K
evin Czinger is not a fan of electric cars. Which
is perhaps surprising given that little more than
10 years ago Czinger was the CEO of an electric
vehicle startup called Coda Automotive. Coda
planned to build an affordable electric car for the
U.S. market by re-engineering a Chinese sedan called the
Hafei Saibao—an utterly unremarkable device based on
a late ’90s Mitsubishi Lancer—to be powered by a 130-hp
motor and a 35-kW-hr battery pack from China’s Lishen
Battery. Coda Automotive went bust in 2013, almost three
years after Czinger stepped down as CEO, having sold
just 117 cars. But it’s the reason the 1,233-hp, $1.7 million
Czinger 21C hypercar exists today.
Electric vehicles are not the eco-friendly panacea
they are often portrayed to be, Czinger claims. He cites
a National Academy of Sciences study that suggests that
because electric vehicles with large battery packs are
more expensive, heavier, and more emissions-intensive
to produce, their life-cycle impact on the environment
may not be better than that of conventional cars
and trucks. Especially if the grid relies heavily
on fossil fuels to generate electricity.
During his time at Coda, Czinger realized
the way cars were made hadn’t fundamentally
changed in almost a century. Metals that were
cast or stamped to create parts and components
were then fed on to assembly lines with complex
fixtures that precisely put all the pieces in place so they
could be turned into structures and assemblies and,
ultimately, fully finished vehicles.
Czinger came to believe that unibody construction,
invented in the 1930s, had become an expensive road-
block to building lighter vehicles at higher efficiencies. “It
is a process that works when you have an auto industryoligopoly and models being manufactured in volumes of
over 100,000 units a year,” he says. “Then you can have a
10-year vehicle cycle, with seven years of amortization
for tooling and fixturing.”
A flexible manufacturing system that can create parts
and assemblies, even whole vehicle substructures and
bodies—placing the right amount of material in the right
places to optimize structural integrity while lowering
weight and material costs—is an automotive manufac-
turing engineer’s idea of nirvana. Especially if it can
produce at the volumes mainstream automakers need.
Czinger believes he’s created it.
The core technology behind the production system
developed by Czinger’s company, Divergent 3D, is some-
thing called additive manufacturing, more popularly
known as 3-D printing. It’s not a new or proprietary tech-
nology. What is new—and what is still a closely guarded
secret—is the way Divergent 3D has brought together
systems, processes, and sophisticated computing power
to create a holistic approach to additive
manufacturing that works at scale.
The 268-mph Czinger 21C, an evolution
of Czinger’s Blade concept first shown in
2015, showcases the potential of additive
manufacturing. Its body structure, unique
2.9-liter turbo V-8, seven-speed automated
manual transmission, and suspension are
all made with 3-D printed parts. And mainstream auto-
makers are paying attention.
“We take out the tooling, the stamping, the fixturing,
and the half-mile-long robotic welding body assembly [of
a conventional assembly plant],” Czinger says. Instead,
the Divergent 3D system uses a series of compact
modules or cells capable of producing a wide variety of
components and structures.
“Our body assembly cell will assemble 10,000 full
vehicle structures a year, off about $3 million in hard-
ware,” Czinger says. If those numbers add up, his big idea
might be the biggest game changer in the auto industry
since Henry Ford’s moving production line.
In theory a mainstream automaker need buy only
10 cells—$30 million worth—to make 100,000 vehicle
structures a year. For context, in 2015 GM announced it
would spend $877 million upgrading the bodyshop at its
Flint Truck Assembly plant, which last year built fewer
than 185,000 vehicles.
Czinger says he’s licensed the Divergent 3D system
to two of the world’s top five automakers. One has a
dozen production-oriented additive manufacturing
programs underway, ranging from suspension systems
to subframes to full vehicle structures. He says a main-
stream car with a 3-D printed subframe will be on the
road within 12 months. Let the game changing begin. QNEWS I OPINION I GOSSIP I STUFFWhy 3-D printing could be a game
changer for the auto industry
Angus MacKenzie
Kevin Czinger,
pictured below,
says the 21 C's
compact 2 .9-liter
twin-turbo V- 8
makes 950 hp at
10 ,5 00 rpm, or
330 hp per liter.The Big Picture
90 MOTORTREND.COM JUNE 2020