Engineering360: "Porsche 3D prints a complete electric drive unit housing"

The ability to quickly manufacture complex machines and large structures via this method will greatly accelerate the development of off world facilities.

I keep hearing about how 3D printing can make better parts requiring less secondary work or assembly but the time to produce a single part seems to be too long for anything more than niche or low volume products.

The 21 hours used for this one housing is a production rate of 1 car per day per 3D printing machine.

The real strength here is to produce a prototype or low production parts very quickly and at less cost than producing a all the tooling needed for a cast part. The production time of a traditionally manufactured part becomes much greater when you add in time to procure tooling. You are right though, high volume production is not suited for most DED options yet.

There is a great deal of interest in using binder jetting options however, and with some recent improvements this system could reach production level cycle times. Binder jetting moves the sintering and heat treatment processes outside of the 3D printer allowing the printer to focus on printing. Once done multiple parts can be processed all at once in large furnaces while the printer continues on to the next batch. This all relies on strong additive designs as well, simply dropping a traditional design in a additive system is not efficient, and in a high performance low volume application such as a Porsche the 10% weight savings may be deemed a priority.

Additive is not a silver bullet but it is a powerful tool that needs to be further developed.