Using 3D printers from Formlabs alongside traditional manufacturing methods allows Vital Auto to turn concept car designs into prototypes faster and more cost-effectively. (Image courtesy of Vital Auto.)

Turning a new car design into a prototype is a complicated endeavor. By incorporating 3D printing into the process, Vital Auto is making that process faster and more cost-effective—pushing the industry into the future.

Vital Auto, based in the United Kingdom, was founded in 2015 by three friends who were ready to turn futuristic automotive designs into reality. An early project for the NIO EP9 supercar concept set the team on a path to push boundaries and incorporate the latest technologies into their processes.

“We’ve used 3D printing from day one,” said Anthony Barnicott, Vital Auto design engineer in charge of additive manufacturing. “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.”

That innovation has led to the small company gaining clients, including Jaguar, Lotus, Nissan and Rolls Royce. Along with using traditional equipment, such as CNC milling and hand forming, the company quickly established a relationship with Formlabs. Vital Auto has three Form 3L large-format stereolithography (SLA) printers and five Fuse 1 industrial selective laser sintering (SLS) printers.

“The Fuse 1 empowered Vital Auto’s first venture into SLS printing, unlocking the advantages of SLS 3D printing with an intuitive interface that removed the guesswork, making it easy for the team to create both prototypes and end-use production parts to create door hinges, door handle inners, door internals and structural applications,” said Adam Hourigan, Formlabs technical sales engineer. “In addition to the Fuse 1, Vital Auto used the Form 3L as their large-format 3D printer. The high build volume enabled the Vital Auto team to produce auto parts with smooth finishes that could be quickly added to the vehicle right out of the printer.”

Creating a Concept Car

If experimentation isn’t part of a manufacturer’s timeline, Vital Auto steps in to help make the seemingly impossible possible. When a client comes to Vital Auto with a concept, it is usually one that is breaking boundaries and going outside the box. That often means taking an idea, creating sketches, determining technical specs and the gamut. Some clients also come with completed cars that need new innovations.

“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,” Barnicott said. “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.”

Since every project is different, a project often takes three months to one year to complete. Throughout that process, multiple design changes are made, which makes embracing digital technologies essential.

“One of the beauties of using additive manufacturing is the compression of a time frame,” said Shay Moradi, Vital Auto vice president of Innovation & Experiential Technology. “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.”

Vital Auto regularly uses its Fuse 1 3D printers for mechanical parts, such as door hinges, door handle interiors, door internals, and structural applications. These parts can be used straight off the printer with minimal finishing. (Image courtesy of Vital Auto.)

Without the Fuse 1, the Vital Auto team would have to produce mechanical parts for testing by CNC machining, which takes two to four days compared to less than 24 hours with the Fuse 1. Like the Fuse 1, the Form 3L is designed to be intuitive, with automatic resin dispensing, simple print preparation software, and an interface anyone can use. This ease of use enables the Vital Auto team to use the Form 3L for multiple types of parts with the ability to change the material in five minutes or less. The company prints nearly 100 different parts using the Form 3L, such as transparent electronic devices and replacement push buttons.

“Additive manufacturing speeds up the prototyping process by enabling users to rapidly iterate on designs in-house rather than having to send designs to an outsourced manufacturing facility and await their return,” Hourigan said. “Because additive manufacturing is digital, it also speeds up the creation time and workflow. For example, hand modeling takes skill and time. With additive manufacturing, you can design in your preferred CAD software and simply hit ‘print.’ With multiple design iterations accessible at a lower cost and in less time, 3D printing enables designers to be more experimental, testing out new ideas and running functional validation testing on each prototype to find the optimal design.”

Other technologies, including 3D scanning, also come into play when bringing a design to life.

“It's a common challenge for us as a business where customers will approach us with a proprietary product and want to encase it in their own design,” Moradi said. “Once, a customer approached us with a proprietary air vent from another vehicle that they wished to have inside their own interior. We used 3D scanning technology to reproduce this part digitally and then created an external skin. We first produced this in the Draft material to test out the design and allow the customer to verify it. From there, we moved to produce a production-ready part.”

Balancing Traditional Methods and New Technologies

In automotive design, 3D printing provides the freedom and flexibility to prototype and create end-use parts quickly, as well as opening up complex geometries that are difficult or impossible to achieve with traditional manufacturing techniques. On the flip side, combining subtractive and additive methods opens the doors to more possibilities.

“We use the two processes together to help support each other,” Barnicott said. “We have many parts where we would use subtractive manufacturing and then use additive manufacturing to produce all the finer details. This allows us to have a much more cost-effective way of producing a lot of our concept models.”

Along with its 3D printing department, which includes the Formlabs printers and 14 large-format FDM printers—all of which have been running 100 percent, 24/7 since they got them, according to Barnicott—Vital Auto uses three- and five-axis CNC milling, hand forming, hand clay modeling, and GRP composites. Taking this hybrid approach makes it easier to solve complex design problems, iterate multiple prototypes and create end-use parts.

“I think there’s always going to be a place for physically manufactured objects as well,” Moradi said. “There’s nothing that beats the sensation and feeling of holding an object in your hands with the correct weight, the correct proportions, and the dynamics of how the physical environment changes your perception of that physical object.”

The Future of Automotive Design

As automotive designers and manufacturers compete to create the latest innovations, 3D printing is steadily becoming a vital tool in the process. Along with reducing the waste that subtractive techniques create, SLS technology enables reuse of unfused powder, which can dramatically reduce the cost of production over time.

3D printer manufacturers are steadily at work creating new materials, which will also provide new opportunities for automotive creativity to bloom.

“A vast materials library enables manufacturers to use 3D printing for a variety of use cases, and this continued innovation is critical to advancing the 3D printing adoption in manufacturing,” Hourigan said. “Automotive manufacturers can tap into the unique benefits of these different materials to use 3D printing for different types of parts. For example, Draft Resin enables a fast printing time while maintaining the highest degree of accuracy and improving part quality to allow product designers like Vital Auto to create quick initial designs. After using Draft Resin, they might then use Rigid 10K Resin, which is stiffer and more heat and chemically resistant to suit the needs for high-performance parts.”

Formlabs also offers Nylon 12 Powder for SLS printing on the Fuse 1. It is a high-performance nylon material that is ideal for functional prototyping and small batch production, such as hinges and clips. ESD Resin, its first static-dissipative material, was developed for applications that require ESD-safe parts to protect objects and electronics sensitive to unregulated static discharge.

With new 3D printers and materials steadily hitting the market, embracing the latest innovations and balancing that with existing processes is helping the automotive industry step into the future.