Czinger auto company is using 3D printing to build cars

Right. Well, James Bond may have had a flying car, but the next big thing might actually be a 3D printed car. Now, automakers have been slowing innovating throughout the years, but the past couple of years has seen a large spike in car evolution between electric vehicle technology and new car design. Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Praz Subramanian to tell us more about it. Praz, what are you watching? Hey, Rochelle. So, you know, there's an innovative new company out in California called Zinger. And what they do is they've been making this 21C supercar from their factory in Torrance, California. It's been breaking all kinds of records across the globe in terms of racetracks. But what it has is an innovative sort of secret feature here. I shouldn't say secret. What basically is that this car uses a bunch of 3D manufactured parts, as well as additive manufacturing, which means they take lasers and metal dust to create metal parts. So yesterday I had the chance to catch up with Zinger's CEO, Kevin Zinger, who founded the company as well, and he spoke to me about this process and how it works with this car. What happens is that the machine using AI within the space within which we direct it to design generates a design that meets all of the crash and durability and other requirements, splits that from a design standpoint into assemblable Lego blocks, 3D prints those Lego blocks in materials that we've created that are for each different purpose in the vehicle, and then there's something that looks like a robotic octopus that grabs those parts and puts them together. So you mentioned that robotic octopus. I saw that actually in their factory in Torrance, and basically it puts together that jet fighter-esque looking car, that C-20 that you see behind us there. It has a sloping roof, a number of parts inside and out, specifically in the rear of the car with the rear subframe and also some of the suspension. I spoke to a Lucas Zinger, who's by the way Kevin's son, who's the CEO of the company, and he showed me a few of those parts in the back of that car. This is actually a novel 3D printed aluminum. So we are a materials company, we're an additive manufacturing company, and we're actually an assembly company as well. So this rear frame right here actually represents generative design, AI-driven generative design, novel aluminum alloys, 3D printing, and fixtureless assembly. So just this area of the vehicle probably represents about 450 patents. The system overall has about 650 patents on it now. So the company uses AI in addition to this additive manufacturing and 3D printing process to create the best part, the lightest weight part, the strongest part for a given condition. So that's sort of the secret sauce here. But the big part for this company is they are bringing this technology to other companies using them as a technology partner, for instance Aston Martin, Mercedes, and even a bunch of aerospace companies. So that's the big bet on Zinger and the future. I mean, Pras, that thing is gorgeous. It almost looks like a Batmobile. What does something like that cost for the 3D printed version? Do they give you a ballpark perhaps? This car is probably around $3 to $5 million depending on spec and maybe even more. They've had a couple of versions of this car coming out. And Q4, actually, I shouldn't mention this, is they're going to start delivering the car in Q4 of this year. And they have plans to expand to around 30 factories to build not just this car, but mostly of the other parts and stuff for other companies. But Michelle, the car is very, very cool. And we had a number of people that were coming up to us and bothering us during the shoot because they couldn't keep their eyes off the thing in Lower Manhattan. Man, if they knock a few more zeros off the price tag, maybe I have a chance. But I mean, it's gorgeous though. Thank you, as always. Pras Subramanian there for us. Thanks so much.