EVwire brief: Volkswagen Group has ordered 16 new 9,000-ton gigacasting machines from Swiss supplier Bühler.
The gigapresses are earmarked for front and rear underbody castings on the group's next-generation EV platform. These are the huge single aluminium parts that stand in for dozens of stamped and welded pieces that normally make up the car’s body.
It seems that the likely split inside the group could be 8x VW, 2x Audi (with +2 optional) and 2x Škoda.
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We picked this one up from our good friend Luca Greco, who runs The Gigacasting Newsletter over at Industry Arsenal and tracks orders like this machine by machine in his Gigacasting Database.
The order also lines up with the direction Volkswagen laid out at IAA Mobility in 2025, where the group leaned into a flatter battery-and-body strategy built around its unified cell. The castings are the body-side half of that same cost-down push.
Image: Volkswagen at IAA, via Industry Arsenal
The order itself traces back to the die-casting world on LinkedIn, and Bühler is the supplier on the receiving end.
A quick reminder on what these machines actually do:
A 9,000-ton press clamps a mold shut with that much force while molten aluminium is injected, letting Volkswagen cast a front or rear underbody as one piece.
Do that, and you delete a whole sub-assembly of parts, the robots that used to stamp and weld them, and a chunk of the weight. It is the same manufacturing bet Tesla made famous, lots of automakers have taken up now, and one Volkswagen group seems to have spent years resisting before warming to it.
Here’s one of the short b-rolls from Tesla on the Gigacasting:
Just ordering the machines is just the first step
As Luca points out, ordering the machines is only the first step. Installation, commissioning, tooling development and process stabilisation can run for months or even years, and schedules slip. A purchase order is not a running production line.
China is his cautionary tale here. Suppliers there have booked multi-machine packages only for a fraction to end up installed and actually running, and utilisation across the installed gigacasting fleet has stayed low.
Either way, it is a notable commitment, with the standard caveat that a casting line is measured in years from purchase order to volume output.
The machines here are Bühler's, one of the two suppliers (alongside Italy's Idra) that build presses at this clamping force.
Where the parts land depends on Volkswagen's next-generation platform, and the group's EV timeline has been shifting. Its electric Golf, for one, is no longer expected until the end of the decade, which hints at how far out some of this next-gen hardware really sits.
For readers who want the granular version, Luca's Gigacasting Database tracks every order, install and line by name, including the Chinese fleet numbers referenced above.
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