- 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. I used to hate to see that
bumper to bumper chaos, (car honking)
- Jerry! - but with six hours of playtime, these everyday E25 earbuds
take you right out of the chaos and right into the front
row of the jazz club. Ooh, that's old Tony tickling the ivories, they sound just as amazing as
those other top audio brands, but they're half the price. Better yet, they offer a
free 45 day return policy. So you can make sure you're
getting the earbuds you want. - 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.
I don’t understand the point of the shape of the strut arms, but I guess the AI can comprehend things beyond our understanding
You can cast all those parts. 3D printing in not the only way. The not humanly possible, no tooling in the world, comments are fluff. A human made the 3D printer. Someone can make the tooling. They just have not because it’s getting printed. Also 3D printing is super fucking slow and required a ton of post processing. It will absolutely be requiring machining for all the mating surfaces. So if you can cast it faster and it still needs to go to a machine shop it’s just a sales pitch
Still a dope car and a lot of cool manufacturing going on there. Not trying to shit on it. Accomplishing anything like that is very difficult
The video explains everything
“Oh Tony, don’t tickle my ear holes so good”
Christ man...I spit tea everywhere..