The upcoming 2024 Cadillac Celestiq will serve as the brand’s flagship model, providing prospective buyers the ultimate authority in the customization of their vehicle. To enable this, the luxury marque has turned to 3D printing as a way of giving customers an innovative and bespoke experience. As such, the Celestiq will include more than 115 3D-printed parts. However, there has been some concern of the replicability of these unique pieces, but GM has recently said that won’t be a problem.
In an article by Repair Driven News, Cadillac stated that 3D-printing parts should pose no extra difficulty to repair efforts in the event of a crash. Referred to as additive manufacturing, the luxury marque when on to explain that a repair shop would likely not even know the piece was 3D-printed, and that the vast majority of these printed parts are less collision-prone pieces, like a door handle or seatbelt buckle.
“3D printing allows us to do new and interesting things, but the final result is really the same,” Cadillac spokesperson Katie Minter said.
It’s imperative to keep in mind that these 3D-printed parts represent a small percentage of all the production pieces, as the 2024 Cadillac Celestiq will be built as a low-volume, halo vehicle anyways.
An interesting point worth noting is that this additive manufacturing process helped GM create specific parts for specific needs, such as the metal medallion crowning the manual transmission shift levers of the Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing and Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing sedans. About 60,000 individual parts were also 3D-printed to compensate for a last-minute change in the current-gen Chevy Tahoe’s development.
As a reminder, the 2024 Cadillac Celestiq rides on GM’s BEV3 platform and uses a 111 kW Ultium battery pack as well as an AWD, two-motor Ultium Drive setup. Total system output is a GM-estimated 600 horsepower and 640 pound-feet of torque. The impressive horsepower and torque numbers enable the all-new, all-electric vehicle to achieve a 0-60 acceleration of 3.8 seconds.
All Celestiqs will be assembled by hand at the GM Global Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, making it the first production vehicle to be built at the historic facility. Production is expected to begin in December 2023, with a steep asking price north of $300,000. Availability will be by waitlist only.
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Comments
Most likely the customer will take the car to the dealership for collision repair instead taking it to the mom and pop collision center. Also learned that certain things that a mom and pop shop can’t legally fix first unless they contact GM due to the legal matters involved.
To the contrary, 3D printed parts could well be easier to obtain than those made the traditional way, especially for a low volume product. The “tooling” for the part is a computer data file, and the “factory” that builds it is off in the corner cranking out parts. Type a command into the controller and the voila, there’s your repair part.
3D printing is the ideal solution for repair.As you said, Stephen, the spare parts or replacement parts store is then no longer some hall with physical parts waiting on shelves to be mailed anywhere where they are needed, with more or less long delivery times, but a computer storage with the digital files which can be emailed or fed directly to any 3D printer anywhere on the world or the moon or even on Mars, or downloaded by the repair shop.The only limit is the availability of specific materials consumed by the 3D printer to form the desired part.
But the would be no longer a “this spare part is no longer available” or “you will have to wait for a new batch of that part is being produced, but Oh! the mold to shape that part is lost ir broken or no longer in good shape etc etc
3D printing could really revolutionize maintenance and increase longevity of any thing being produced.
Looking forward to the rare opportunity of viewing a Celestiq first-hand.