general discussion, page-1207

Have just watched the latest 'Munro Live' assessment of the Tesla gigacasts being rolled out to their vehicle range.

Tesla made about 1.1m vehicles last year, this year they are expected to do 1.8m, next year 2.8m etc

The giga casting are rewriting the engineering of car production by hugely reducing the parts counts, improving quality and dramatically reducing the time in production to build a car. VW takes over line 30 hours to build a EV, Tesla takes 9 hours.
Not only does this allow a lot more cars to be built, it greatly simplifies the number of robots, workers, parts used, product inventory etc etc.

Q; If you make millions of large aluminium castings per year and the casting are predominantly aluminium and magnesium where do you get those materials?

For process security, you need multiple sources but 90% of current magnesium supply comes from China?

Where else can you buy very very large quantities of Magnesium from?

The next problem is all of the legacy auto companies are frantically trying to catch up, building battery factories now seems the 'thing'.

But, what about the supply of critical minerals, aluminium, magnesium, nickel, cobalt, copper etc.

And then you need the factories, the tech and the supply chain to enable manufacture.

Australia is lucky we don't currently have a car manufacturing industry, we get to miss out on industry giants all going broke in very quick succession.

Meanwhile, we have patented scale-able Mg recovery tech and a small company called Latrobe.

DYOR.