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Two months ago, a car of the future rolled out of a Los Angeles factory and onto the street.
Called the Czinger 21C, it is mostly made with a gigantic 3-D printer. However, this electric hypercar is anything but a toy.
With a starting price of $2 million, the two-seat rocket ship of a vehicle (one seat in front and one seat in back) has a top speed of 253 miles per hour and goes from zero to 62 in 1.9 seconds.
“Right now, it’s the fastest hypercar in the world,” Lukas Czinger, COO of Divergent, the company that produced the Czinger, told The Post. “And it is fully road legal.”
Cool as the car may be, it is also the template for a whole new kind of manufacturing. Just as a computer can send information to a printer anywhere in the world to make a hard copy of a document, Divergent can do the same with the parts to build a car.
And it would not be limited only to automobiles. Can the technology be used to construct, say, a house? “Yes,” said Los Angeles-based Czinger, 29. “We can build virtually any metal structure.”
Divergent says it will completely transform the way in which cars and other items are produced.
“We’re ripping apart the supply chain,” said Czinger (the C is silent, so it’s pronounced as ‘zinger’). “The printer is where the end product is manufactured, so you don’t have to worry about a supply chain.”
But it doesn’t come cheap. Development of the printer ran to $500 million before a single thing was actually produced. “It wasn’t easy to raise money,” Czinger admitted. “It was a capital-intensive development [but] the fundamental idea is to create a new kind of manufacturing.”
Weighing in at around two tons and dimensioned like a pair of shipping containers stacked on top of each other, the printer uses metallic powders and lasers (which melt the powder) to build parts layer by layer.
“A single part,” said Czinger, “could have 5,000 layers. One day, each printer will be its own factory. This is what we call digital manufacturing.”
Czinger thinks of it as “one factory that can make any product as opposed to one factory that makes only one product. We’ll have instant manufacturing, in which the printer can make a Ferrari rear frame for one of its automobiles and then, in the next second, it can print a cruise missile for Lockheed Martin.”
Divergent is the brainchild of Lukas and his father, Kevin Czinger. Kevin, from Ohio, founded the company in 2014 following careers in law and investment banking.
As things got off the ground, Lukas, who has an engineering degree from Yale University, “quit my banking job and rolled the dice, betting on Kevin, betting on myself, betting on the vision of Divergent.”
Currently, said Czinger, creating one of his company’s cars from design to the finished product takes about 1,000 hours. Done the old-fashioned way, “with a manual chassis [building] process,” he added, “you can probably add another 600 hours.”
Although Divergent is at the forefront of the new auto revolution – and road-worthy proof that it works – they are not the only ones changing the game.
In fact, changing batteries in electric cars, which lose charging power over time, is another growth area.
“There’s a player in China that allows for battery swapping,” Phillip Kampshoff, a McKinsey & Company senior partner who focuses on the automotive industry, told The Post.
Tesla, at one point, is said to have also considered battery swapping but did not follow through.
More intriguing, Kampshoff said, “At a later stage in time, if there is a new generation of batteries or a better version of the one you have, you’ll be able to upgrade.” Right now, however, the upgrade “is not possible.”
What is possible – and something that could happen as soon as Divergent has more 3D printers – is the instant printing of hard-to-find auto parts. “If you’re a supplier for a certain part,” said Kampshoff, “you eventually sunset the production line,” of parts for models you no longer make, as it is not financially worthwhile to produce them.
But, with a 3D printer and a software copy of each part’s design, they can be produced instantly and, as Kampshoff put it, “not take up space in a warehouse for 10 years.”
Cars may become cheap enough that maintaining a clunker won’t be worth it. One offering that may bring that to reality could be the Slate, bankrolled in part by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
According to the Slate website, consumers will be able to design the car to their specifications – whether they want, say, a pick-up truck or an SUV – and have the ability to tweak the vehicle even after it is purchased, with prices expected to start at $20,000.
“Slate is exciting because it brings mass customization, which may sound like a contradiction, but it is not,” James Meigs, a senior fellow focused on technology with the Manhattan Institute, told The Post. “If they do everything they say, it will be practical and utilitarian and reasonably priced.”
And you might not need to be one of the richest men in the world to take a shot at pulling off your own car company.
“I think we will see more people taking gambles in EV startups that satisfy niches,” predicted Meigs. “In China, we’ve seen micro city-cars that are good for buzzing around and slipping into tiny spaces.
“Thirty or 40 years ago, nobody in their right mind would have started a car company. But with the battery-operated vehicles, it’s a little easier today, and people are willing to try different things. Maybe we’ll see things we can’t even predict and don’t expect” – Kampshoff goes so far as to imagine self-driving campers that can function as mobile hotel rooms.
“I think the future will be exciting,” Meigs added.
English (US)