How GM used additive manufacturing to produce its Cadillac Celestiq EV

Engineers working on the Cadillac Celestiq—an ultra-luxury, hand-built, bespoke electric sedan with a starting price tag of around $340,000—contemplated numerous ways to make the center of the vehicle’s metal steering wheel.

Ultimately, they opted to 3D print the part, because “additive manufacturing [or 3D printing] was the only [method] that came in with the right ability to create the very fine details and the thin, delicate nature of that part, and still be able to hit the cost targets” for the Celestiq, Brennon White, technical specialist for additive manufacturing product integration at General Motors, told Tech Brew.

The team employed “metal laser powder bed fusion technology,” which, GM explained in a blog post, “uses a laser to infuse layers of metal, creating durable parts with geometries that are impossible to produce through traditional manufacturing processes.”

Those considerations—whether additive manufacturing both meets functional requirements and makes economic sense—guided GM’s use of the technology on the Celestiq, which features more than 130 3D-printed parts.

“Anytime you’ve got a low-volume vehicle…[additive manufacturing is] a great solution set. However, Celestiq really allowed us to take design advantages that we would be struggling to be able to fit in other spaces,” White said. “And there was a mandate to give the customer something they couldn’t get someplace else. And that really made us look for manufacturing methodologies that were able to provide something you couldn’t do.”

Command + P: Additive manufacturing has been around for decades, and has become a common tool in the vehicle development process.

The technology—which involves building parts layer by layer—is helping automakers get new models to market faster in a competitive industry that’s moving quicker than ever. Speed has become more important as Chinese manufacturers launch new vehicles on shorter timelines than has been the norm for the auto industry. GM and other automakers also are turning to technologies like AI, automation, and robotics to make their plants more efficient and improve vehicle quality.

Additive manufacturing can deliver advantages such as greater design and engineering flexibility, more opportunities for customization, lower costs, more flexible supply chains, and greater manufacturing efficiencies, though it’s difficult to implement in mass production. For EVs in particular, bringing down costs is a key objective in the auto industry—and White noted other benefits like being able to reduce the vehicle’s mass, thereby improving battery range and performance.

“Being able to adjust on the fly and find solutions within a couple of weeks that you can implement without having to buy a new tool or fix a tool,” White said. “It’s a critical thing when you’re doing a vehicle that’s this bespoke.”

More to come: The Celestiq represents GM’s latest foray into using additive manufacturing in production, not just prototyping. It also uses the technology in the production process for the Cadillac V-Series Blackwing, and could use it for other low-volume models in the future.

“The systems are getting much more efficient. They have higher productivity. The material sets are much more robust than they used to be,” White said of advancements in 3D printing.

“And the ability to actually get a really organic component or feature set is now available, because software can now catch up with the design elements that we’re looking to put together,” he added. “Some of the software is so crazy on what it can do with very little input nowadays. It was almost like all three of those things—the process, the material, and the software—had to catch up to be at the point where we could actually implement this stuff into full production.”