Lucid Motors has designed its most important vehicle yet without the manufacturing technique that Tesla, Rivian, Ford, Volvo, and Toyota have all bet billions on.
While rivals from pour billions into gigacasting — the technique of forming massive aluminium structural components in a single press cycle — the EV maker has deliberately designed its upcoming Cosmos midsize SUV without any full underbody gigacastings.
The decision was announced by the California-based brand’s chief engineer Zach Walker, at the Investor Day and detailed by director of cost engineering Cory Steuben in a subsequent interview with State of Charge.
The decision amounts to a calculated bet that the total cost of ownership matters more than factory floor efficiency.
“It starts with our insurance ratings,” Steuben said. “So we want to look at total cost of ownership. We are projecting a 31% decrease in cost of ownership versus some of our peers.”
Castings Where They Count
Lucid‘s approach is more nuanced than a blanket rejection of large castings.
The Cosmos uses four mega castings positioned at the vehicle’s corner nodes — one at each front shock tower and one at each rear shock tower — where structural loads converge and rigidity demands are highest.
“We do have four large castings in the corners — each of the front shock towers and each of the rear shock towers,” Steuben said.
“But we choose to start and terminate our two crush cans at certain points to allow us for a higher level of repairability over a more wide range of impact scenarios,” the former President of Munro & Associates added.
Steuben said crash performance was a co-equal priority alongside repairability.
“We also want to be really careful to make sure that we achieve our five-star crash safety rating,” he said.
The Lucid Gravity SUV received a five-star rating from Euro NCAP in late last year, scoring 83% for adult occupant protection, 93% for child occupant, 80% for vulnerable road users, and 85% for safety assist — all with standard equipment.
At the Investor Day event, Walker described the front rail design in his keynote.
“We obsessed about these front rails. We’ve actually put two different separate sections of rail to have both high-speed, low repairability, and even another high-speed rail. So we don’t destroy the castings, but we can easily repair and bolt in.”
The rest of the body combines steel stampings, aluminium extrusions, and smaller aluminium castings.
Steuben explained the logic of mixing materials rather than consolidating into giant single pieces.
“We choose between steel and aluminum. We choose between extrusions and castings,” he said.
“If you look at how we tie the front together, there’s some stampings, there’s some castings, there’s some extrusions, and we use those in ways that are the most efficient from a manufacturing perspective and a cost perspective for the given use case of those materials,” Steuben added.
The company projects the approach will save owners approximately $1,000 a year in insurance premiums relative to comparable EVs.
A slide presented at Investor Day, citing data from the Research Council for Automobile Repairs, compared the Cosmos body structure directly with two generations of the leading US midsize EV.
It showed that Lucid‘s mix of aluminium extrusions, aluminium castings, and steel stampings against the rival’s gigacast-heavy construction.
The Saudi-backed EV maker said the Cosmos platform achieves a 65% reduction in joining guns and doubles robot efficiency relative to the Gravity, while targeting five-star safety performance in all markets.
Against the Grain
Lucid‘s stance places it in a shrinking minority.
Gigacasting — known as megacasting at Volvo, hypercasting at Hyundai, and unicasting at Ford — has become the dominant manufacturing paradigm for new EV platforms.
Tesla pioneered the technique in late 2020, replacing 70 stamped components in the Model 3’s rear underbody with a single cast piece for the Model Y.
The move cut rear underbody manufacturing costs by roughly 40% and eliminated hundreds of welds.
The 2025 Model Y uses a redesigned rear gigacasting that is 7 kg lighter than the original and requires half the machining.
Tesla‘s current production approach sandwiches a structural battery pack between front and rear castings, eliminating more than 350 stamped parts in total.
Rivian has adopted a similar philosophy for its R2 mid-size SUV, which was officially launched last week.
Three rear castings eliminate approximately 50 stampings and more than 300 joints from the body assembly relative to the R1 platform, according to CEO RJ Scaringe.
Volvo‘s EX60, which premiered in January, is the first European production vehicle built with megacasting.
An 8,400-tonne Bühler press at Torslanda produces a single rear underbody component that replaces more than 100 stamped parts.
Volvo said the cast structure costs 35% less than a mixed steel-aluminium equivalent and reduces rear section weight by 15 to 20%.
Ford is retooling its Louisville Assembly Plant around what it calls ‘unicasting’ for a $30,000 midsize electric pickup due in 2027.
The approach condenses more than 146 front and rear body parts into two castings. Alan Clarke, a former Tesla executive who leads the programme, said the castings deliver a 27% weight advantage over the first generation Model Y.
Toyota plans to introduce gigacasting on a mass-produced Lexus EV this year, with cast front and rear body structures.
Honda has installed six 6,100-tonne presses at its Anna, Ohio, engine plant for EV components.
In China, BYD, Nio, XPeng, and Li Auto all use large-scale die casting in production vehicles.
Even among adopters, however, the technology’s limits are becoming clearer.
Tesla itself abandoned plans in late 2023 to cast the entire vehicle underbody in a single piece, reverting to its proven three-piece method, Reuters reported in May 2024.
Hyundai postponed the launch of its $730 million hypercasting facility in Ulsan from 2026 to potentially 2028, citing softer EV demand and US tariffs.
The Repair Problem
Industry data from the Chinese automotive newspaper Zhongguo Qiche Bao puts the yield rate for gigacast parts at 65 to 80%, well below the roughly 98% throughput typical of conventional stamping.
That gap narrows the production cost advantage and generates additional scrap that must be remelted.
Stellantis, the world’s fourth-largest automaker by volume, has reached a similar conclusion to Lucid, though for different reasons.
Chief manufacturing officer Arnauld Deboeuf said at the company’s Factory Booster Day in 2024 that Stellantis conducted an internal study of Tesla’s Giga Press and found no benefit.
“We don’t see the benefit in manufacturing, we don’t see the benefit in CapEx, and we don’t see the benefit in after-sales,” Deboeuf said.
Tearing Down Teslas
Before joining Lucid, Steuben served as president of Munro & Associates, the Michigan-based teardown firm whose detailed analyses of Tesla vehicles helped popularise gigacasting’s manufacturing advantages.
In that role, Steuben participated in multiple Tesla teardowns and saw the technology’s strengths firsthand.
His choice to avoid full underbody gigacasting at Lucid is informed by that experience. In an earlier interview with Assembly Magazine, Steuben described castings as being “like stones” that “provide amazing structural rigidity, because they don’t flex like many types of stamped steel subassemblies.”
The Cosmos design puts that rigidity at the four corner stress points while using bolt-on replaceable sections everywhere a collision is likely to demand repair, according to the executive.
Steuben said ultra-high-strength steel also plays a structural role that aluminium castings cannot replicate in certain applications.
“Utilizing ultra high strength steel where necessary really helps us enable our class-leading driver vision,” he said, referring to thin pillars that maximise glass area.
The body’s mixed-material approach extends to the chassis, where a five-link rear suspension uses all-steel links manufactured with what Steuben described as “very low-cost manufacturing methodologies.”
“We wanted to make sure that we weren’t required to throw the maximum amount of money at every single aspect of the vehicle,” Steuben said. “We were able to achieve the attributes for the customer with a really tailored approach, and that all starts with efficiency.”
No Mega Press
Walker framed the broader manufacturing philosophy during his keynote with irony.
“I’m here to make a huge announcement that we’re not using giga castings in the midsize,” he said, drawing laughter.
“Everyone’s heard giga casting, giga casting, giga casting. It’s what you hear all the time when we’re talking about the automotive,” Walker added. “But we need to not follow trends. We need to do what’s right for us and for the customer.”
Lucid’s midsize platform targets an 80% reduction in battery assembly components, 50% lower labour and overhead costs, and 70% lower unit costs relative to the company’s current Air sedan and Gravity SUV.
The company said the Cosmos’s bill of materials already undercuts at least one unnamed Chinese EV SUV and is approaching Tesla’s.
A 69 kWh battery delivers 300 miles of range at the platform’s target efficiency of 4.5 miles per kWh.
Production is scheduled to begin at Lucid‘s AMP-2 plant in Saudi Arabia by the end of this year.
“We want to have these mega castings,” Walker said, “and we want to have repairability.”
