Welcome to The Gigacasting Newsletter
New here? Subscribe for weekly updates
For the long term subscribers of The Gigacasting Newsletter, we have followed the development of this project since its very beginning and now, finally, Dongfeng’s eπ M8 will officially be the first production vehicle to feature the industry’s first 16,000 ton die casted battery tray/casing, in Q3 of 2026.
This one-piece Gigacast component, produced on the world’s largest die-casting machine at Dongfeng’s Wuhan plant, replaces the traditional assembly of ~195 stamped/welded parts that previously took 2 hours.
The new process forms the large ~2 m × 1.3 m battery enclosure in a single shot with a cycle time of roughly 2 and a half minutes, with 135 seconds of just cooling.
Dongfeng is the first Chinese OEM to run its own 16,000 ton Gigacasting in production; the first battery casing rolled off on 21 January 2026, with mass production still to initiate with a proper ramp up.
Check out who else is running 16,000T, 12,000T and all the >6,000T machines in the world in The Gigacasting Database.
Dongfeng launched the project to industrialize ultra-large Gigacast NEV structures, battery trays and front/rear underbodies, two and a half years ago. The Wuhan plant’s phase-1 investment reached ~1 billion yuan; construction of the dedicated facility began in late 2024 and was completed ahead of schedule.
In a 14-month “vehicle-component collaboration” with its R&D institute, engineers ran thousands of computer simulations plus dozens of physical validation rounds to master precision and minimize distortion on such a large casting. The LK 16,000-ton machine entered testing around October 2025, delivering its first series-intent battery casing in January 2026.
