General Motors Manufacturing Engineer Benjamin LeBlanc inspects a 3D printer at the General Motors Additive Industrialization Center at the GM Tech Center in Warren, Michigan.

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General Motors (GM) has opened a 15,000-square-foot 3D printing facility comprising of a combined 24 metal and polymer platforms. The Additive Industrialization Center (AIC) is exclusively dedicated to productionising 3D printing technology within the automotive industry and has been described as the ‘capstone’ of GM’s increased expertise and investment in 3D printing over the last few years. Within the AIC, GM intends to validate 3D printing technologies and applications, while also ‘pivoting frequently’ to evolve additive machinery and equipment. As is standard in the automotive space, GM already has a good grasp of 3D printing’s capabilities as a prototyping tool, with many of the parts the AIC produces being functional models used within a variety of testing environments for pre-production vehicles. Through this endeavour, GM is said to have enjoyed the elimination of expensive early tooling costs and the ability to iterate quickly across a range of parts, including during the development of the brake cooling ducts on the Chevrolet Corvette where the company reduced time by nine weeks and costs by more than […]

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