For years, a little-known company called Tooling & Equipment International (TEI) has helped Tesla push back the frontiers of "gigacasting", the process it pioneered to cast large body parts for cars in one piece to save time and money.
The specialists use sand casting in a process called rapid prototyping to help validate Tesla’s designs and engineering specifications for its giant molds quickly and cheaply.
According to all four sources, TEI began helping Tesla around 2017 to develop the Model Y and is considered in the industry to be one of the world’s top sand casting specialists.
Since then, TEI has been involved in gigacasting mold prototyping for Tesla’s Model 3, Cybertruck and its heavy-duty Semi truck, according to two of the sources.
TEI’s been doing the low-volume rapid prototyping required before you move to high pressure dies. You don’t go straight from CAD to volume production — you need low-volume mules, and you use sand casting (cheaper, faster to iterate) to make that happen.
This is all covered in the article itself:
TEI’s been doing the low-volume rapid prototyping required before you move to high pressure dies. You don’t go straight from CAD to volume production — you need low-volume mules, and you use sand casting (cheaper, faster to iterate) to make that happen.