trials at Toyota. Toyota’s presses are from Japanese press maker Ube Corp.
Forming large modules out of one gigacast component saves time, weight and money. Additionally, it can make the vehicle more structurally rigid and improve safety, Sakamoto said.
Challenges remain
However, gigacasting still presents manufacturing challenges.
Even though stamping is fast and cheap once the machine is up and running, the process has high upfront costs because of the giant, complex machines.
Also, companies can find it difficult to consistently deliver casting accuracy and quality under such pressures.
Nissan has been using large-scale casting for more than a decade at its Tochigi plant in Japan, where the company makes the Ariya electric crossover at its Intelligent Factory, Sakamoto said.
That factory is a mother plant for future EV lines that will be established around the world.
While the parts cast in Tochigi are not as big or complex as what Nissan envisions for its upcoming EVs, they give Nissan a good foundation for a quick pivot to the new technology.
“We have a lot of experience in large-scale casting,” Sakamoto said.
Another challenge is connecting the aluminum modules to steel parts in the vehicle’s structure. Steel and aluminum don’t weld together easily, so Nissan will deploy new kinds of fastening methods, including self-piercing rivets and drill screw technologies.
New ways
New approaches will be key to making Nissan’s next-generation EVs more competitive.
The planned five-vehicle lineup debuts in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2028, when Nissan introduces a new “family” development approach. Nissan thinks its new EVs can achieve cost parity with gasoline-powered cars by 2030.
Nissan expects to be able to supply up to 300,000 vehicles globally from this new EV family. And it envisions getting 40 percent of its global sales from full EVs in the fiscal year ending March 2031. That’s up from only 9 percent in the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2024.
Nissan said the modular approach to design and manufacturing will deliver huge savings:
- Development costs will fall 50 percent.
- Variation in trim parts will tumble 70 percent.
- Product lead time will be shortened by four months.
- Overall cost will fall 30 percent compared with Nissan’s current EVs.
Nissan reckons it can save nearly $1 billion in development costs for all five models in the family.
Sakamoto declined to say when Nissan might deploy the gigacasting process to overseas plants. But the family of next-generation EVs will be manufactured with a new modular production technology that will be deployed to assembly plants in the U.S. and U.K. from Japan. In the U.S., Nissan’s Canton, Miss., and Smyrna, Tenn., factories are in line for the upgrade by 2030.
The approach will achieve a 20 percent reduction in per-vehicle production time, Nissan said.
Even as Nissan makes advances, however, rival automakers are hardly standing still. A critical question, experts say, will be how quickly the Japanese carmaker can implement the changes, as rivals such as Tesla and China’s BYD rapidly adapt new methods and further drive down costs.
