DECEMBER 2017 FORBES ASIA | 79ETHAN PINES FOR FORBESFUTURE OF MANUFACTURINGwith Czinger himself and others, have poured $28 million into
the company. A new investment round targeting up to $100
million is expected to close soon.
“Traditional auto manufacturing is fundamentally bro-
ken from an economic and environmental standpoint,” Czing-
er says. “You can’t scale factories up and down to meet chang-
es in the market.”
Divergent 3D, he says, points the way to a better future for
how industrial goods are made. In place of Detroit’s mega-
factories—or Elon Musk’s Gigafactories—21st-century man-
ufacturing will be ruled, Czinger believes, by networks of
small-scale urban factories like his. They’ll be able to deliver
low-cost, low-carbon vehicles in small and highly customizable
batches. And they could help bring jobs back to communities
that have lost them.
A typical car factory costs between $500 million and $1 bil-
lion to build, and the tooling and machinery are amortized
over many years, which is why they need to produce hundreds
of thousands of vehicles per year to be profitable. Divergent
3D promises it can build a production line for 20,000 or more
cars a year in a warehouse-type space, complete with large-
scale 3-D metal printers, laser cutters and assembly robots, for
just over $50 million. Because of lower capital and production
costs, vehicles would be up to $6,700 cheaper to build, on aver-
age, Czinger says.
Czinger is hardly alone in betting on industrial-scale 3-D