Innovation & Technology

3D Printing Driving Rapid Development of Ford EVs

Remaining competitive in the increasingly crowded EV market will require all automakers to continue integrating cutting-edge technologies and new materials, processes and machinery.

Published 3 months ago | About a 4 minute read

Image: Ford/Formlabs

The auto industry is undergoing rapid transformation as consumer demand and regulatory mandates create mounting pressure to transition away from fossil fuels, toward electric vehicles. Ford Motor Company, the sixth-largest automaker in the world, has embraced 3D printing as a key tool in keeping up with intense competition and increasingly shorter development cycles as the global EV race heats up.

At the heart of Ford's European operations is Ford Cologne, established in 1930 and best known for assembling the Ford Fiesta. Adjacent to the factory is the PD Merkenich Rapid Technology Center (RTC), responsible for designing all Ford passenger vehicles for the European market — including the Fiesta, Focus and Kuga. The new, all-electric Explorer — Ford’s first EV for the European market — recently entered serial production in the Cologne plant, and 3D prototyping has been integral to its rapid development.

Producing full-scale automotive prototypes

Producing full-scale vehicle prototypes requires a wide range of tools. So, the RTC has its own injection-molding machines, forming tools and a wide range of subtractive manufacturing tools (such as milling machines); as well as a growing suite of tools for additive manufacturing — including fused deposition modeling (FDM), stereolithography (SLA), and selective laser sintering (SLS) polymer and metal 3D printers.

“Additive manufacturing is very important in the development process,” says RTC Supervisor Sandro Piroddi. “It gives you the opportunity to produce parts very quickly, very efficiently, reduce costs [and] react on a short-term basis. In the direction of electrification, the development times are getting shorter — so, the time you have to develop parts and verify parts of vehicles is getting shorter — therefore, [having] this technology in the development process makes you much more competitive.”

Developing design prototypes with SLA 3D Printing

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SLA 3D printers are used mainly in the workshop for design prototypes that require good surface quality and need to be rapidly produced for quick iterations. PD Merkenich uses several printers from Massachusetts-based Formlabs — including a Form 3L large-format SLA 3D printer; and Ford recently became one of the first companies to use the Form 4, Formlabs’ latest MSLA 3D printer.

The RTC team says the printer’s speed enables it to deliver more parts in less time and able to accommodate short-term requests. For the new Explorer, the team leveraged SLA 3D printing to validate the design of many exterior and interior parts.

“Some years ago, it was days — now, we are just printing some parts in minutes,” says Bruno Alves, Additive Manufacturing Expert and Tooling Specialist at Ford. “So, the engineers are not afraid to make new designs, new iterations, because they know now that they will get the parts very fast.”

Testing mechanical parts with SLS 3D Printing

The workshop also operates a large suite of SLS 3D printers used for testing mechanical parts — including parts that were difficult to physically test in the past, due to their complexity to produce.

“For the [cover for the charging port], it was important to use SLS — [because] we needed a functional part that would enable us to test the mechanisms. It's a really complex design that we are not able to produce in any other way,” Alves says. “We cannot mill this part; we cannot use injection molding to produce just some samples. So, the best way is to print in a material that we can test physically.”

Combining traditional and next-gen manufacturing

Having diverse technologies in-house also enables the Rapid Technology Center to create hybrid workflows — for example, by combining traditional manufacturing processes with 3D-printed rapid tooling.

For the new Explorer, the team produced rubber components for the door handle assembly using 3D-printed mold inserts in its in-house injection molding machine.

“This was a complex process, because we are using several inserts and there are also several different designs that could have several iterations each,” Alves explains. “Normally, external injection molding will take maybe two or three months. Internally, using additive manufacturing, we can speed up the process to maybe two weeks — three weeks, maximum. For this project, if we had to use external tools, it would have been much more time-consuming and we would not have been able to deliver the parts on time.”

Fast-tracking electrification

Ford's commitment to an entirely electric lineup in Europe — and 40-50 percent of its global vehicle volume — by 2030 sets an ambitious roadmap for the PD Merkenich facility. Remaining competitive as automakers including Aston Martin, Jaguar Land Rover, Porsche and Lamborghini accelerate advancements in the increasingly crowded EV market will require all automakers to continue integrating cutting-edge technologies and new materials, processes and machinery.