Exotic car brand makes world's first 3D printed titanium brake calliper; Audi, Volkswagen, Skoda to benefit

How do you use a 3D printer to create the world’s largest brake calliper that has to reliably decelerate a vehicle from more than 400km/h?

With a quartet of military-grade 400-Watt lasers in the world’s largest titanium 3D printer — that’s how!

Bugatti has today announced it will start testing what is not only the world’s largest automotive brake calliper at 410mm long, but also the world’s first 3D-printed brake calliper.

Intricate car components built for high strength are often carved from a large block of aluminium alloy by a CNC mill machine, then whittled down into the required form.

But Bugatti has teamed up with Laser Zentrum Nord in Hamburg, Germany, to 3D-print the new titanium stoppers.

The process to create one eight-piston front brake calliper suitable for the record-breaking Bugatti Chiron takes the world’s largest titanium 3D printer 45 hours to build. It uses titanium dust to painstakingly build 2213 ‘layers’ which eventually form the brakes.

Like a Bugatti car, it’s exceedingly expensive to make brakes this way. In fact, it was simply impossible to do so until now.

But now the technology has advanced enough, Bugatti reckons the 3D-printed titanium brake calliper can withstand a force of up 125kg per square millimetre (tensile strength: 1250N/mm2) before it cracks.

That means it “offers considerably higher performance than aluminium”, says the car maker.

The titanium brake callipers are also lighter than aluminium jobbies. Buggati reckons the world-first titanium anchors weigh 2.9kg, where the previous alloy units were 4.9kg. Less unsprung weight means more agility, performance and efficiency.

Many car companies already employ some forms of 3D printing, but the technology is still in its infancy.

Although prohibitively expensive at the moment, the processes, technology and know-how involved in 3D printing Bugatti’s big titanium callipers will eventually trickle down to mainstream models.

Bugatti’s parent company, the Volkswagen Group, owns Audi, Skoda and of course the VW brand, all of which will benefit from stronger, lighter and eventually cheaper 3D-printed parts in future.

This also begs the question: Are days numbered for the custom-made, hand-crafted car components long required for exotic cars?