The rest are bleeding money, and everyone is trying to cut costs and move faster.

Megacasting, or gigacasting as it's often called, is the latest manufacturing technique promising to do exactly that, make EVs cheaper, lighter, and simpler.

Tesla has been credited with pioneering the method.

I think it's basically going to be how all cars are made in the future.

Rivals are already sinking billions trying to jump on the bandwagon.

If you want to make an efficient, electrified car, you need to have more aluminum, you need to have less parts, you need to have less complexity, and you end up in, okay, let's look at how we can use casting in a better way.

It's a very logical kind of process step for us in our technology transformation, I would say.

Details on how much each is spending are scant, but the total market for diecasting, which includes parts of all sizes, is expected to grow 70% in less than a decade.

That's $126 billion by 2032.

I see tons of opportunities going forward.

We can increase the amount of aluminum and reduce the weight of the vehicle, which in the end is CO2 and range for the customer.

Researchers agree megacasting is potentially revolutionary, if it works.

But there are some serious challenges.

To say this is the future of car production can be, but the realization showed that the problems are more expensive and we should go back to the conventional way.

So this is really an open game at the moment.

Megacasting, or as Tesla calls it, gigacasting, is a form of diecasting.

It's a common manufacturing technique that can be used to make all sorts of things, including car parts.

The process is fundamentally simple.

You fill a high pressure mold with a substance such as molten aluminum and form a cast.

After some cutting and finishing, the part is ready to go.

While casting has been used to make smaller parts for a long time, many of the larger parts on a vehicle have historically been made out of stamped steel pieces, typically welded or joined together.

But at some point, Tesla started pushing the limits of the casting technique and now In the 3 and the Y, large sections of the front and the back of the vehicle are made out of single casts.

Tesla's really the first one to go and have very large, high pressure die cast aluminum castings in cars to replace large sections of what are traditionally stamped steel or stamped aluminum structures.

The front and rear portions of the early Model 3 chassis each contained more than 70 parts.

The same two portions on the very similar Model Y are now just one part each.

To cast the rear body or front body is lighter, cheaper, better for noise, vibration and harshness, much easier to manufacture.

Beginning with these big pieces allows Tesla to make tweaks that improve manufacturing efficiency.

We decided the floor should be a part of the car.

The battery is the floor.

With that, Tesla says it can build different parts of the car at the same time instead of piecing things together one by one.

The carmaker claims it cut the size of its assembly line by 10 percent.

Casting also provides the opportunity to rethink designs, allowing for a wider variety of shapes than stamped sheet metal.

You could add support in places where it would be too difficult to do otherwise.

You can use less material to get the same amount of strength because you can customize the shape of it to be most advantageous for the loads that you're trying to carry.

The material matters to giga casting is typically done with molten aluminum because EVs already carry such heavy battery packs.

Reducing weight as much as possible wherever you can is essential.

Automakers have been using aluminum even in gas cars to improve fuel efficiency.

Ford was able to drop 15 percent of the F-150's weight just by using an aluminum body instead of steel.

But aluminum is more expensive than steel overall.

Giga casting can help close that gap.

A giga cast component would be about 30 percent cheaper than trying to make the same part or assembly out of stamped aluminum.

It would still cost about 50 percent more than stamped steel, but weight reduction, part reduction and other advantages might make it worthwhile.

Tesla has said that combining its giga casting process with battery improvements can reduce vehicle weight by about 10 percent, increase range by 14 percent and use 370 fewer parts.

CNBC reached out to several automakers.

However, most said their plans for mega casting are in the very early stages.

Erik Severinsen leads Volvo's electrification strategy.

The company doesn't break out exactly how much it is investing in mega casting, but says it is a significant portion of the one billion dollars it spent on a plant in Sweden.

Right now we are investing in Torslanda.

That's the first plant out with this.

Of course, you know, long term, this is what we will have in all the plants where we are building this generation of vehicles.

The potential goes far beyond reducing weight or the number of needed parts.

Automakers say giga casting offers them a chance to change the way cars are made.

In the past, when you had to change your rear floor, you had to go in and change in a hundred different tools.

And now we need to change in one tool.

So one, you have the machine there, one, you have the casting infrastructure to actually do a change on the rear floor is much easier.

And that offers you flexibility for product upgrades.

It offers you flexibility for improvements of the products during the lifespan of it.

So it has a lot of other benefits to it.

Of course, it's a big investment to start with, but it is very much infrastructure.

Once you have it, you can really get more flexibility in your products portfolios.

Tesla has said it wants to use giga casting to completely change the way it makes vehicles.

In the very early days of the automotive industry, cars were built one at a piece in a single place.

Henry Ford changed all this by adopting the assembly line.

This streamlined the process and allowed cars to be made continuously.

This is still basically how vehicles are made today.

First, sheet metal is stamped into the panels that make up the body.

These are welded together.

Then the doors get hung on the body.

The whole thing goes through the paint shop and gets painted.

Then the vehicle goes into final assembly.

The body is married to the chassis or the frame.

But at this point, oftentimes the doors might come off and they travel down a separate belt where window mechanisms, door trim panels and other things are added.

While the doors are off, the interior of the vehicle goes in.

All the instrument panels, seats, carpets, everything.

This, some say, is really inefficient.

Those door openings make it tricky to fit all that equipment into the car.

Robotic equipment helps, but it is tough to automate that process.

You still have to have people leaning into the vehicle at sometimes kind of awkward positions with torque wrenches and those things, putting all of this together.

The unboxing is really blowing that apart.

So you start with some large gigacastings, attach components onto each of those, paint what is necessary, and then.

Kind of Lego fashion.

Everything comes together at the end.

And the big advantage of this is that instead of trying to reach into a car, you have people working around something like the size of a table.

So you could have four people working at the same time.

Much better access.

So there's lower labor content.

It also takes up a much smaller footprint because I can get four people around this thing versus having to stretch it out.

Tesla has claimed it could reduce factory size by 40 percent and costs by 50 percent.

When you look at the million to two million square foot, you're talking seven, eight hundred million dollars worth of potential investment on a large plant that you would have by being able to shrink that footprint.

Volvo installed gigapresses in its new one billion dollar plant in Torslanda, Sweden, and at a plant it is building in Slovakia.

We have casting, we have the structural battery pack and adaptations in the plant for full EV production.

And the casting is a significant part of that.

Ford, General Motors, Toyota, Hyundai, Nissan and others have all announced investments.

Despite all this, reports have said Tesla has paused or even abandoned its plan to cast the underbody of its next gen vehicle out of one piece.

During its first quarter earnings call, Tesla said it does plan new models that will use aspects of the next generation platform, but will be produced on current manufacturing lines rather than on a new factory or production line, such as the one designed by Ford.

The company did not elaborate on whether it planned an entirely new, cheaper vehicle, reportedly called the Model 2.

Tesla VP of Engineering Lars Moraevi said the unboxed manufacturing method it had described earlier came with risk because it required new production lines.

One argument for why they did this is because Tesla seems to be pivoting towards autonomy more, thanks to the success of the FSA, which is a version 12.

And so what we're going to get in tandem with the next gen facility is this robo taxi.

So it has less to do with them being dissatisfied with the next gen facility or giga casting and more to do with their own internal pivot towards autonomy.

But there may also be technical challenges.

First, there is some skepticism that casting very large parts will necessarily lead to significant weight reduction.

Volk's own research indicates that extra large castings could actually be 10 percent heavier than a comparable solution from sheet metal.

There also appear to be higher scrap rates.

For every 100 parts you cast, about 15 will, on average, be unusable due to defects.

For stamping, it's just one out of 100.

Again, castings are made by filling a mold with molten aluminum, sometimes from more than one angle.

But the larger a part is, the further into the mold the material has to travel.

And as it is traveling through the mold, it is cooling.

Filling the mold properly becomes more challenging.

And then as the material cools, it contracts.

That can create small voids in the molded part.

Because then those defects can become structural weak points within there.

So that's a general challenge with any casting and large castings.

It gets a little bit worse.

Some evidence indicates cars with large giga casts or mega casts either are or will be more expensive to repair.

We've had a discussion with our German premium car makers like BMW and Volkswagen.

We can't do this because our customers wouldn't accept that with this relatively often happened low speed crash, we have an unrepairable car.

Repairability on a rear floor, for example, has one importance level versus repairability on a door, for example, if you would go for that one, right?

What we're going after here are components which are very durable.

And, you know, you don't repair them that much either.

And if we need to, of course, there is a solution to repairing also a casted rear floor.

It's not an easy operation, but it's definitely doable.

On its second quarter earnings call in 2023, VP of Engineering Marevi said Tesla can replace a rear cast rail on a Model Y 10 times cheaper and three times faster than a corresponding set of stamp parts.

My design team works with our collision repair team since we're closed loop on this with insurance.

And we design specific parts that make it easier and faster to repair.

We have an incentive to do that because we have our own insurance and our own body shops.

We expect that we'll continue to do this and collision repair will continue to become cheaper and faster over time.

And we are actually able to change the details, the casting with inserts.

And we actually do that all the time.

So because the answers actually wear out and need to be replaced anyway, so we can actually make design changes to the inserts and tweak the castings.

We've been casting everything from, you know, gearbox housings to, you know, engine parts and whatnot.

And also we have made this as a kind of a stepwise approach.

So we have already in the second generation, the EX90, for example, a certain level of large casted aluminum parts.

And now we're taking the next step of doing the rear floor.

But the way on how to optimize your process and the way how to minimize the cost is a bit like that step by step.

So we are done now doing the rear floor.

We're not doing the full car.

And we're building on the knowledge we already have created.

The question will be the next and the over next Model Y still having these mega casting parts?

Question mark.