{"id":485321,"date":"2026-02-23T07:59:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T07:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/485321\/"},"modified":"2026-02-23T07:59:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T07:59:09","slug":"a-recent-3d-printing-breakthrough-brings-us-one-step-closer-to-you-downloading-a-car","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/485321\/","title":{"rendered":"A Recent 3D Printing Breakthrough Brings Us One Step Closer to You Downloading a Car"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back when the movie industry had fewer legitimate existential threats, studios and theaters were utterly apoplectic about the scourge of film pirates supposedly robbing them blind. At the peak of this panic, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) released a controversial<\/a> study<\/a> claiming cam-wielding criminals had cost the industry a whopping $18.2 billion in lost revenue for 2005 alone.<\/p>\n

The year before, industry-wide anxiety also compelled Warner Bros. and the MPAA to produce one of the most memorable PSAs of the new millennium. Titled \u201cYou Wouldn\u2019t Steal a Car,<\/a>\u201d\u2014and recently revealed to possibly have been made with pirated fonts<\/a>\u2014the commercials made the case that procuring a burnt DVD or torrent file of a grainy Meet the Fockers was, in fact, tantamount to a B&E robbery or grand theft auto. The two 45-second morality plays contained interstitial title cards insinuating that the presumably honest and law-abiding individual watching would never commit such real-world transgressions. So how come they\u2019re OK with anonymously making or watching digital copies of media from the comfort of their own home?<\/p>\n

Immediately, the public reacted to the ads with ridicule, not just at their pearl-clutching corniness, but the central premise itself. As many would point out in the years to come\u2014sure, they\u2019d pass on hotwiring a car in their neighbor\u2019s driveway, but they\u2019d be perfectly fine with downloading one<\/a>. Once merely a meme, this fantasy is now one huge step closer to reality thanks to a recently reported breakthrough<\/a> in the field of 3D printing.<\/p>\n

A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has recently developed a printer<\/a> with four different extruders that outputs five different materials to produce a fully functioning linear motor in about three hours. Publishing their work in the industry journal Virtual and Physical Prototyping<\/a>, the team explained how by retrofitting a printer with enough extruders to handle the various materials needed to make a working motor, they decimated the usual production time for such a device and brought the material costs down to around $0.50.<\/p>\n

In a world where the usual cost of building such a prototype would be comparatively huge and turnaround time could take anything from weeks to months, the team\u2019s proof-of-concept has the potential to change the manufacturing world. The linear motor<\/a> they fabricated, which operates in a straight line rather than spinning like a car engine\u2019s, is primarily used in automation and manufacturing. It\u2019s hard to fathom the scope of impact if factories floors were someday able to print out complex replacement parts rather than be at the whim of a sluggish global supply chain.<\/p>\n

While the linear motor is a far cry from the complexity of a V12 engine, the MIT team\u2019s development is unquestionably a significant baby step in that direction. We\u2019re clearly still a ways off from being able to download and slice 2026RangeRover.stl files, but you might be surprised to learn that there are already hobbyists successfully 3D-printing parts<\/a> and even entire cars<\/a>, one piece at a time.<\/p>\n

Big Auto may want to get a head start on brainstorming their own PSAs while there\u2019s still time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back when the movie industry had fewer legitimate existential threats, studios and theaters were utterly apoplectic about the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485322,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[6560,28,5476,1728],"class_list":["post-485321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-3d-printing","tag-business","tag-manufacturing","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485321\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}