Ford used 3D printing to help design an all-electric version of the Explorer

Getting a new vehicle from the design phase to mass production typically takes years.

But in an increasingly fast-paced and competitive global market, automakers are doing everything they can to get new models onto the road quicker–including leaning into nontraditional manufacturing methods.

Take, for example, the all-electric Explorer SUV Ford currently produces for the European market at its Cologne, Germany, plant. The automaker used 3D printing to shave time and costs off of the traditional development process. Ford and 3D-printing company Formlabs earlier this month provided a behind-the-scenes look at how, exactly, they leveraged additive manufacturing to bring the electric Explorer to market faster.

“Every second counts in the development process, and reducing the time to prototype lowered the overall costs of finalizing the design,” Michael Baker, global head of brand and communications at Formlabs, told Tech Brew via email.

For example: using Formlabs’s 3D-printing equipment, Ford employees at the automaker’s development center in Cologne printed injection molds for rubber components for the vehicle’s door handles. This helped reduce a potentially months-long process to three weeks, according to Baker.

Hurry up: Speed is a key consideration for legacy automakers as they go head-to-head with highly competitive Chinese EV makers that hold a dominant force in the global EV market.

“Our competitors are speeding up the developing process. We need to speed up as well,” Bruno Alves, an additive manufacturing expert and tooling specialist at Ford, said in a press release. “The solution is to test new materials, new processes, and new machines coming to market. Currently, if we didn’t have access to additive manufacturing, we would not be able to compete with the competitors.”

The introduction of an electric version of the Explorer in Europe comes as Ford aims to deliver a fully electric lineup of passenger vehicles there by 2030. To prepare for EV production, the automaker invested $2 billion in its Cologne operation, which now includes a 3D-printing center.

Ford isn’t the only automaker employing additive manufacturing: The electric Cadillac Celestiq from General Motors, for example, has over 100 3D-printed parts, and Toyota recently revealed a concept car developed with 3D-printed components.

“As 3D printing has improved—faster printers, better print quality, and more advanced material varieties—the technology has become an instrumental part of the automotive design process,” Baker said.

Prototyping: Ford started out using traditional clay-modeling techniques to come up with an initial concept for the electric Explorer, according to the news release. Additive manufacturing was introduced in the prototyping phase; the development team 3D-printed prototypes of components ranging from the rearview mirror assembly to the charging port cover as they worked to finalize the design.

Prototyping is a key part of the design process, Sandro Piroddi, supervisor of the Rapid Technology Center at Ford, explained in the press release: “It gives you, the engineer, the possibility to verify the design. If you need to rework your injection molding tool or production tool later on, this is very expensive.”

Baker said that prototyping the vehicle’s charging port “would have been impossible…with traditional methods,” pointing to the component’s “complex geometry.” But the team was able to create a prototype using Formlabs’s equipment.

The companies didn’t specify the cost savings Ford achieved on the Explorer using 3D printing, but Baker said the automaker avoided “expensive tooling costs and wait times on outsourced parts.”

“3D printing is important in the ways it helps companies like Ford save money and iterate quickly, but is also invaluable in a broader sense,” he added. “It allows them to take more design risks and, ultimately, produce better products.”