New details are available on the BYD Yangwang U9. The U9 is a stunning hypercar from Yangwang Auto, a BYD subsidiary. Yangwang specializes in high-end cars, producing a large SUV, as well as the U9 Xtreme. Xtreme can do the Nürburgring Nordschleife in 7 minutes and has been clocked at 391 kilometers per hour. The company claims that the car can reach a speed of 496 kilometers per hour. That speed puts it in league with the Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut, Bugatti Chiron Super Sport, and approaches the cruising speed of some turboprop aircraft. The 1,290 hp sports car is powered by four 240 kW electric motors, capable of 30,000 rpm, and features an Individual-wheel drive (IWD) architecture using BYD’s e⁴ technology.

U9 Xtreme. Image courtesy of BYD via LinkedIn.

IWD is a relatively novel way of powering and steering cars, where each individual wheel/motor can be specifically turned, allowing for precise, different torques to be delivered to it. This allows for more precise maneuverability and even allows the cars to drive sideways. IWD could, with different driving styles and algorithms, lead to vastly different cornering and driving strategies that we have yet to see play out.

The 3D printed honeycomb frame increases torsional rigidity by more than 200%. Image courtesy of BYD.

The U9 is probably the world’s fastest production car and serves as a halo car and testbed for BYD Auto. BYD had revenues of $79 billion year-to-date, selling over three million units as of the end of this year. The car manufacturing giant is currently experiencing a profit crunch as competition in the Chinese EV market intensifies. The company is expanding, however, by building factories in Hungary and Turkey. BYD is the world’s 9th largest automaker in revenue and is besting Tesla in global vehicle sales. But, in China, you can never be too sure of anything, least of all your viability as a firm, so the U9 is important to its future and to showcase its current capabilities. The company has spent over $6 billion on R&D this year and is keen to show its government and prospective customers that it will come out of the price war unscathed.

The U9, therefore, is very much a money-no-object car with a crucial role to play in establishing the automotive firm’s permanence. At the same time, BYD, at a group level, is quickly establishing itself as a key supplier to Apple, manufacturing the company’s keyboards, iPads, and VisionPro, while it is also one of the world’s largest battery manufacturers. The technological scale and heft of BYD, with its 968,900 employees, can scarcely be contemplated.

U9 Xtreme. Image courtesy of BYD via LinkedIn.

The U9’s use of 3D printing could reverberate very widely indeed, therefore. The U9 uses additive components to reduce weight but also to make a more rigid, well-balanced car. Crash survivability was also important. The material used was aluminum in LPBF. The car utilizes a “Printing HyperCell structure,” a global first in automotive use, which integrates internal cavities and ribs in a honeycomb-like design. The new structure reportedly increases torsional stiffness by more than 200% compared to solid equivalents of the same weight.

The company also stated that the structure, known as the Printing HyperCell hyper-dimensional honeycomb technology, was made possible due to the team’s ability to compensate for warp in the thin-walled cell structure through dynamic compensation. They claim that they have tolerances of less than 0.1mm on mating surfaces. The body was not designed to be as rigid as possible, but rather to respond well at high speeds while being as stable as possible while driving at various speeds. The firm wants to continue with this approach and additionally use more additive and aerospace in future vehicles. 

The 3D printed honeycomb frame. Image courtesy of BYD.

One remarkable thing, overlooked by some other translations of the original text, is that the team claims to have developed its own aluminum alloy for this project, with the necessary yield strength and other characteristics for these chassis components.

Researcher Yang Feng stated, “The ultra-liberalized 3D printed body structure perfectly matches and efficiently connects various systems, realizing the deep coupling of the whole vehicle and greatly improving track-level handling stability.”

This kind of advanced thinking about flow and designing the entire chassis, performance, and system around additive is an example of very advanced use of the technology. Using 3D printing not only to optimize a part or even add to the optimization of a system, but also to design the system with additive in mind and make use of additive to optimize the interaction of that system, is something that few are doing.

The 3D printed honeycomb frame. Image courtesy of BYD.

Will additive be used more in cars? Super and hypercars, sure. We do not know if this usage will trickle down to less expensive automotive products. But if we just determine the future of the supercar and use it for the development of hypercars of the future, it would be a huge step forward for us. If 3D printing goes from being used for a few small components to determining the performance of the vehicle, then we will be well on our way to relevance.