Ford and Rivian lean on 3D printing to cut costs and speed up factory floors

Rivian has spent more than $5 million on 3D-printing machines and shells out roughly $1.7 million a year on materials, but the payoff lands fast. Jared Beck, who heads additive manufacturing at the EV maker, told CNBC the printers typically pay for themselves within a year, and that the savings — while real — aren't the main event. Speed is. Parts that used to take weeks now land in days, sometimes hours.

The latest expansion includes machines that can build flexible silicone parts and a bay of printers at Rivian's Normal, Illinois plant, where employees can order parts on demand. Beck said every engineer should be able to make a part and get it in their hands as fast as possible. Rivian has already put the tech to work on electric-motor models for fluid testing, screw guides for tooling, stamping press inserts and trim pieces that filled gaps in early builds.

Ford is spreading the approach wider. Instead of a single bay of machines, the automaker runs additive manufacturing departments at many plants — including a vending machine stocked with 3D-printed parts for F-150 pickup production near its Dearborn, Michigan headquarters. Gregory Foresi, a Ford mechanical engineer who ran the 3D-printing lab at the River Rouge factory from 2024 until last month, said roughly two dozen machines churned out thousands of tools, with employees designing some of them and requesting others through an app.

That stash has bailed Ford out in a pinch. Foresi said a large machining wheel was needed to keep the assembly line moving, and the team printed one while waiting on a permanent replacement from a supplier. It didn't perform as well as the bought version, he said, but it kept the plant running. Ford expects 3D labs at more than 23 plants by the end of this year, and its official program already counts more than 200 machines, with extra printers running outside it.

At General Motors, 3D printing shows up in low-volume products and R&D. The Detroit automaker uses 135 printed components for its bespoke Cadillac Celestiq, plus parts for its performance Cadillac Blackwing sedans, including a unique medallion on the manual shifter knob. GM recently expanded its use of industrial Stratasys printers, which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the job.

Fadi Abro, senior global director of automotive and mobility at Stratasys, credited GM as a strong example of how a company can standardize 3D printing and then scale it. He said material properties have improved so much that the use cases have widened, and noted Stratasys works with virtually every major automaker. The next hurdle, he said, is making the technology faster and cheaper to reach.