For anyone interested in learning more about what Stratasys is doing with 3D printed tooling for partners like Toyota, register for the webinar, “3D Printed Tooling: A Generational Opportunity to Reshape Supply Chains”, which will take place on October 16 at 12:00 PM Eastern.

Few areas of the global economy have been more upended by tariffs than the automotive sector.

According to a Wall Street Journal article from August, in the span of about four months between “Liberation Day” and the article’s publication, automakers had already suffered a 12 billion dollar loss from the new tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. The subheading for that article notes, “The obvious responses to tariffs are to raise prices and move production to the U.S. Neither would be an easy fix.”

Similarly, a September article in Metal Miner on the same set of topics recommends that “…US automotive market procurement leaders should stress that building more resilient supply lines through dual sourcing or extra inventory may entail upfront costs, but will ultimately protect the business from disruptions down the road.” While that article focuses primarily on imported metals, the general rule applies across the entire automotive value chain: those responsible for managing U.S. auto supply chains need to be proactive about diversifying and, wherever possible, localizing the sources of their parts.

Fortunately, auto giants already have at least one proven method for localizing supply and, in many cases, decreasing their dependence on imported metals. Toyota, for instance, established its Add Lab in January 2023, an in-house program dedicated to using additive manufacturing (AM) to solve the challenges that arise every day on the factory floor. A recent video that the company released in partnership with Stratasys explains how Toyota uses the company’s polymer 3D printing ecosystem to minimize disruptions to the automaker’s manufacturing and assembly processes.

A 3D printed transmission test tool, designed in the Toyota ADD Lab and printed on the Stratasys H350 using PA12 material.

Among the most revelatory details from the video is the fact that Toyota uses all five Stratasys technologies: FDM, SAF, P3, PolyJet, and Stereolithography. Toyota leverages the Stratasys AM ecosystem throughout the production cycle, from prototyping through end-use part output. But, in terms of applications that can make the most immediate impact on bolstering automotive supply chains, tooling may be the application category that observers should be focused on.

AM Research recently collaborated with Stratasys on a white paper making that argument, which you can download here. Meanwhile, the Toyota/Stratasys video, released just before the white paper’s publication, touches upon many additional applications: a welder tip cleaner blower nozzle, which one Toyota employee points out is “stronger than most steels”; a two color assembly tool that indicates when it needs to be replaced; and a translucent surrogate part that enables Toyota engineers to study the wax application in the bottom of a car door.

In addition to all the specifics, the video also aptly sums up the big picture view of how Toyota and Stratasys have both benefited from working together throughout their decade-long history. As Lisa Bednar, Group Manager, Production Engineering at Toyota North America, puts it in the video, “The relationship between Stratasys and Toyota is absolutely critical, and really the word partnership is the right word for it. I think one of the things that’s been so important in that true relationship, that true partnership, is that there’s really mutual communication…and that’s what I think keeps both of us at that leading edge.”

Dallas Martin (left), with Stratasys founder and Chief Innovation Officer Scott Crump.

I got even more insight into the partnership between Toyota and Stratasys by talking to Dallas Martin, Additive Manufacturing Engineer at Toyota North America, and Fadi Abro, Sr. Global Director of Automotive & Mobility at Stratasys. Throughout the interview, the two really emphasized the extent to which their working relationship is a partnership, not a traditional supplier/purchaser arrangement:

“If the two organizations don’t move together, they’re going to start moving in opposite directions,” Martin asserted. “This is just my opinion, but I think Stratasys employs the people who are the best at what they do.

“It’s the people who are the magic. You can have a great engineering department or great technology, but if you have really horrible people then the company isn’t gonna go anywhere. When we call Stratasys, we get the best and brightest people in their field on the line with us, and they’re all willing to help. They’re on the same ride as we are, and that makes me feel really confident in the company.”

Abro pointed out why this sort of longstanding partnership is such a necessity for AM, in particular:

”We’re not selling, say, a commodity glue, where the customer just needs the specs for the glue that they use and then the product sells itself — someone from your sales team just has to take someone to lunch once in awhile. We need partners that we can work with towards the same vision, and we partner with market leaders because we know we’ll drive the rest of the market to adoption,” Abro explained.

“We have engineering resources dedicated specifically to what Toyota needs. So if there’s a tricky problem they’re trying to solve, whether it has to with materials, software, or hardware, they have a direct conduit into our organization.”

An end-of-arm tool 3D printed at the Toyota ADD Lab using the Stratasys F900 3D printer and ASA material.

A big piece of the puzzle that helps Stratasys optimize its relationships with strategic partners is the customer advisory board (CAB), which Stratasys’s Chief Business Officer, Rich Garrity, explained to me in an interview published earlier this year. Martin described how the board works in practice:

“It helps tremendously, because when I go in front of an executive who has been at a CAB meeting, and I say, ‘Hey, I’m planning on buying this piece of equipment,’ they already have some context for what it does. That type of background fills the gap between the boots on the ground and the people in the C-suite. That’s what’s so great, is it’s not like they just talk to one person at the top, and then that person comes to us and says, this is the new initiative from Stratasys. They interact with all of us.

“We got a new senior manager recently, and after a CAB meeting he came back and sat down with me, and said this is what they want to do, and it’s the same thing we want to do, so let’s figure out how to align. That process really helps someone like me not have to push so hard: I’m not just pushing a rock up a hill all by myself, I’ve got a Stratasys crane on top of the hill pulling with me.”

So just how important is 3D printing to tooling in the automotive sector? Abro put it into perspective for me:

“Just in terms of the handful of applications shown in the video, the cost savings are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, and then you have to think about everything else going on in a plant,” Abro said. “We recently toured the West Virginia plant, and every 20 feet or so, there was a 3D printed fixture supporting a manufacturing application.

“Sometimes I hear people minimize 3D printed tooling, along the lines of, ‘Well, that’s just low-hanging fruit.’ But even if that’s true, it’s still low hanging fruit that people aren’t picking enough of.”

Abro contrasted this against the state of AM for end-use parts:

“If production-level parts are the fruit at the top of the tree, why does it make sense to climb all the way up the ladder, ignoring everything else on the way up, just to say you’ve put a 3D printed part on a vehicle? So if you haven’t implemented AM for tooling in every facet of your plant, you’re missing out on a lot of ROI.

“When it comes to manufacturing, automotive does more volume than just about any other industry. Every 50 seconds there’s a car rolling off the line. And so if you can assemble that car more effectively, more cheaply, with fewer risks of worker hazards, and more automation — the combination of all that means that tooling is more often than not going to result in higher ROI than having a widget on a car or a widget on a plane or a medical device. Production parts and prototyping are a ‘nice-to-have’ on top of everything we’re doing with tooling. But to me, tooling is the primary use-case.”

Martin added, “One of the points the video is meant to draw people’s attention to is that they may be stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime. There are probably tons of opportunities out there that they’re not capturing.”

To help inform manufacturers about those opportunities, Stratasys recently opened the North American Stratasys Tooling Center (NASTC) in Flint, Michigan, in partnership with Automation Intelligence. According to Abro, one of the NASTC’s central purposes is to help bring awareness of how transformational AM tooling can be to everyone in the auto sector beyond the OEMs:

“The OEMs have done a good job investigating and implementing industrial additive solutions like what we’ve developed at Stratasys,” Abro began. “But the supply base for the OEMs, the tier-ones and tier-twos, still seem a little hesitant.

“From what we can tell, the hesitance mostly seems to stem from a lack of awareness and confidence in the technology. So either they’re just not even aware of the fact that you can do these metal to plastic conversions for some of these fixtures, and some of these other tools, or they’ve only had exposure to desktop grade 3D printers, the parts broke, and they don’t have faith that the technology can be scaled up for the most demanding industrial environments.”

The Stratasys F3300 FDM printer, designed with extensive input from Toyota — including from Dallas Martin.

That’s precisely the misconception that the NASTC will address:

“The NASTC’s mission is to help show people how our technology works and what the prints can do,” Abro continued. “Automation Intelligence does a lot of sales of integrated manufacturing equipment, and they’re already leveraging our hardware inside of the cells that they distribute to the major OEMs.

“In addition to showing companies what’s already being done, the other purpose of the tooling center is to let people experiment. So if you’re supplier X, and you have a couple of different plants and we show you around the tooling center, you may not want to jump into buying an industrial piece of equipment that might cost half a million dollars, but you’re more than welcome to do a trial run yourself. That’s not free, but it’s a much more minimal commitment for someone who’s just getting started.”

With the drastic improvements in the latest generations of desktop 3D printers, there’s been a lot of discourse recently about the pluses and minuses of sub-$3000 machines vs. their high-grade industrial counterparts. In addition to the strength of the parts, Martin both brought up security:

“At Toyota, we don’t just look at the reliability of the machines and the longevity of the parts — we also look at cybersecurity. We look at the ecosystem as a whole that the OEM provides. Automotive is a very cutthroat industry: everyone’s always trying to figure out what the next person is doing.

“I can’t be in the position where I’m worried about my data floating out there because of some leak. So while some of the desktop-grade printers are great, they typically don’t invest in cybersecurity and encryption. We’ve been starting to weed those out of our plants.”

Finally, as to the macroeconomic and geopolitical catalysts we led off with, Abro thinks the global business environment will continue moving in a direction that’s increasingly favorable for AM:

“I hate to use the word, but tariffs are creating uncertainty in the market. So it seems to me like if you have a plant and you need a constant flow of tools to help you assemble vehicles, you’re better off putting a printer in the plant, or at least in a local center like where Dallas works. That’s also going to help support your local region more effectively than if you’re paying the tariff on imported aluminum.

“And it’s not just the cost of the aluminum, itself: you gotta pay someone to weld it, someone to mechanically fasten it, someone to certify it, and then you finally get it to your plant where you have to pay someone to assemble it. I see all of that as clearly benefitting AM for the foreseeable future.”

Featured image courtesy of Toyota. Unless otherwise noted, images courtesy of Stratasys