The Challenge

Vital Auto was founded in 2015 when three friends got together, quit their jobs, and decided to set up a shop—fittingly—in a garage. One of the first contracts the company took on was for the NIO EP9 supercar concept, which instantly set the team on a course to producing extremely realistic, high-fidelity vehicular prototypes.

Depending on the client request, the team will start anywhere from simply a sketch on a piece of paper to an already designed vehicle. They develop cars from a blank sheet, design all the mainframes, all the exterior and interior elements, open/closings, and interactive elements. With five to 30 people working on a single concept, a typical project could take anywhere from three to 12 months.

In this time, a typical show car goes through up to a dozen core design iterations, and within those, there can be further iterations of smaller components until the design meets the expectations of their customer.

“It's all well in our industry to look at virtual properties as a means of evaluating a product before it goes to market. However, I think there's always going to be a place for physical manufactured objects as well. There's nothing that beats the sensation and feeling of holding an object in your hands with the correct weight, with the correct proportions, and the dynamics of how the physical environment changes your perception of that physical object,“ said Moradi.

“Most of our customers will come to us with a new idea, an innovative idea, and something that's never been done before. So the challenges for us are new every single day and they're endless,” said Anthony Barnicott, Design Engineer in charge of additive manufacturing. “These challenges can range from, how can we produce this number of parts in this amount of time to, how can we make a sustainable product or how can we make a part that achieves a particular weight while still achieving a particular performance.”

While traditional show cars are normally made just from milling clay, the team also uses three- and five-axis CNC milling, hand forming, hand clay modeling, and GRP composites. These traditional processes are, however, often not ideal for producing the custom parts required for one-off concepts.

“We've used 3D printing from day one. We wanted to introduce it to our manufacturing processes, not only to reduce costs, but to give the customer more diversity with their designs and their ideas,” said Barnicott.

Today, Barnicott runs a whole 3D printing department, including 14 large-format FDM printers, three Formlabs 3L large-format SLA printers, and five Fuse 1 SLS printers.

"In terms of capacity, all those printers have run 100%, 24/7, pretty much since day one. We use these printers for all areas of our concepts and designs. Typically, we would use the Fuse 1s for our production-based parts and we would use our Form 3Ls for our concept-based parts,” said Barnicott.

The Solution

“We use the Form 3L machines for anything that is an A-class finished surface. So typically in an automotive environment, an interior where you have parts that are not being trimmed with leather or Alcantara or some sort of cloth material. Formlabs materials give us a nice, smooth finish for our painters to work with, we can use these parts straight out the printer, straight onto a vehicle,” said Barnicott.

“What interests me most about the Form 3L machines is their versatility, the ability to do a material change in less than five minutes and the variability of those materials going from a soft, flexible material to a hard and rigid material for us is priceless,” said Barnicott.

Having the Form 3L empowers the team to produce multiple iterations of parts in most cases within 24 hours. They ended up buying three different machines so they could produce up to three different iterations of a part at the same time, even using three different materials. They can then pass on the cost savings to the customer or offer more value by showcasing multiple design options for the same price.

“One of the beauties of using additive manufacturing is the compression of a timeframe. So what do you do in that span of time that you have freed up? We sort of see it as extending the possibility space into imagining alternatives, into adding more iteration loops in the process,“ said Moradi.

“There are many products we produce that we simply wouldn't be able to without our Form 3Ls. With some of the most advanced manufacturing techniques, such as seven-axis CNC machining, we'd be able to produce these parts, but it would come at a huge compromising cost,” said Barnicott.