The Giga Press is not a gentle machine. It slams molten aluminium into a mould at ten metres per second. Eighty kilograms of metal, injected at that velocity, fills a die in a fraction of a second. The whole cycle — clamp, inject, cool, open, eject — takes about 80 to 90 seconds. That is a casting roughly every minute and a half. The math is straightforward: 40 to 45 completed castings per hour, around 1,000 per day.
Those numbers matter because they shift what is possible on a car assembly line. Tesla has been running a custom OL 6100 CS Giga Press since late 2020, making chassis parts for the Model Y. One machine, one enormous die, replaces a sequence of smaller stampings and welds. Fewer parts means fewer joints, fewer potential failure points, fewer robots and workers needed to join things together. It is a straight trade: a bigger upfront cost for the press and the die, against a radically simpler production flow downstream.
The machines come from Idra Group in Italy. Idra first listed the Giga Press in its catalogue in 2018. The specifications were already extreme. Clamping force ranges from 55,000 to 61,000 kilonewtons. Each machine weighs between 410 and 430 tonnes. As of 2020, these were the largest high-pressure die casting machines in production anywhere. Idra built them. Tesla bought them and adapted them to automotive use.
The stakes here are not about one car company. They are about the economics of scale in manufacturing. A Giga Press is a fixed asset — enormous, expensive, immovable once installed. But it runs. It runs fast. If it runs reliably, the per-part cost drops hard. That changes the calculation for anyone building vehicles in volume. Competitors who stick with traditional stamped-and-welded chassis structures face a cost disadvantage on every single car. Over a production run of hundreds of thousands of units, that disadvantage compounds into real money.
There is also the question of cycle time. Eighty to 90 seconds per shot. That is the cold-chamber process. The aluminium is molten, injected, then cools inside the die. The machine holds the pressure while the metal solidifies. Then it opens, and the part is removed. The next shot begins. The rhythm is mechanical and relentless. At that cadence, a single machine can feed a substantial portion of a vehicle line. Add more Giga Presses, and the throughput scales linearly.
The risk for other manufacturers is that they fall behind on process technology. Die casting is not new. High-pressure die casting is not new. But casting a full rear underbody or front structure in one piece is new. The tolerances, the thermal management, the die design — all of it had to be solved. Tesla and Idra solved it together. Now the knowledge exists. The question is who else will license it, buy the machines, and retool their factories.
The integrated die-casting approach also changes supply chains. Fewer parts means fewer suppliers. Fewer suppliers means less logistics, less inventory, less complexity. That is a structural advantage in a world where supply chains have proven fragile. A company that can cast a large chassis component in-house, in one shot, does not need to coordinate deliveries from a dozen stamping plants. It needs aluminium ingots, a furnace, and a Giga Press.
Idra’s catalogue lists the base specifications. The OL 6100 CS is a custom variant built for Tesla. The base machines share the same clamping force range, the same weight class. The technology is not locked behind a single customer. It is available. The question is who will place the next order.
