What a megacasting is, and whether any car made in India has one

Short answer first. A megacasting, also called a giga casting, is one very large aluminium part made in a single shot of high pressure die casting. It takes the place of a sub-assembly that would otherwise be 50 to 100 separate steel or aluminium pressings, welded, riveted and sealed together on a line. Bühler, one of the two big machine builders in this space, puts that range of 50 to 100 parts in its own announcements. Typical uses are the front and rear underbody of a car and the battery housing of an EV.

No mass-market car built in India currently has a cast one-piece underbody. What India does have is the equipment creeping in at component level. Bharat Forge lists a 4,200 tonne giga press at its Centre for Light Weighting Technology at Mambattu, in Nellore district of Andhra Pradesh, and says it is the only company in India to start with a press of that size. The parts it names are EV battery housings, EV motor components, transmission casings and brackets, not body structures.

How a giga press makes one

High pressure die casting is not new. Your engine block, gearbox casing and most scooter crankcases are die cast. What changed is scale. A megacasting machine holds the two halves of a steel die shut against the pressure of the shot, and that clamping number is how the machines are sized. Bühler's Carat range runs from 10,500 kN to 92,000 kN of die locking force. The Carat 840, which it unveiled to European customers in June 2023, is rated at 8,400 tonnes, stands 7.6 metres tall and can inject over 200 kilograms of liquid aluminium into the die in milliseconds.

That is the whole trick. Get enough metal in fast enough, hold the die shut hard enough, and a part the size of a car floor comes out in one piece. Everything that follows is what you no longer need: dozens of stamping dies, the welding cells, the sealer robots, the fixtures that hold it all in place. Bühler said in June 2025 that six of the world's ten largest carmakers had taken up megacasting, that four of them had ordered from Bühler, and that it had booked its 50th megacasting order. Volvo and Honda are among the named customers.

What it means if the car is crashed

This is the part owners actually worry about. If the floor is one casting, does a parking knock write the car off?

Thatcham Research, the UK insurance industry's vehicle research centre, published the results of a two year study on 26 September 2025, run with real world claims data from British insurers and with Allianz Centre for Technology in Germany, looking at Tesla's mega cast structures. Its conclusion was that mega cast parts can be cheaper to repair than conventional structures, but only if the carmaker gets three things right: designing the casting with sectional repair in mind from the start, publishing proper repair methods, and selling partial replacement parts rather than only the whole casting. Thatcham's point is that lower repair bills keep cars that would once have been total losses on the road.

The warning inside that finding is the real story. A megacasting is only repairable because someone designed and documented it to be. There is no body shop workaround for a casting the maker treats as one serial-numbered item.

Where Indian suppliers sit

India's route in is the battery enclosure. It is flat, it is big, it has to be pressure tight, and it does not carry crash loads the way an underbody does, which makes it the sensible first job for a 4,000 tonne class press. Steel is not conceding the body either. Indian mills are adding advanced high strength steel and hot stamping capacity for exactly the same lightweighting brief, and a pressed boron steel door ring remains far cheaper to tool than a megacasting die. Expect castings to arrive here under the floor of an EV long before they arrive as the floor.

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