Tesla's RIM process kills the paint shop, shrinking Cybercab factory footprint ~50%
elonmusk · x · 2026-09-05
Joe Tegtmeyer interviewed the head of Tesla's Reaction Injection Molding (RIM) team behind Cybercab's exterior panels.
- RIM injects two liquid chemicals into a mold to produce strong, lightweight plastic parts
- The main goal is eliminating the traditional automotive paint shop — historically the most expensive, space-hungry and environmentally taxing part of car manufacturing
- Combined with Tesla's compact parallel modular "unboxed" assembly, skipping the paint shop can cut factory footprint by roughly 50%
More from Embodied
- Why fleet buyers beat individuals: service consistency, financing, scale — surmenok · 2026-09-05
- Robotics team signs purpose-built real-world agentic robot — yunta_tsai · 2026-09-05
- XDOF, 3 months out of stealth, in talks for Series B at $1.2B valuation — ZeYanjie · 2026-09-05
- AMD unveils Threadripper Halo Station: 96-core CPU plus MI350P cards with 288GB HBM3E — Aroochacha · 2026-09-05
- Transformer Transformer: design a full robot from one manipulation demo, 73% tracking error cut — SongShuran · 2026-09-05
- AirSim co-creator: we used to pay thousands of dollars to Unreal designers for training environments — sytelus · 2026-09-05