Tesla beat Hyundai and BMW to this meaningless announcement a year ago, and have already progressed from that to the inevitable “oh yeah, this doesn’t actually work yet.”
>The Automation Factor Tesla’s response to labor pressure has always been more automation. In 2026, Giga Berlin is the pilot site for the "Optimus" Gen-3 integration—humanoid robots performing repetitive tasks in the battery pack assembly area.
Oh, absolutely. Because history clearly shows that when multi-billion dollar corporations save money on labor, they immediately pass those savings directly to the consumer.
That only happens in an open and competitive market. It’s usually governments that block that from happening (tariffs, taxes, unnecessary regulations…)
It is a pilot project. German pilot projects rarely go anywhere. If this succeeds against all odds, I hope for BMW that the robots are buying cars, too.
Yeah. Feels kind of insignificant considering the amount of non-humanoid robots they've used on production lines for the last few decades and lack of any claims to be "fully autonomous" or for the humanoid robots to be performing particularly advanced tasks
Not if they trained on driver data. Will come with tailgating, lane swerving and flashing high beams as standard. Sonar will be used to judge the minimum distance you can ram behind someone and when to activate high beams.
I think this is a myth - Chinese factories don't seem to be automated to a higher degree than European ones, and in any case are still full of Kuka, Fanuc and ABB robots.
I think there's a domestic brand or two that's gaining marketshare, but they're not there yet.
There's a myth of Chinese high-tech (esp in cars), that is not to say their stuff isn't technologically advanced, but the characterization that Chinese tech has left Europeans' behind just does not pass muster when one looks at mechanic videos of Chinese EVs.
Their cars look fancy and are full of futuristic screens and sensors, but the suspension setup and lot of engineering behind them is not exactly cutting edge.
That's why a lot of car reviewers say that a lot of their EVs don't drive particularly well
This take might have been true years ago, especially for cheaper makes, but modern EVs from china use high-quality components and designs that often surpass european automakers. The premium brands - Nio, Zeekr, Polestar, Lotus, etc - have design and R&D offices in Europe, and source parts from suppliers all over the world. Nio uses Nvidia Orin chips, Qualcomm SoCs, Brembo brakes, Bosch controllers, ZF suspension systems, Continental/Pirelli tires, and ClearMotion (in their flagship model); can't get any better than that.
The driving feel is definitely a thing, the chinese cars are very soft and 'boaty' which is not as desirable elsewhere. They are also on average much larger and heavier than their western counterparts, cities in China have road infrastructure built in the past 20-30 years with spacious lanes.
> have design and R&D offices in Europe, and source parts from suppliers all over the world. Nio uses Nvidia Orin chips, Qualcomm SoCs, Brembo brakes, Bosch controllers, ZF suspension systems, Continental/Pirelli tires, and ClearMotion (in their flagship model); can't get any better than that.
Exactly my point - if premium Chinese cars use Western components are built by Western robots, and designed in Western offices - that means the Chinese technological superiority does not exist.
As for their cars and roads being big - I don't see that as an upside, I have heard from many Chinese residents that the physical size of their cities means (most European cities are denser than Chinese ones) that navigating them becomes that much harder and painful.
Which lays to rest another myth about how China is light-years ahead of the West in urban planning , when in reality they have their own issues.
Yaya. Sorry. I didn't state my assumptions, am mixing issues.
To me, Kia/Hyundai is an example of a foreign manufacturer successively building EVs in North America for North America. Satisfying American standards, tastes, regulations, etc.
I expect the larger Chinese competitors to do the same.
Decades ago, European and then Japanese competitors did as well.
I think this is going to be bad for BMW, and bad for the current robotics-summer. I _hope_ that’s not the case, I’d love for robotics to get deployed more widely in manufacturing. But I’m pretty sure it will be. I think the chances of meaningful success would be higher with non-humanoid robotics
Feel free to ask for more details if you have specific questions! I worked in robotics for many years, I have some decent familiarity with this space. Here’s some more detailed thoughts “for free”:
Humanoid robotics are largely a publicity stunt. Our actuators, sensors, and algorithms are better adapted to other form factors. The nice thing about humanoids is that you (in theory) don’t have to change the interface, since they can use the same interface humans can use. In practice that doesn’t hold well, because we don’t have great force/pressure sensors to cover large areas like human skin. Likewise, it’s difficult to apply the fine forces that are sometimes needed (grabbing an egg, moving a joystick, etc). And there’s risk of the robot doing something unpredictable, so you always have to set a good safety bound around it anyways. In the end it’s often better to adapt the process to modern robotics, rather than the other way around.
It would be hard to believe that BMW doesn't have many industrial robots already deployed and in fact they do on a serious scale [1]. Now, to my mind, adding humanoid-robots to the existing mix of standard-robots and people seems not completely terrible.
The article's vacuous AI gloss language indeed makes it seem like they are indeed engaging in, crudely put, baloney. But your own language is weird here, like you don't realize robots are a standard thing in modern manufacturing. I mean, modern manufacturing "succeeds" massively using nonhumanoid robots at large scale.
Robots are widely deployed in manufacturing, just not humanoid robots. The biggest benefit of stationary robots is that their behavior is 100% predictable and they are always where the humans expect them to be. There are certain areas in factories which can be nearly 100% automated (pick & pull in warehouses, for example), but there are a lot of areas where, without a human in the loop, there are too many edge cases to reasonably expect humanoid-robots-as-replacements-for-humans to anticipate or react to.
(I have 15 years experience in high tech manufacturing, with most of that building test automation & manufacturing execution systems, and an advanced degree in operations research.)
BMW does not focus on providing cheap cars but highly performing ones. So probably the reduction in costs will be used to improve performance, features and perceived quality.
BMW has pretty low margins, like around 7-12% usually. A 10% reduction in manufacturing costs is not much.
Whenever I hear german companies mention digitalisation, I get reminded that they still use pen and pencil in production environments to log data, pass those sheets to secreteries who enter the data into legacy systems so data analysts can enter it into another system that then has an integration with SAP. Data from SAP then flows onwards to some buzzword filled Azure product that costs a few million a month from which someone downloads an xls file and uploads it to Tableau where they run some simple calculations. Someone else downloads it as an xls and manually writes (not copy pastes) the numbers into a power point presentation and makes graphs by drawing shapes. This is then presented at some bi-monthly meeting.
I agree and it's quite resilient to digital outages/downtime (at least in terms of hours, probably not more than a few days) so your manufacturing productivity won't drop to zero when the ERP system goes down. The paper logs can also be entered later when the system comes back up.
As we've seen in the Iran conflict, datacenters are a target and result in extended outages.
And the customer being cheap doesn't pay for the proper modules and thus everything gets mapped to PSP elements -- to keep the same old garbage piles that get pushed around.
But you can't just hire one, you have to hire functional consultants (who tell you your flow is wrong and you have to adjust that to how SAP does things) and then implementation consultants who don't know how the process works, but can actually implement that integration. And then again after the next release because the integration broke.
I've seen worse. For 2 years I received the results weekly, that I didn't ask for, of a $1m a year burn reporting stack. This was launched during a massive back patting ceremony like something out of Severance.
So one day I stared at it randomly and noticed that the pie chart percentages on one thing didn't even add up to 100. Looked back at history and it turned out this had been the case since day one. Spent a day taking it to bits and a good 50% of it made no sense at all and people had been making business decisions on it without checking it.
And to remediate it? They replaced it with some AI generated slop which is even worse.
I have seen this way to often in other areas. That is the push here as well AI can sort through it. Too many people are held to account for not meeting what amounts to made up numbers.
It's always funny when HN users comment that there are no more opportunities for startups and it's too hard to compete against large, wealthy corporations. The reality is that most of them are so badly managed that competing against them is easy if you're actually competent.
> The reality is that most of them are so badly managed that competing against them is easy if you're actually competent.
The world is a graveyard littered with startups that thought this way. One of the consequences of wealth concentration and monopolies is that it is insufficient to be better than your competitors because your customers are also incompetent. To find product-market fit you not only have to be better, you have to be noticed by someone that cares that you're better and upon reflection confirms you solve a valuable problem.
By way of analogy, it's not enough to realize that MouseCorp makes shitty mousetraps and the local village spends $1M/yr on them. You can make a better mousetrap thinking its worth $1M/yr, or do the deeper look and realize the local village doesn't have a mouse problem but rather has a problem with too many feral cats, and has no interest in buying better mousetraps and once their attention is gained simply stops buying mousetraps altogether. Both parties lacked competence, but that didn't mean there was a market.
Right, so don't waste time trying to sell low-margin products to local governments. As the saying goes: it's like trying to shear a pig, too much squealing and not enough wool.
> The world is a graveyard littered with startups that thought this way. One of the consequences of wealth concentration and monopolies is that it is insufficient to be better than your competitors because your customers are also incompetent.
It's less that and more that governments and bureaucrats are corrupted to create barriers tot the market and to turn a blind eye to anti competitive behavior and outright illegal practices. For example huge banking corporations have been caught laundering money for drug cartels and got away with fines -- if your fintech startup tried that on, you would never see the outside of a prison cell.
> For example huge banking corporations have been caught laundering money for drug cartels and got away with fines -- if your fintech startup tried that on, you would never see the outside of a prison cell.
German bank N26 was embroiled in money laundering, scams and other issues stemming from bad KYC for years, and all they got was a slap on the wrist from regulators.
Before you say SAP is terrible, have you tried the competition?
It has some data entry screens that are super efficient, cursor always goes to the right place, tab moves you to the right place etc. 15 years and lots of ERPs later I have never seen better
When you are viewing a purchase invoice on the ledger you can see the PO it is matched to, click on it and it goes to the PO. Click a line on the PO you can see the GRNs related. Click on them you go to the actual GRNs
SAP is much better than the home-grown stuff Tesla, Space X, or Amazon are using. One needs to compare the "new" public cloud solution, rather than the outdated soon not supported ECC system.
I used to work for the US side of a German multinational (one of the largest in the world) and discovered the same thing when it came to software.
The German side always had slick presentations (they always had good visual marketing) and impressive claims, but whenever I tried to work with their products, I always found the claims overstated and that they hadn't really executed deeply. This despite my German counterparts working hard (I visited HQ in Germany and when they work, they really work and clock the hours, no idle chitchat)... yet it doesn't translate to impact.
A lot of their products had impressive front-ends but half-baked back-ends (on the American side, it's the reverse -- our interfaces looked like crap, but our stuff actually worked and often delivered in less time).
A lot of their designs were also non-human friendly (if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users -- weird little user-hostile features pop up everywhere). I don't understand why this is -- this is a nation that produced Dieter Rams. Tobi Lutke (CEO Shopify) likes to talk about how Germans grew up surrounded by good design, yet that design culture never permeated many German products. I own a Bosch in-unit washer/dryer and it's frustratingly unintuitive and has a "my (the engineer's) way or the highway" philosophy.
I went to a BMW talk once about the infotainment system (it was built on the latest Azure tech), but came away feeling that the work was not deep. It was skin deep.
I wonder what has happened to the German builder/tinkerer culture that made German manufacturing great. In the 1980s and 1990s, Germany was synonymous with excellence. But in the 2000s-present, not so much (except maybe in very narrow mittelstand verticals, e.g. Zeiss).
Whats funny is when its privatized by publicly traded companies it becomes this weird nationalized-kinda but not really thing that turns the economy into a bifercated class of first class citizens and second class citizens.
It's really that the upper management does not appreciate change over departments if it's not their idea.
There is always the mentality that "why fix it if it works" where you actually have to wait for people to go to their pension to really grab a process and drive change.
You then get partially digitalized processes where digital native departments are concerned but they always have to solve the problem of interacting with a bunch of legacy systems and workflows, which in itself is so much harder and more inefficient.
I wonder if anybody's manufacturing was great before the Japanese quality revolution. It took Germany longer than the US to adopt modern quality control. Granted, Germany did a lot of it, for instance their chemical industries were staggering.
I've formed the impression that every country's engineering and design cultures are essentially aesthetics.
History of manafacturing philosophy is a pretty interesting lens;
I once had the chance to chatt with an old German colleague about the change in mentality over multiple decades. One thing he highlighted was the change from "lower error rate equals less waste, and higher final sale price" to "customer complaints or defect rates should be above a threshold, otherwise we are investing too much in the process control".
Particularly due to the desire to derisk the process; design by collaboration with the end user, and contracts with quality requirements, rather than the design being owned by the manufacturer.
BMW's most recent infotainment is a big step backwards to me in both areas - aesthetics and UX. Its previous generation was one of the best in the market also in both. I literally don't consider buying the newest 4-series just because of it, especially of the ultrawide driver's "monitor" - it's just so ugly, and I regret it, since on the outside the car appeals me so much more. I'd rather spend the same on previous year model with better specs.
I strongly disagree. The step from the F series to the G vehicles was big, quality improved a lot, specially for the 3 series (F30, F31 vs G20, G21) and the X3 (the G01 feels like a 5 series). The materials, assembly, noises during driving, but specially the driving dynamics and robustness are incredibly high.
It’s also true though that the last wave of G models has improved driving dynamics but cheapened out in interior materials. Peak BMW interiors happened between 2019-2022 with the G01, G30, G05 and iX, i4. Being my favorites the iX and the G01.
BMW also has the best infotainment system after Tesla. And it still integrates well with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.
Mechanically, you're probably right, but the screen-centric controls of the newer generation are _awful_ by comparison to the F generation's physical buttons and dials (this isn't BMW though, it's the whole industry).
My wife and I both have F31s, which we will drive until we can no longer source replacement parts unless the industry comes to its senses first (unlikely). Any time we've ever looked at plausible replacements, the screen-based controls are an immediate hard no.
I worked on BMW infotainment for a time. My opinions are my own obviously, I don't even work at BMW anymore.
So, when I was working, I found the decisions regarding the infotainment mind boggling, to me they made zero sense, until I found some random documents deep in the BMW intranet, where I found the logic of it all: The focus was actually increasing the car range, so for example instead of having one infotainment dedicated hardware, one for the doors, one for the brakes, etc... now the cars have the least amount of computers as possible, located in the locations that result in the least wires as possible, with the goal of saving weight. Because of this, the software layer now had to deal with extra virtualizations, software that originally was to run on a specific microcontroller and do a specific task, and communicated with other parts by wire, now shares a generalized CPU with many other software, and communicate by virtual machines sending messages to each other.
Marvelous stuff from the point of mechanical engineering, indeed results in lighter car and less parts. But the end result for the user? It is mind bogglingly bad, several VMs running on top of each other, everything is slow, the Infotainment instead of being just Infotainment now do several other things.
I had written some of the surprising non-Infotainment stuff the Infotainment do, but that probably would cross into violating NDAs territory, so better not. Just let's say the Infotainment has to meet some non-entertainment related EU regulations.
Isn't what you are describing known as Zonal Architecture (as opposed to Domain Architecture) and supposed to be the hot new way of architecting automotive platforms? Tesla was pioneering it. The Volkswagen Group spent billions to get their hands on Rivian's zonal architecture platform.
But bafflingly to me, almost zero of my coworkers seemed to be aware of it. They would just get the seemly weird orders from above and would execute them, without figuring out the end goal, and this does result into some bad software engineering (because people don't know the end goal they don't know what they can optimize, so they just don't).
"if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users "
cracks me up. I once leased a BMW for 3 years. By the time I returned the car, I still didn't what all the cryptic buttons for HVAC and other controls. They just refused to follow established automotive ergonomic conventions.
Anyway, my father used to do business with Germans for a long time. He had many interesting stories to share, but one that has always stayed with me is, his disdain for how cheap / penny pinching his German companies and their employees were when doing deals. This was in the 90s, so definitely passed the West Germany glory days.
My take is, in the era of global competition, Germans didn't know how to strike the right balance and effective allocate resources. Where to compromise, and where not to. I don't know if it's sheer stubbornness or they're just wired differently.
>how cheap / penny pinching his German companies and their employees were when doing deals
I think most people(Americans mostly) don't have the faintest idea how true that is right now. Here's a comment of mine from a few weeks ago giving such a present-day example that will blow your brains of how cheap german companies are. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47018023
I feel like German companies know they lost the innovation race (I mean companies that aren't Zeiss), they lost the cheap manufacturing race "thanks" to Russian gas dependence and ideological denuclearisation before enough renewables were built, so all that's left for them now to stay afloat is reducing labor and operating costs by offshoring and pinching all the pennies they can find, but even that it not enough since from where I stand there's weekly corporate bankruptcies and layoffs and that's including the fact that the government has been speeding like crazy the last 3+ years to make sure the private sector industry doesn't completely collapse.
I’m told that Germans in general are “cheap” and that this is an expected consequence of their economic policies designed to reinforce their industrial base.
I wish I could find the reference I’m thinking of, but the idea was that Germans buying absurdly cheap wine and their constantly underfunded trains were part of a pattern of deliberate domestic under-investment to keep exports competitive.
Dutch may be cheap at hospitality but they're savvy at running business, while Germans are cheap at running business and the economy in general, hence why austerity is their favorite word in the vocabulary, they're penny wise and pound foolish.
And unfortunately the focus on austerity post-2008 spearheaded by Germany only held the EU economy back compared to the US.
~46M employed (of which ~16M part time, usually related to child or elder care), ~84M total population, ~22M pensioners, avg age ~47, lots of SMEs, little natural resources. It's part of necessary consolidation. Considering all that, we're doing quite well...
If they're planning to reduce labour with this BMW robot, I have interesting news for them: the Chinese showcased kung fu dancing robots that runs circles around their lame German humanoid robot who can't even pour a beer, let alone assemble cars.
I don't know if it's sheer stubbornness or they're just wired differently.
As a German I believe it's more about demographics nowadays. The country and all large companies are run by older people who only saw rising prosperity their entire life. They all have settled in a comfortable place and do not seriously care about the future anymore. They just want to keep the system running until retirement.
There is no long-term strategic thinking anymore, only feel-good policies and short-term cash burning for their respective clientele.
As a young person it infuriates me but there is nothing we can do.
You are right about the issue, but wrong about the action. There are things you can do. Vote for candidates and parties that genuinely want a different future. Become politically active yourself. Run for office. Work with your local community. Every bit of action helps.
There is no party in German political landscape interested, capable of solving or even understanding the problems that needed to be solved. We have lost political center to groups of special interests and medieval guides. The state sponsored tool for informing about political programs (Wahl-O-Mat) is biased towards political issues of the mainstream. E.g. nobody is talking about the suffocating monopoly of notaries or increasing the property ownership by any significant margin. Running for office is an interesting idea, but in party-dominated politics to achieve anything is a decades-long adventure.
It seems to even get the compass needle pointing in the right direction would require immense personal sacrifice. This brings to mind a line I heard recently: “I burn my life to make a sunrise I will never see.”
The wahl-o-mat is not biased, it's based on the respective election programs. If one party decides to put something "about the suffocating monopoly of notaries" in it, it's not enough to be mentioned. There have to be some parties at least to make it comparable.
Also feel free to peruse election programs yourself. Most parties put out short versions.
You also don't need to run for office to have an effect on party lines. I'm a member of a party. There are congresses on a regional (Bundesland) and national level. In my party the process is voting for proposals before the national congress due to the huge amount of proposals, but usually every proposal on regional level is discussed and voted on. It does not take much time to prepare a proposal, but it shapes the discourse.
> The wahl-o-mat is not biased, it's based on the respective election programs.
That’s exactly my point. If a problem exists or a solution to a problem is possible about which no party is willing to talk about, it will not show it. The choice of topics is based on party opinions, not on voter surveys. This is called bias.
> Also feel free to peruse election programs yourself.
I read the full programs. This is the main reason why I think German political system is in the state of crisis.
> I'm a member of a party.
You surely know some examples when a party member shaped the discourse and set the course of institutional reforms. How long did it take for that person to achieve such results?
>As a German I believe it's more about demographics nowadays. The country and all large companies are run by older people who only saw rising prosperity their entire life. They all have settled in a comfortable place and do not seriously care about the future anymore
However bad Germany is in this regard, I suspect the US is far worse. There is no cohort in the US who remembers living in "East US" to temper the excesses of the people who've only known ease and comfort (though of course those people will tell you they worked hard to <insert career/prosperity path that no longer exists).
>who only saw rising prosperity their entire life.
Their prosperity has been artificially inflated and not earned for the last years, as the government adjusted their pensions according to inflation, not according to actual economic growth/fall of the nation. It's a cheat code that shouldn't be used if you wish for economic reality but it's used to buy votes.
>They just want to keep the system running until retirement.
To be fair, this is a similar issue with Boomers versus Gen-X in the US and most of the west.
The is always something you can do. Sometimes it's hard or uncomfortable but you can still have an impact on the things you care about if you're willing to do enough.
I have long experience of multiple German car brands. The interface spectrum goes like this: driving and seats etc are close to perfect for me. As long as it's about buttons, they are really good. But once it goes to screens, it starts getting worse. And then, with mobile app, it's basically barely functioning at all.
I like how the VW controls are laid out on older models but not the seats. They're too hard and not confortable. Even my Suzuki has better, more confy seats. The seats in the A1 I had were a diaster, especially the back seats, totally useless unless you put 10 year old kids in them.The fronts seats were hard, your butt would hurt after 3 hours. The engine was rattling new and the car is a pita to repair, something broke all the time. But it stuck to the road and was so much fun to drive that I skidded in a roundabout and nearly hit the lane separator. A Civic is probably better in every regard though. Newer Audi diesel models automotive eat up oil, adblue. You basically need to fill up at least 3 or 4 fluids all of the time, including screenwash. Just another extra reason to avoid diesels.
Our (~2015) 3-series controls are just about perfect. Where they differ from Honda/Toyota's controls that I am also very familiar with, they're noticeably better now that I'm familiar with them. Everything is really well thought-out.
Of course, now they (and almost every other manufacturer) have followed Tesla off the cliff and made everything a screen, so the current generation cars have abysmal controls.
> if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users -- weird little user-hostile features pop up everywhere
I drive a German car, all be it one from 2015, I don’t recognise this statement at all.
I agree. Parent comment is making extremely generalized statements, about German cars with overconfidence. There’s not a single “German” car, it’s a huge ecosystem of brands like VW (Audi, Porsche), BMW, Mercedes. I’m quite sure they don’t have the single “user-hostile” interface.
They all look the same, e.g. like sh*t IMO, so although the above statement sounds overgeneralized it doesn't meant that it doesn't generalize well. IME it does.
> I wonder what has happened to the German builder/tinkerer culture that made German manufacturing great.
Over engineered stuff which hate the user is staple of German manufacturing. Look on tanks during WW2. Impressive on the surface but unreliable crap for everyone who used it.
I have a Sebo. The primary thing I dislike is the weight. You'd think something this heavy would have some kind of performance advantage, but it doesn't. I've seen battery powered shit from Walmart suck harder than this machine does.
I recently replaced the shock dampers on our Miele washing machine (~10 years old) and I was amazed how well designed and ergonomic the inside of the machine is.
Parts are very easy to get at, all screws are Torx of identical size, and there's one very obvious way to take the machine apart and put it back together again. Made the replacement a breeze.
I think the whole premise of judging a whole country on some random product a company from that country made is rediculous. It's like saying Americans can't develop software because Microsoft screwed up Windows in the last few versions.
Indeed, the parent phrase " German engineering ... their vacuum cleaners" struck me as a bit ridiculous. Perhaps there is a design standard for a company and "their" products, but this was too sweeping.
> if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users
Perhaps they were built for engineers designing the car not for the actual people repairing or maintaining them - they are notorious for requiring a cascade of disassembly for repairs of simple components, require specialist tools, overengineering of components etc.
As a non German but someone who has lived there for 10 years my take is that its cultural part of being Germans. They always seem to gravitate towards making things just a little bit more difficult.
Sthe keyboards are not QWERTY. They're QWERTZ.
Traffic lights are in excessive combinations of green/yellow/red. Sometimes you might have yellow/red light sometimes only red.
Roads often have "end of speed limit" sign. But the speed limit might have been temporary for construction. So now you have to remember the original speed limit. Why not post the actual speed limit again?
Stuff like this is absolutely everywhere in the German society for apparently no reason.
EDIT: Adding the best for last.. in Germany when you have an IBAN bank account (you know the I stands for international) you must have German international bank account, or else it will be rejected by everyone and everything.
German here. Some of it I can agree with. The traffic light though is very simple. Yellow means “it was green and will turn red”. Red+yellow means “it was red and will turn green”.
It’s this way in the entire country. There are many things I can get upset with in Germany (I moved abroad 10y ago and have an outsider’s perspective by now) but the traffic light example to me just indicates you didn’t ask why certain things were the way they were.
"The traffic light though is very simple. Yellow means “it was green and will turn red”. Red+yellow means “it was red and will turn green”."
That was not the point, that's the standard way the lights will work.
The point is that sometimes you have a light combination where actual light post only has yellow/red for example (no green light). Sometimes you have a light post that has red only (on, off).
(I'm sure there are various German things to criticize or to make fun of. Much of what I read here, however, says more about the (US?!) authors, though.)
There are many different keyboard layouts, at least nowadays there is only one German layout. For Spanish there are 2 different layouts which are both actively sold.
The meaning of yellow on traffic lights is no problem, you'll see it for no longer than 2 seconds. Unless it flashes yellow which means that the traffic light is shut off, then "right before left" applies.
Some countries only have a green light, no red and no yellow. Now that is a problem because if the light is off because you a) don't see it, you have to know that it is there, and b) don't know if it is operational.
The end of a speed limit indication means the same as no speed limit indication. The lawful limit for the type of road applies, 50 in the city, 100 for rural roads, unlimited for Autobahn.
Thats why on the Autobahn there will be a speed limit indication after every on-ramp, if there is no speed limit sign then it is unlimited.
I know how the traffic lights work, point was that there are just excessively many of different combinations in Germany rather than just a single standard green/yellow/red.
"The end of a speed limit indication means the same as no speed limit indication. The lawful limit for the type of road applies, 50 in the city, 100 for rural roads,"
See, that's already wrong because the "Landstraße" may be 70, 80 or 100 depending on the exact road. If there's construction you might have a lower speed for the construction and then "end of limitation" at which point you have to remember whether the road is 70, 80 or 100.
Another example, if you have a Landstraße that is 100km/h, but you have a section that is 80km/h which has construction that has 50km/h, after construction you see "end of limit" what's the speed you're allowed to drive? 80 or 100? If you just had the speed limit sign all this confusion would simply not exist.
France does the same with regards to speed limits. There are also signs telling you the speed limit hasn't changed, or telling you to watch your speed, but without giving you the speed limit!
You are supposed to guess the speed limit from the size and shape of the road too. When I ask, almost nobody knows what is the speed of a road, they just wing it.
By law the speed limit has to be posted before an automatic speed trap (they are everywhere in France). Essentially training everybody that speeds limits are only for avoiding the speed trap "tax", but don't matter otherwise.
I can't speak to Germany, but we also have "end of speed limit" signs in California, and here they definitely mean what the other commenters have said, i.e. the basic speed rule applies. Just based on reading these comments, the German rules seem to be the same here, so I would very much suspect that that in your example the speed limit is unambiguously 100km/hr after the "end of limit" sign.
My experience is totally to the contrary. That American software is overpromoted crap - see you there Salesforce.
I have an (admittedly) older BMW. It just works. At first I thought that the cruise control lever is worse than buttons on the weel. After spending a lot of time in the car - no it isn't, it's much better.
I don't know about culture in German companies, but my experience with end-user products is the opposite of yours.
I used to have a 2005 c-class mercedes, and that was a great car. Everything was well thought-out and had some very nice touches I didn't even know I needed and haven't seen in any other car my dad has had since then. It was very reliable and even had a recall some 3 years ago for a minor issue with the sunroof – which didn't manifest in my specific car.
I also have a Siemens dishwasher that is absolutely great. It has direct buttons on the front for direct selection of the different washing cycles it has, plus delayed start, extra rinse, and half load. It has an app, but you'd never know if you didn't read the manual – everything is accessible through the front panel and intelligible icons. The drawers are adjustable with the latches you need to pull on falling right under your fingers when you hold them.
In contrast, my LG washer + dryer is much more of a PITA to operate, with indicators that don't fall in front of the labels. I have to count the programs and the wheel clicks just to be sure which one is actually selected, even though I've had it for two years now. The thing doesn't even have a dedicated spin cycle! You can only select it as part of some other, larger cycle, or by using the app to upload a "custom" program. But without the app, there's no way of knowing what the currently loaded 'custom' program does until you actually start it.
I’ve rented many different brands and the BMW interface is by far the best and quite consistent across generations. It hasn’t changed all that much since early 2000s. What exactly do you think was “user-hostile”? If you want to see bad UI/UX, try a Range Rover. Unfortunately all brands collectively (even BMW) have taken a step back with the latest generation of cars and the touch-screen-all-the-things craze.
I distinctly remember reading that the entire bill of materials for building a Boeing 747 was managed in Excel. I have not been able to find that claim since then but it was so amazing to me that I remember it.
It doesn't really make sense as I think about it now, because the 747 design predates Excel by many years so maybe it was BS.
Assume that later models of the 747 were managed in Excel. No trolling: What is wrong with that? You can write insanely powerful software using (1) formulas on the sheet (which are essentially functional programming) and (2) imperative logic in VBA (HTTP calls, database calls, file system, etc.). For years, I used this model and wrote pretty powerful software. Sometimes, I miss it for the encapsulated system. These days, in "biz dev" (internal software), it seems like the Excel model was replaced with an Electron front-end (HTML/CSS/JS) with Java back-end.
There's nothing particularly wrong with it, Excel works great. But almost any complex Excel file is riddled with obscure bugs and the nature of the tool makes it impractical to apply some of the most effective quality control techniques. Like you can't easily do code reviews or write an automated test suite.
I second this! Excel is a front end everybody knows and everybody can run. I always got laughed at when I say the biggest competitor of small apps (things like gym diary, meal planner etc.) is excel. Now that it even support python…
Because you can't define a named custom formula by composing the built-ins. So every cell is just the same copy-pasted formula string. When you need to change something, you have to change it everywhere and pray that you didn't miss one usage.
I can't count how many times I found a bug in a spreadsheet because someone (who might be me) missed one or two instances.
Or even more likely gets emailed around daily to a bunch of people, half of which don't work there anymore, most of which don't read it, and one that is looking to haul people over the coals over a KPI that is against the companies best interests, but is powerful enough to command this wasting of time
I worked with several multinationals, and the Germans always had very complex processes, but cannot at all confirm that they were the least digitised. The Americans were always behind in integrations (lots of file-based stuff), using outdated software, etc. I think the US has this problem that in Germany working for a bigger company is attracting talent, vs. the US where the talent goes to tech, while the rest is really far behind, i.e., Fortune500.
Germany is desperately wishing for a wonder weapon that will help them catch up and overtake other nations technologically. They constantly talk about smart cities and AI pie-in-the-sky projects while their administration is paper-based, risk-averse and parsimonious. They would not recognise not use such a breakthrough solution if it was handed to them.
Berlin's Chief Digitalization Officer's Twitter account was pure black comedy, until he was replaced by someone who - to my knowledge - has been AWOL for years.
I've only seen pen and paper at work in connection with things where real paper signed with actual pens was required by law in such unambiguous terms that nobody felt like taking the risk of PDFs or a boolean database column. So, less than once per year. I've never printed anything for work and I'm not really sure how I would correctly print something. I think there is one printer in my branch office, somewhere?
I haven't seen any production process in automotive involve hand-written paper and I doubt it exists. Automotive supply chains have always been under massive cost pressure and therefore were always at the forefront of the most deeply digitized and automated supply chains.
> someone downloads an xls file and uploads it to Tableau
Sometimes this is because of red tape and not because of software. I’ve run into many situations where you can log into the system and download a spreadsheet from the web interface, but the equivalent API hasn’t been configured (or has been deliberately disabled).
There is your problem right there. A family member worked for a large German company which used in-house developed software for exchanging and preparing lab reports for customers. The software worked well since the 90ies, was perfectly tailored to the company, and the people writing it were in the same building and could ship bug fixes within hours. Everyone was happy. Around 2015, someone in management had the idea to move the entire process to a customized off-the-shelf SAP product because of <buzzwords>. The software engineers were in effect degraded to administrators. The new system missed so many edge cases of the lab process that they had to fall back to pen, paper and phone. Customer complaints and employee turnover started to skyrocket immediately afterwards.
> Someone else downloads it as an xls and manually writes (not copy pastes) the numbers into a power point presentation and makes graphs by drawing shapes. This is then presented at some bi-monthly meeting.
I made an app that fixes this part of the problem. The rest is cultural.
I worked for a company where we punched in using an iButton (it's a pretty neat 1-wire thing that fits on a key chain).
The punch clock system was logged and then at the end of the month, they printed out a single A4 sheet for every employee for us to make corrections and sign. Of course, someone had the unenviable job of going over all those and applying the corrections.
We also had to write down hours spent on different projects in a completely different system that wasn't at all integrated with the punch clock system.
At some point in the last couple of years that I worked there, they switched to Workday. That was not an improvement.
Hexagon is very prominent in precision manufacturing through their dimensional measurement robots (CMM Coordinate Measurement Machine) and other metrology software/hardware. This is most likely why they were chosen by BMW, as I imagine they already have a working relationship together, although the EU aspect could have contributed as well.
I wonder if this is a newly acquired subsidiary producing these robots (they've been doing a lot of acquisitions recently), or if these have been in development in-house for a while.
My prediction is that by the time humanoid robots actually make it to the factory floor, they'll be pretty un-humanoid.
90% of car manufacturing is done by oldschool industrial robots, and I've had people point out that heavy use of industrial robots are basically unique to the car industry.
You might see a robot arm here and there in other industries, but it's somewhat rare, usually its all purpose-built machines or humans.
I agree and for me personally this is very easy to see and understand.
Why do you think the vast majority of people fail to see it like this? Guys like Musk obvious hype it up as he now has tied the valuation of the firms he owns and operates to this story.
Because so much infrastructure is in humanoid form. If you can make something that can manipulate two hands on arms that are positioned and moved like human arms, you could just put that torso into a lot of situations to replace a human without a lot of retooling. That's the dream I think.
Installing humanoid robots in a factory is like using regexes to parse data.
It makes sense if it's a one-off but there are better solutions.
Maybe it does make sense for small scale businesses that need just a little automation? Like a humanoid robot could restock shelves and do inventory in a grocery store at night, and you wouldn't need to retrofit anything to be able to do that.
Large scale factories seems like the wrong use case for humanoid robots.
I don't disagree with the general utility of humanoid (or other multipurpose) robots, just not in a factory setting.
I think automating stuff in the factory makes zero sense - its a controlled environment with purpose designed tooling where anything that makes sense to automate has been automated. All the extra work will only result in marginal gains.
It's automating the stuff that goes on outside of the factories - for example construction imo is about almost as labor intensive as it was a century ago, the marginal gains were offset by more complex building techniques and higher expectations.
Housing is also just about the most valuable thing that exists in every country.
The difference is they can be put into environments that do not allow for purpose robots. I don't think it is a bad idea that spaces are still made for humans for when something goes wrong. A frozen pizza factory is trying to solve and sell something different.
Vertically upright humanoids have a lot going for them: they don't occupy a lot of floor space, they can pull an object right into their center of gravity to manipulate it, and because they're familiar they're relatively easy to prototype actions for because they're our actions.
People always asser without evidence that humanoid isn't the best design, but there's a paucity of alternatives that don't make some type of tradeoff: humanoid might not be the best at anything, but it's clearly very good at a lot of things.
Cars are in the intersection where you have large parts that need to be moved around where other things happen with them and large scale of standard designs that is worth automating.
I expect that when we manage to do automated construction, it will use robot arms in several places too. But it's very rare that those two happen at the same time. Usually, large things are not standard.
I toured a major US OEM assembly plant recently, and there were a TON of humans working insanely repetitive tasks.
The most kind numbing of all were the easiest (sit in chair and put bolts upright in holder so robot can pick them up) and the highest paid thanks to union seniority.
The UAW will kill all the US OEMs before that let robots replace all the humans.
All of the robot arms where I work are stood idle. Humans are so much more agile, so much more adaptable, so much easier to train, give better feedback, their moving parts last much longer. We focus instead on making the humans as productive as they can be, MES, kitted parts, intelligent tools etc.
Edit: We do have robots btw. But they are not arms. They are super specialised, high precision machines that are designed to do a job humanoids could not
I remember back in the 90s hearing about a manufacturing paradox. Robots can reduce costs but for them to work you have to carry out extra design for manufacturing that simplifies the required tasks.
The paradox is that now you've simplified the process humans can also do it more efficiently and cheaply. The capital expense of robots doesn't really cost in compared to human production line.
There are exceptions. In the car industry you're moving heavy things with a high requirement for precision. I've also seen robots used for cleaning mouse cages in bioinformatics laboratories. There it's because handling large amounts of hazardous waste safely is inefficient for humans.
I wonder, how long will cheap human labour stay competitive for small consumer products compared to AI driven systems?
This doesn't feel like it needs to be humanoid shaped. It does not appear ambulatory. Why not just tracked chassis with some robot arms. That said, humanoid robots with food tracks very anime.
Seems so funny to me that we are building llms to write in english code for computers. And building robots to perform some automated processes in the shape of humans.
When are we going to rip the bandaid off, and skip bothering with the ux layer built for humans? I guess that is just old fashioned 20th century factory style automation that doesn't get headlines written about it, at least not in these decades.
Looks like they already have been testing it in the Spartanburg, SC, USA plant (just outside of Greenville SC [also I think the largest BMW factory in the world making most of their SUVs]). Still I don't get why a humanoid robot would be a thing for car making, a robot arm seems like it'd almost always be more efficient.
Auto manufacturers have been using robots for decades to paint, weld, machine, cast, and manufacture critical automobile components and even entire chassis.
Not sure this counts as "humanoid" any more than the robots we've had in factories for a century... the hands and feet are nothing like a human's, and would not be improved by being more human.
It seems they just made the shape of their machine have a vaguely human silhouette so they could ride a hype wave.
I'm all for programmable humanoid robots, humans are an awesome human interface, but this ain't it.
That’s generally what it seemed like to me too. Seemed to be human shaped so they could say it’s humanoid… and nothing else.
Nothing in the video looked like it couldn’t be done by a more industrial robot shaped robot. And I bet that would be cheaper or easier to make.
Then I started reading the text. When I got to the part very early on about deploying “Physical AI” that confirmed it to me.
This all seems to be “humanoid washing”. Nothing terribly interesting that someone put a special coat of paint on to get attention.
I’d love to be proven wrong. But the video certainly didn’t show it. And I didn’t notice it in the press release, though it was hard to parse past the ridiculously over the top language that did nothing but obscure what was actually going on.
I agree with your opening paragraph -- hot take! What would be more interesting, would be to see humanoid robots un/packing and moving boxes in their warehouses. That to me seems like one of the first logical places to deploy humanoid robots to replace (or assist) human workers.
They will deploy robots , but their infotainment system is crap. Entire pricing model is to sell extra volume in engine for $10k on each measurable step , even though electric cars has a solved performance that is only limited by tires. Not to mention their gas cars are way more complex vs electric. Sure that will save bmw .
Let me first comment that this is just another publicity stunt and that there will be no useful humanoids in BMW factories in the near future. Then I will read TFA and get back here.
So, nothing to see here. From what I understand the robots are doing pick and place. In the video the robot also gets passed a part from a human worker. So nothing here makes any sense and the tasks could solved with conventional robotics. I guess it is good that the robot can be moved but for this you don't need a two-legged humanoid balancing.
A union in Germany is fighting Tesla over this same thing...
>. In 2026, Giga Berlin is the pilot site for the "Optimus" Gen-3 integration—humanoid robots performing repetitive tasks in the battery pack assembly area. IG Metall views this not as progress, but as a threat to job security.
I mean the union is correct in this case. Robots will replace jobs. A union’s job is to make sure there are jobs for people in the company they are already in.
Usually unions would speak the truth (“robots = jobs go away”) but pair this with some suggestions: eg trying to upskill the affected worker so that they can be moved to a different department).
While I was working in Germany I always felt better at a company with a strong union.
The main problem with unions in Germany is that they block companies from adapting to changes in the environment quickly. Companies become heavy behemoths and end up suffering from it, which ends up damaging their own employees as well.
I can try convince you. In unionized companies one can’t fire employees from the 53rd birthday. That makes them similar to care home at the end. Young folks come and go and are minority at the end. Dynamics decrease not from the size, but from getting old. Since the salaries are more or less the same the oldtimers have maxed out bonuses. What do young guys get? Basically nothing since the bonus pool must be distributed equally in the company.
I like the concept of the union, but I think that IG Metall is not the good implementation of that. At least not for white collar workers.
Fundamentally the union should be getting the workers a fair deal for their labour (conditions and wages); once the union starts interfering with the technical aspects or blocking labour saving investment it quickly sours the whole arrangement.
It's not even about blocking investment, they just want to make sure the employees still have jobs. You can invest if you find something else to do with the employee.
These humanoid robots making cars is always a bit disappointing. If you look at videos of an assembly line the humans do manually dexterous complex tasks like bolting in car seats which are move in by hand, or helping place windshields into position.
The problem humanoid robots solve would be addressed better by simply altering the design of the car to not require humans to do that stuff.
What we actually see is humanoid robots deployed to do tasks that can already be done with simpler robot arms...
What advantages has a humanoid robot compared to automation for the tasks in a factory?
I mean: yeah, it's easier to think for a human how to operate a human.
Is this the Pareto optimum? No low hanging fruits left?
Does anyone here with years of experience in robotics have a better explanation?
(I hope so, because all the domain experts I met, always could tackle questions that pop into the mind of a layman without even breaking a sweat. Experts being experts, obviously)
The first question I had when watching this was how this robot doesn’t fall over with just these two tiny wheels. The center of mass is much higher than on a Segway, for example, isn’t it?
It’s dynamically balancing so wheel size doesn’t really matter as long as the wheels are responsive enough. Segways have big wheels to deal with bumps, this has smooth concrete floors to roll around on.
I still don’t understand how this can be considered cheaper or more productive than using a human.
I’m all for automation in industry, but the "human simulation" approach (where a robot mimics a human on a production line instead of using a process optimized for machine operation) just doesn’t make sense to me.
It makes sense when you find out that there's only so much humans who want to do and are capable of doing that type of work. Also, robots are cheaper, and they are the opposite of humans - theyt are not emotional, lazy, feeling fatigue or any other spectrum of feelings or behavior ...
Most manufacturing operations have a long tail of stuff that is done by people because it's just not worth buying/designing a specialized machine for. That's exactly the stuff that people do currently that humanoid robots might step in and do cheaper.
Employees cost roughly 70-120K per year. A lot of work in automotive is skilled work that pays relatively well. So, the economic case is easy to understand.
That's why there are lots of companies trying to produce humanoid robots. If they get good enough, lots of companies would buy them. A humanoid robot costing about 100K that can work around the clock (minus charging, battery swaps, servicing, etc.) doing work that otherwise would be done by a person could earn itself back in well under a year. Maybe it will cost a bit more or a bit less.
Will they be able to do anything? Not right away probably. But they'll probably be able to do useful things which means people don't need to do these things and can do more valuable things with their time.
I work in manufacturing and one of the driving forces here is the proposed cost of these humanoids. The target price range given by some companies is somewhere between 10k€ and 30k€, which would make them insanely competitive vs a human or a custom automation (which is easily over 100k€).
> which would make them insanely competitive vs a human or a custom automation (which is easily over 100k€).
But the humanoids are not competing with custom automation.
Judging by some of the footage from BMW and the humanoid manufacturers themselves, they very frequently boil down to pick n place tasks, which is a field where lower to low cost automation solutions have been available for a while. Often times with significantly higher throughput as well.
Its been a while since I was dealing with shopfloor stuff and I am not an expert, but I do not see these humanoids anywhere near as compelling as many people pretend they are
Employee costs vary greatly depending on where the factory is located. Here in Italy, a line operator costs around €60,000–70,000 per year, and half of that goes back to the government for public welfare redistribution.
Robots costs have a fixed CapEx that humans don't have.
If they become expensive you can move the factory to a cheaper nation.
People keep saying that a humanoid robot will cost around €30,000, but is that just for the hardware, or does it include all the additional services required to operate it? Will they be as interchangeable as humans, who can be reassigned to a different task in 30 minutes without notice?
Honestly, it still doesn’t make sense to me; to use an analogy, it's like you're building and "horseless carriage" instead of a car.
BMW really needs to change its strategy to build cars for the future ( battery electric vehicles ) and stop churning out all those heavy diesel SUVs.
Because it doesn't matter how efficient you produce something, if it is the wrong thing you produce. Actually producing the wrong product highly efficiently makes matters even worse. It's like running in the wrong direction, but faster.
So only 20% of the cars they produce are electric. That is not enough. In China 50% of all sold cars are electric nowadays. In Norway it is even 90%. BMW is way behind these numbers. They are not producing for the future, they are producing for the past.
The German car brands are better positioned than especially Americans are giving them credit for, especially people affected by Tesla's reality distortion field.
Heck, Toyota is better positioned than many believe.
They are just being cautious but they all have access to the relevant tech.
EVs will become the majority of cars sold in major markets in maybe 5 years, and BMW, VW, Mercedes, etc. all have relevant EVs and many types, and they will have even more by then.
They can't compete with subsidized Chinese EVs, but that will be solved soon as nobody wants to see a repeat of phone/smartphone industry destruction, but this time with cars. Yes, through tariffs and trade barriers.
>battery electric vehicles
>if it is the wrong thing you produce
Says you and not the guys with the big pockets that actually do market research? Until you solve the charging times problem, the mileage problem and the amount of available charging stations problem you will not see wide adoption. Most people don't want them and petrol is still king for many years to come.
Just a bit of cursory research provides some evidence counter to your confident assertions. It's fine if you don't like EVs or like the idea of them becoming popular, but it's worth doing a little reading first.
- In the US in 2025, 35% of vehicle shoppers say they are at least "somewhat likely" to consider purchasing an EV, with 24% saying they are "very likely" to do so. [1]
- Among younger consumers, more than two-thirds of Gen Z (72%) and Millennials (70%) say they would consider purchasing an EV. [2]
- In Germany, EV purchase intent rose 8 percentage points in a single year, with 30% of consumers planning a fully electric vehicle as their next car, which is the highest BEV intent of any surveyed European country. [3]
- The median range of new EVs hit a record high of 283 miles per charge for the 2024 model year, more than four times higher than in 2011. [4]
- The average EV range in 2025 has increased a further 4% over 2024, now reaching 293 miles, while fast charging speeds have improved 7% over the 2024 model year. [5]
- DC fast chargers can bring an EV battery to 80% charge in as little as 20 minutes. [6]
- In 2025, battery electric cars reached a historic 19% share of all new car registrations across Europe - the highest annual share ever recorded - with total volumes up around 31% compared to 2024. [7]
- Germany and France reached a combined battery electric and plug-in hybrid market share of 30% and 27%, respectively, while Italy and Spain are catching up at 12% and 20%, respectively. [7]
- Several smaller EU markets are already well ahead of the European average, including Belgium at 34%, Luxembourg at 27%, and Portugal at 23% BEV market share in 2025. [8]
- Europe's public charging network surpassed 1 million charge points in 2024 - a 35% growth in a single year with fast chargers now available every 50 km on over 75% of European highways. [9]
I own both an EV and a gasoline car, and feel there are upsides and downsides to both.
Are you just going to ignore that BMW already sells numerous EVs and sold through their entire years worth of production capacity for their Neue Klasse EVs?
I would place a bet that there are dozens to hundreds of German engineers gnashing their teeth over this travesty. This is a pure FOMO driven exercise, and the insulting thing is that BMWs management didn't even learn from Hyundai who ended up buying Boston Dynamics who started all of this madness with Atlas, which despite being the best humanoid robot still has no business case.
It's especially funny to have a demo of human shaped robots doing low productivity tasks in a staged environment in a factory that has dozens of real robots doing real work faster and more productively than humans. Real robots work behind barriers because they are strong enough to be dangerous. But that hasn't got a sci-fi narrative for the public to latch on to.
> Real robots work behind barriers because they are strong enough to be dangerous. But that hasn't got a sci-fi narrative for the public to latch on to.
Wait till they are controlled by ASI - there is your sci-fi for real.
This is BMW's clever attack on Tesla's overvaluation, partially based on Optimus hype.
The use of (general purpose) humanoid robots in manufacturing will fail. BMW is just accelerating that outcome.
Then Tesla's market cap will implode.
Note that Tesla's business is pivoting to batteries. Demand is basically infinite. They'll kill it, basically printing money, if they survive the transition.
dataviz1000 | a day ago
u1hcw9nx | a day ago
tw-20260303-001 | 23 hours ago
baxtr | 23 hours ago
warkdarrior | 22 hours ago
cpursley | 21 hours ago
simondotau | 23 hours ago
Give Hyundai and BMW time.
hnburnsy | 17 hours ago
>The Automation Factor Tesla’s response to labor pressure has always been more automation. In 2026, Giga Berlin is the pilot site for the "Optimus" Gen-3 integration—humanoid robots performing repetitive tasks in the battery pack assembly area.
https://www.teslaacessories.com/blogs/news/the-giga-berlin-s...
downrightmike | a day ago
lifestyleguru | a day ago
givemeethekeys | a day ago
Flavius | 23 hours ago
usrusr | 22 hours ago
tirant | 11 hours ago
Zqwlpaj | 23 hours ago
notahacker | 23 hours ago
s3p | 23 hours ago
rafaelmn | 22 hours ago
ItsYan | 14 hours ago
amelius | 23 hours ago
weinzierl | 23 hours ago
The owner family did the right thing at the right time. If the Europe and US business tanks they will be fine. BMW as a brand not necessarily.
torginus | 22 hours ago
I think there's a domestic brand or two that's gaining marketshare, but they're not there yet.
There's a myth of Chinese high-tech (esp in cars), that is not to say their stuff isn't technologically advanced, but the characterization that Chinese tech has left Europeans' behind just does not pass muster when one looks at mechanic videos of Chinese EVs.
Their cars look fancy and are full of futuristic screens and sensors, but the suspension setup and lot of engineering behind them is not exactly cutting edge.
That's why a lot of car reviewers say that a lot of their EVs don't drive particularly well
ricardobeat | 21 hours ago
The driving feel is definitely a thing, the chinese cars are very soft and 'boaty' which is not as desirable elsewhere. They are also on average much larger and heavier than their western counterparts, cities in China have road infrastructure built in the past 20-30 years with spacious lanes.
torginus | 13 hours ago
Exactly my point - if premium Chinese cars use Western components are built by Western robots, and designed in Western offices - that means the Chinese technological superiority does not exist.
As for their cars and roads being big - I don't see that as an upside, I have heard from many Chinese residents that the physical size of their cities means (most European cities are denser than Chinese ones) that navigating them becomes that much harder and painful.
Which lays to rest another myth about how China is light-years ahead of the West in urban planning , when in reality they have their own issues.
specialist | 5 hours ago
I'd buy a Kia PV9 in a heartbeat.
tooltalk | 3 hours ago
specialist | an hour ago
To me, Kia/Hyundai is an example of a foreign manufacturer successively building EVs in North America for North America. Satisfying American standards, tastes, regulations, etc.
I expect the larger Chinese competitors to do the same.
Decades ago, European and then Japanese competitors did as well.
The sooner the better.
pinkmuffinere | 23 hours ago
krona | 23 hours ago
pinkmuffinere | 23 hours ago
Humanoid robotics are largely a publicity stunt. Our actuators, sensors, and algorithms are better adapted to other form factors. The nice thing about humanoids is that you (in theory) don’t have to change the interface, since they can use the same interface humans can use. In practice that doesn’t hold well, because we don’t have great force/pressure sensors to cover large areas like human skin. Likewise, it’s difficult to apply the fine forces that are sometimes needed (grabbing an egg, moving a joystick, etc). And there’s risk of the robot doing something unpredictable, so you always have to set a good safety bound around it anyways. In the end it’s often better to adapt the process to modern robotics, rather than the other way around.
There are many good practitioners that write about these and other limitations, I think Rodney Brooks has some good discussion of it, eg. https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...
bitwize | 22 hours ago
barrkel | 22 hours ago
The mechanism humans use to stay upright after an unexpected loss of balance, flailing etc., would not be safe to be around when a robot employs them.
joe_the_user | 21 hours ago
The article's vacuous AI gloss language indeed makes it seem like they are indeed engaging in, crudely put, baloney. But your own language is weird here, like you don't realize robots are a standard thing in modern manufacturing. I mean, modern manufacturing "succeeds" massively using nonhumanoid robots at large scale.
[1] https://www.bmwgroup-werke.com/spartanburg/en/our-plant.html
eitally | 21 hours ago
(I have 15 years experience in high tech manufacturing, with most of that building test automation & manufacturing execution systems, and an advanced degree in operations research.)
r33b33 | 23 hours ago
tirant | 11 hours ago
BMW does not focus on providing cheap cars but highly performing ones. So probably the reduction in costs will be used to improve performance, features and perceived quality.
BMW has pretty low margins, like around 7-12% usually. A 10% reduction in manufacturing costs is not much.
moogly | 23 hours ago
javiramos | 23 hours ago
newppc | 4 hours ago
ge96 | 23 hours ago
Maxion | 23 hours ago
I wish I was making this stuff up.
FrustratedMonky | 22 hours ago
I think pencil is more efficient than SAP.
hypeatei | 22 hours ago
As we've seen in the Iran conflict, datacenters are a target and result in extended outages.
jimnotgym | 14 hours ago
RGamma | 9 hours ago
fHr | 22 hours ago
nom | 21 hours ago
kingjimmy | 22 hours ago
paffdragon | 22 hours ago
jimbokun | 20 hours ago
xarope | 19 hours ago
GuestFAUniverse | 15 hours ago
isbvhodnvemrwvn | 14 hours ago
dgxyz | 22 hours ago
So one day I stared at it randomly and noticed that the pie chart percentages on one thing didn't even add up to 100. Looked back at history and it turned out this had been the case since day one. Spent a day taking it to bits and a good 50% of it made no sense at all and people had been making business decisions on it without checking it.
And to remediate it? They replaced it with some AI generated slop which is even worse.
fires10 | 22 hours ago
nradov | 20 hours ago
tristor | 17 hours ago
The world is a graveyard littered with startups that thought this way. One of the consequences of wealth concentration and monopolies is that it is insufficient to be better than your competitors because your customers are also incompetent. To find product-market fit you not only have to be better, you have to be noticed by someone that cares that you're better and upon reflection confirms you solve a valuable problem.
By way of analogy, it's not enough to realize that MouseCorp makes shitty mousetraps and the local village spends $1M/yr on them. You can make a better mousetrap thinking its worth $1M/yr, or do the deeper look and realize the local village doesn't have a mouse problem but rather has a problem with too many feral cats, and has no interest in buying better mousetraps and once their attention is gained simply stops buying mousetraps altogether. Both parties lacked competence, but that didn't mean there was a market.
nradov | 16 hours ago
stinkbeetle | 16 hours ago
It's less that and more that governments and bureaucrats are corrupted to create barriers tot the market and to turn a blind eye to anti competitive behavior and outright illegal practices. For example huge banking corporations have been caught laundering money for drug cartels and got away with fines -- if your fintech startup tried that on, you would never see the outside of a prison cell.
mschuster91 | 9 hours ago
German bank N26 was embroiled in money laundering, scams and other issues stemming from bad KYC for years, and all they got was a slap on the wrist from regulators.
functionmouse | 20 hours ago
drnick1 | 21 hours ago
Lmao. Yes it's a pretty good summary of what happens in the corporate world, and not only in Germany.
KnuthIsGod | 21 hours ago
jimnotgym | 14 hours ago
Before you say SAP is terrible, have you tried the competition?
It has some data entry screens that are super efficient, cursor always goes to the right place, tab moves you to the right place etc. 15 years and lots of ERPs later I have never seen better
When you are viewing a purchase invoice on the ledger you can see the PO it is matched to, click on it and it goes to the PO. Click a line on the PO you can see the GRNs related. Click on them you go to the actual GRNs
Oracle ERP can't do any of that.
_glass | 12 hours ago
tirant | 11 hours ago
A merge between Palantir and SAP would dominate the market in a way there wouldn’t be any competitor left.
wenc | 21 hours ago
The German side always had slick presentations (they always had good visual marketing) and impressive claims, but whenever I tried to work with their products, I always found the claims overstated and that they hadn't really executed deeply. This despite my German counterparts working hard (I visited HQ in Germany and when they work, they really work and clock the hours, no idle chitchat)... yet it doesn't translate to impact.
A lot of their products had impressive front-ends but half-baked back-ends (on the American side, it's the reverse -- our interfaces looked like crap, but our stuff actually worked and often delivered in less time).
A lot of their designs were also non-human friendly (if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users -- weird little user-hostile features pop up everywhere). I don't understand why this is -- this is a nation that produced Dieter Rams. Tobi Lutke (CEO Shopify) likes to talk about how Germans grew up surrounded by good design, yet that design culture never permeated many German products. I own a Bosch in-unit washer/dryer and it's frustratingly unintuitive and has a "my (the engineer's) way or the highway" philosophy.
I went to a BMW talk once about the infotainment system (it was built on the latest Azure tech), but came away feeling that the work was not deep. It was skin deep.
I wonder what has happened to the German builder/tinkerer culture that made German manufacturing great. In the 1980s and 1990s, Germany was synonymous with excellence. But in the 2000s-present, not so much (except maybe in very narrow mittelstand verticals, e.g. Zeiss).
vjvjvjvjghv | 19 hours ago
RobRivera | 19 hours ago
notTooFarGone | 10 hours ago
It's really that the upper management does not appreciate change over departments if it's not their idea.
There is always the mentality that "why fix it if it works" where you actually have to wait for people to go to their pension to really grab a process and drive change.
You then get partially digitalized processes where digital native departments are concerned but they always have to solve the problem of interacting with a bunch of legacy systems and workflows, which in itself is so much harder and more inefficient.
analog31 | 18 hours ago
I've formed the impression that every country's engineering and design cultures are essentially aesthetics.
servo_sausage | 11 hours ago
I once had the chance to chatt with an old German colleague about the change in mentality over multiple decades. One thing he highlighted was the change from "lower error rate equals less waste, and higher final sale price" to "customer complaints or defect rates should be above a threshold, otherwise we are investing too much in the process control".
Particularly due to the desire to derisk the process; design by collaboration with the end user, and contracts with quality requirements, rather than the design being owned by the manufacturer.
jarek83 | 15 hours ago
pcurve | 15 hours ago
tirant | 11 hours ago
It’s also true though that the last wave of G models has improved driving dynamics but cheapened out in interior materials. Peak BMW interiors happened between 2019-2022 with the G01, G30, G05 and iX, i4. Being my favorites the iX and the G01.
BMW also has the best infotainment system after Tesla. And it still integrates well with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.
stephencanon | 8 hours ago
My wife and I both have F31s, which we will drive until we can no longer source replacement parts unless the industry comes to its senses first (unlikely). Any time we've ever looked at plausible replacements, the screen-based controls are an immediate hard no.
speeder | 9 hours ago
So, when I was working, I found the decisions regarding the infotainment mind boggling, to me they made zero sense, until I found some random documents deep in the BMW intranet, where I found the logic of it all: The focus was actually increasing the car range, so for example instead of having one infotainment dedicated hardware, one for the doors, one for the brakes, etc... now the cars have the least amount of computers as possible, located in the locations that result in the least wires as possible, with the goal of saving weight. Because of this, the software layer now had to deal with extra virtualizations, software that originally was to run on a specific microcontroller and do a specific task, and communicated with other parts by wire, now shares a generalized CPU with many other software, and communicate by virtual machines sending messages to each other.
Marvelous stuff from the point of mechanical engineering, indeed results in lighter car and less parts. But the end result for the user? It is mind bogglingly bad, several VMs running on top of each other, everything is slow, the Infotainment instead of being just Infotainment now do several other things.
I had written some of the surprising non-Infotainment stuff the Infotainment do, but that probably would cross into violating NDAs territory, so better not. Just let's say the Infotainment has to meet some non-entertainment related EU regulations.
piquadrat | 7 hours ago
https://insideevs.com/features/724945/zonal-architecture-sof...
speeder | 6 hours ago
But bafflingly to me, almost zero of my coworkers seemed to be aware of it. They would just get the seemly weird orders from above and would execute them, without figuring out the end goal, and this does result into some bad software engineering (because people don't know the end goal they don't know what they can optimize, so they just don't).
pcurve | 15 hours ago
cracks me up. I once leased a BMW for 3 years. By the time I returned the car, I still didn't what all the cryptic buttons for HVAC and other controls. They just refused to follow established automotive ergonomic conventions.
Anyway, my father used to do business with Germans for a long time. He had many interesting stories to share, but one that has always stayed with me is, his disdain for how cheap / penny pinching his German companies and their employees were when doing deals. This was in the 90s, so definitely passed the West Germany glory days.
My take is, in the era of global competition, Germans didn't know how to strike the right balance and effective allocate resources. Where to compromise, and where not to. I don't know if it's sheer stubbornness or they're just wired differently.
joe_mamba | 13 hours ago
I think most people(Americans mostly) don't have the faintest idea how true that is right now. Here's a comment of mine from a few weeks ago giving such a present-day example that will blow your brains of how cheap german companies are. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47018023
I feel like German companies know they lost the innovation race (I mean companies that aren't Zeiss), they lost the cheap manufacturing race "thanks" to Russian gas dependence and ideological denuclearisation before enough renewables were built, so all that's left for them now to stay afloat is reducing labor and operating costs by offshoring and pinching all the pennies they can find, but even that it not enough since from where I stand there's weekly corporate bankruptcies and layoffs and that's including the fact that the government has been speeding like crazy the last 3+ years to make sure the private sector industry doesn't completely collapse.
twoodfin | 9 hours ago
I wish I could find the reference I’m thinking of, but the idea was that Germans buying absurdly cheap wine and their constantly underfunded trains were part of a pattern of deliberate domestic under-investment to keep exports competitive.
Someone ITT surely knows more.
logicchains | 6 hours ago
joe_mamba | 6 hours ago
And unfortunately the focus on austerity post-2008 spearheaded by Germany only held the EU economy back compared to the US.
RGamma | 9 hours ago
slaw | 4 hours ago
https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/foreign-born-population...
specialist | 8 hours ago
Yes and: ossified, top-heavy, ever more bureaucratic, MBA/consultant brain rot.
From your linked comment:
> willing to bet my entire salary that the costs of all the new extra bureaucratic overhead
Yup.
petre | an hour ago
0x000xca0xfe | 11 hours ago
There is no long-term strategic thinking anymore, only feel-good policies and short-term cash burning for their respective clientele.
As a young person it infuriates me but there is nothing we can do.
OKRainbowKid | 9 hours ago
joe_mamba | 7 hours ago
That's where the famous high European pensions come from. In France now the average pension is higher than the average salary.
shafyy | 8 hours ago
ivan_gammel | 8 hours ago
markbravo0312 | 7 hours ago
throwway120385 | 3 hours ago
shafyy | 7 hours ago
kuerbel | 6 hours ago
Also feel free to peruse election programs yourself. Most parties put out short versions.
You also don't need to run for office to have an effect on party lines. I'm a member of a party. There are congresses on a regional (Bundesland) and national level. In my party the process is voting for proposals before the national congress due to the huge amount of proposals, but usually every proposal on regional level is discussed and voted on. It does not take much time to prepare a proposal, but it shapes the discourse.
ivan_gammel | 4 hours ago
That’s exactly my point. If a problem exists or a solution to a problem is possible about which no party is willing to talk about, it will not show it. The choice of topics is based on party opinions, not on voter surveys. This is called bias.
> Also feel free to peruse election programs yourself.
I read the full programs. This is the main reason why I think German political system is in the state of crisis.
> I'm a member of a party.
You surely know some examples when a party member shaped the discourse and set the course of institutional reforms. How long did it take for that person to achieve such results?
cucumber3732842 | 8 hours ago
However bad Germany is in this regard, I suspect the US is far worse. There is no cohort in the US who remembers living in "East US" to temper the excesses of the people who've only known ease and comfort (though of course those people will tell you they worked hard to <insert career/prosperity path that no longer exists).
dogemaster2025 | 7 hours ago
wholinator2 | 5 hours ago
collingreen | 5 hours ago
Or is this just lazy bigotslop?
realo | 5 hours ago
Throaway1985123 | an hour ago
joe_mamba | 7 hours ago
Their prosperity has been artificially inflated and not earned for the last years, as the government adjusted their pensions according to inflation, not according to actual economic growth/fall of the nation. It's a cheat code that shouldn't be used if you wish for economic reality but it's used to buy votes.
>They just want to keep the system running until retirement.
To be fair, this is a similar issue with Boomers versus Gen-X in the US and most of the west.
collingreen | 5 hours ago
The is always something you can do. Sometimes it's hard or uncomfortable but you can still have an impact on the things you care about if you're willing to do enough.
Bombthecat | 5 hours ago
They try to hold on to everything until retirement and don't care about anything else. In ten years Germany is like, what? 60 percent over 60?
Everyone knows it won't work, but try to hold on to it as long as possible.
petre | an hour ago
Spend your money elsewhere, perhaps?
Gravityloss | 9 hours ago
petre | an hour ago
stephencanon | 8 hours ago
Of course, now they (and almost every other manufacturer) have followed Tesla off the cliff and made everything a screen, so the current generation cars have abysmal controls.
expedition32 | 6 hours ago
At least Volkswagen is still building relatively cheap and reliable cars for the masses- they can compete with Kia and Skoda.
brummm | 6 hours ago
Bombthecat | 5 hours ago
Lio | 14 hours ago
I drive a German car, all be it one from 2015, I don’t recognise this statement at all.
I find it quite well designed.
This sounds more like over generalised FUD to me.
gregorygoc | 14 hours ago
menaerus | 10 hours ago
Geof25 | 13 hours ago
Over engineered stuff which hate the user is staple of German manufacturing. Look on tanks during WW2. Impressive on the surface but unreliable crap for everyone who used it.
bob1029 | 12 hours ago
aix1 | 11 hours ago
bob1029 | 11 hours ago
SideburnsOfDoom | 11 hours ago
marceldegraaf | 10 hours ago
Parts are very easy to get at, all screws are Torx of identical size, and there's one very obvious way to take the machine apart and put it back together again. Made the replacement a breeze.
ido | 9 hours ago
SideburnsOfDoom | 8 hours ago
nicbou | 11 hours ago
omega3 | 11 hours ago
Perhaps they were built for engineers designing the car not for the actual people repairing or maintaining them - they are notorious for requiring a cascade of disassembly for repairs of simple components, require specialist tools, overengineering of components etc.
samiv | 8 hours ago
Sthe keyboards are not QWERTY. They're QWERTZ.
Traffic lights are in excessive combinations of green/yellow/red. Sometimes you might have yellow/red light sometimes only red.
Roads often have "end of speed limit" sign. But the speed limit might have been temporary for construction. So now you have to remember the original speed limit. Why not post the actual speed limit again?
Stuff like this is absolutely everywhere in the German society for apparently no reason.
EDIT: Adding the best for last.. in Germany when you have an IBAN bank account (you know the I stands for international) you must have German international bank account, or else it will be rejected by everyone and everything.
earthnail | 8 hours ago
It’s this way in the entire country. There are many things I can get upset with in Germany (I moved abroad 10y ago and have an outsider’s perspective by now) but the traffic light example to me just indicates you didn’t ask why certain things were the way they were.
dogemaster2025 | 7 hours ago
samiv | 6 hours ago
That was not the point, that's the standard way the lights will work.
The point is that sometimes you have a light combination where actual light post only has yellow/red for example (no green light). Sometimes you have a light post that has red only (on, off).
pino83 | an hour ago
(I'm sure there are various German things to criticize or to make fun of. Much of what I read here, however, says more about the (US?!) authors, though.)
aeyes | 7 hours ago
There are many different keyboard layouts, at least nowadays there is only one German layout. For Spanish there are 2 different layouts which are both actively sold.
The meaning of yellow on traffic lights is no problem, you'll see it for no longer than 2 seconds. Unless it flashes yellow which means that the traffic light is shut off, then "right before left" applies. Some countries only have a green light, no red and no yellow. Now that is a problem because if the light is off because you a) don't see it, you have to know that it is there, and b) don't know if it is operational.
The end of a speed limit indication means the same as no speed limit indication. The lawful limit for the type of road applies, 50 in the city, 100 for rural roads, unlimited for Autobahn. Thats why on the Autobahn there will be a speed limit indication after every on-ramp, if there is no speed limit sign then it is unlimited.
samiv | 7 hours ago
"The end of a speed limit indication means the same as no speed limit indication. The lawful limit for the type of road applies, 50 in the city, 100 for rural roads,"
See, that's already wrong because the "Landstraße" may be 70, 80 or 100 depending on the exact road. If there's construction you might have a lower speed for the construction and then "end of limitation" at which point you have to remember whether the road is 70, 80 or 100.
Another example, if you have a Landstraße that is 100km/h, but you have a section that is 80km/h which has construction that has 50km/h, after construction you see "end of limit" what's the speed you're allowed to drive? 80 or 100? If you just had the speed limit sign all this confusion would simply not exist.
bombela | 4 hours ago
You are supposed to guess the speed limit from the size and shape of the road too. When I ask, almost nobody knows what is the speed of a road, they just wing it.
By law the speed limit has to be posted before an automatic speed trap (they are everywhere in France). Essentially training everybody that speeds limits are only for avoiding the speed trap "tax", but don't matter otherwise.
throwway120385 | 3 hours ago
0xffff2 | 2 hours ago
FeloniousHam | 8 hours ago
(He loved his time there and the people of course).
wwosik | 6 hours ago
I have an (admittedly) older BMW. It just works. At first I thought that the cruise control lever is worse than buttons on the weel. After spending a lot of time in the car - no it isn't, it's much better.
vladvasiliu | 5 hours ago
I used to have a 2005 c-class mercedes, and that was a great car. Everything was well thought-out and had some very nice touches I didn't even know I needed and haven't seen in any other car my dad has had since then. It was very reliable and even had a recall some 3 years ago for a minor issue with the sunroof – which didn't manifest in my specific car.
I also have a Siemens dishwasher that is absolutely great. It has direct buttons on the front for direct selection of the different washing cycles it has, plus delayed start, extra rinse, and half load. It has an app, but you'd never know if you didn't read the manual – everything is accessible through the front panel and intelligible icons. The drawers are adjustable with the latches you need to pull on falling right under your fingers when you hold them.
In contrast, my LG washer + dryer is much more of a PITA to operate, with indicators that don't fall in front of the labels. I have to count the programs and the wheel clicks just to be sure which one is actually selected, even though I've had it for two years now. The thing doesn't even have a dedicated spin cycle! You can only select it as part of some other, larger cycle, or by using the app to upload a "custom" program. But without the app, there's no way of knowing what the currently loaded 'custom' program does until you actually start it.
raspasov | 4 hours ago
estearum | 20 hours ago
I encountered oil wells essentially controlled by post-it notes passed around an office.
jimbokun | 20 hours ago
estearum | 19 hours ago
SoftTalker | 18 hours ago
It doesn't really make sense as I think about it now, because the 747 design predates Excel by many years so maybe it was BS.
throwaway2037 | 17 hours ago
nradov | 16 hours ago
yen223 | 12 hours ago
SvenL | 15 hours ago
labcomputer | 7 hours ago
Because you can't define a named custom formula by composing the built-ins. So every cell is just the same copy-pasted formula string. When you need to change something, you have to change it everywhere and pray that you didn't miss one usage.
I can't count how many times I found a bug in a spreadsheet because someone (who might be me) missed one or two instances.
FabHK | 6 hours ago
jimnotgym | 14 hours ago
kensai | 14 hours ago
_glass | 12 hours ago
nicbou | 11 hours ago
Berlin's Chief Digitalization Officer's Twitter account was pure black comedy, until he was replaced by someone who - to my knowledge - has been AWOL for years.
formerly_proven | 11 hours ago
I haven't seen any production process in automotive involve hand-written paper and I doubt it exists. Automotive supply chains have always been under massive cost pressure and therefore were always at the forefront of the most deeply digitized and automated supply chains.
Xylakant | 10 hours ago
That's the fundamental reason they're using humanoid robots - industrial robots have a hard time holding pencils.
mr_toad | 9 hours ago
Sometimes this is because of red tape and not because of software. I’ve run into many situations where you can log into the system and download a spreadsheet from the web interface, but the equivalent API hasn’t been configured (or has been deliberately disabled).
lqet | 9 hours ago
There is your problem right there. A family member worked for a large German company which used in-house developed software for exchanging and preparing lab reports for customers. The software worked well since the 90ies, was perfectly tailored to the company, and the people writing it were in the same building and could ship bug fixes within hours. Everyone was happy. Around 2015, someone in management had the idea to move the entire process to a customized off-the-shelf SAP product because of <buzzwords>. The software engineers were in effect degraded to administrators. The new system missed so many edge cases of the lab process that they had to fall back to pen, paper and phone. Customer complaints and employee turnover started to skyrocket immediately afterwards.
onlyrealcuzzo | 9 hours ago
samiv | 8 hours ago
dizhn | 8 hours ago
airstrike | 8 hours ago
I made an app that fixes this part of the problem. The rest is cultural.
any1 | 6 hours ago
I worked for a company where we punched in using an iButton (it's a pretty neat 1-wire thing that fits on a key chain).
The punch clock system was logged and then at the end of the month, they printed out a single A4 sheet for every employee for us to make corrections and sign. Of course, someone had the unenviable job of going over all those and applying the corrections.
We also had to write down hours spent on different projects in a completely different system that wasn't at all integrated with the punch clock system.
At some point in the last couple of years that I worked there, they switched to Workday. That was not an improvement.
loic-joachim | an hour ago
dmix | 23 hours ago
https://robotics.hexagon.com/product/
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/hexagon-robotics-ai-software-a...
skgough | 22 hours ago
I wonder if this is a newly acquired subsidiary producing these robots (they've been doing a lot of acquisitions recently), or if these have been in development in-house for a while.
torginus | 22 hours ago
90% of car manufacturing is done by oldschool industrial robots, and I've had people point out that heavy use of industrial robots are basically unique to the car industry.
You might see a robot arm here and there in other industries, but it's somewhat rare, usually its all purpose-built machines or humans.
df2dfs | 22 hours ago
Why do you think the vast majority of people fail to see it like this? Guys like Musk obvious hype it up as he now has tied the valuation of the firms he owns and operates to this story.
georgeecollins | 22 hours ago
df2dfs | 21 hours ago
Does the computer 'memory' behave identically like human memory? Of course not. Does it look like the 'memory' of a human? Again, of course not.
bentcorner | 21 hours ago
It makes sense if it's a one-off but there are better solutions.
Maybe it does make sense for small scale businesses that need just a little automation? Like a humanoid robot could restock shelves and do inventory in a grocery store at night, and you wouldn't need to retrofit anything to be able to do that.
Large scale factories seems like the wrong use case for humanoid robots.
torginus | 20 hours ago
I think automating stuff in the factory makes zero sense - its a controlled environment with purpose designed tooling where anything that makes sense to automate has been automated. All the extra work will only result in marginal gains.
It's automating the stuff that goes on outside of the factories - for example construction imo is about almost as labor intensive as it was a century ago, the marginal gains were offset by more complex building techniques and higher expectations.
Housing is also just about the most valuable thing that exists in every country.
3eb7988a1663 | 22 hours ago
In this video you see the unnecessary robot arm move the pizza to the oven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN45bTsBUW8
For contrast a How it is Made video of frozen pizzas being created at dozens (hundreds?) per minute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UrSIOtv8a0
telescopeh | 19 hours ago
jonasdegendt | 12 hours ago
XorNot | 21 hours ago
People always asser without evidence that humanoid isn't the best design, but there's a paucity of alternatives that don't make some type of tradeoff: humanoid might not be the best at anything, but it's clearly very good at a lot of things.
marcosdumay | 20 hours ago
I expect that when we manage to do automated construction, it will use robot arms in several places too. But it's very rare that those two happen at the same time. Usually, large things are not standard.
testing22321 | 19 hours ago
The most kind numbing of all were the easiest (sit in chair and put bolts upright in holder so robot can pick them up) and the highest paid thanks to union seniority.
The UAW will kill all the US OEMs before that let robots replace all the humans.
nradov | 6 hours ago
jimnotgym | 14 hours ago
Edit: We do have robots btw. But they are not arms. They are super specialised, high precision machines that are designed to do a job humanoids could not
Lio | 12 hours ago
The paradox is that now you've simplified the process humans can also do it more efficiently and cheaply. The capital expense of robots doesn't really cost in compared to human production line.
There are exceptions. In the car industry you're moving heavy things with a high requirement for precision. I've also seen robots used for cleaning mouse cages in bioinformatics laboratories. There it's because handling large amounts of hazardous waste safely is inefficient for humans.
I wonder, how long will cheap human labour stay competitive for small consumer products compared to AI driven systems?
generic92034 | 4 hours ago
And if they are made redundant by automation, how will economy or even society function. Currently everything revolves around work.
numpad0 | 23 hours ago
okokwhatever | 22 hours ago
fHr | 22 hours ago
maxglute | 21 hours ago
drnick1 | 21 hours ago
asdff | 21 hours ago
When are we going to rip the bandaid off, and skip bothering with the ux layer built for humans? I guess that is just old fashioned 20th century factory style automation that doesn't get headlines written about it, at least not in these decades.
Shitty-kitty | 17 hours ago
RealityVoid | 14 hours ago
cuvinny | 20 hours ago
carefree-bob | 17 hours ago
Some auto robot porn: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Zi8EWZptTfA
The idea of humanoid looking robots shuffling around a factory floor seems like a gimmick to me.
avaer | 20 hours ago
It seems they just made the shape of their machine have a vaguely human silhouette so they could ride a hype wave.
I'm all for programmable humanoid robots, humans are an awesome human interface, but this ain't it.
MBCook | 18 hours ago
Nothing in the video looked like it couldn’t be done by a more industrial robot shaped robot. And I bet that would be cheaper or easier to make.
Then I started reading the text. When I got to the part very early on about deploying “Physical AI” that confirmed it to me.
This all seems to be “humanoid washing”. Nothing terribly interesting that someone put a special coat of paint on to get attention.
I’d love to be proven wrong. But the video certainly didn’t show it. And I didn’t notice it in the press release, though it was hard to parse past the ridiculously over the top language that did nothing but obscure what was actually going on.
Probably because there’s not much going on.
throwaway2037 | 17 hours ago
jimnotgym | 14 hours ago
imglorp | 8 hours ago
Both balancing and bipedal features seem to be only limiting and detrimental in a factory environment.
If they were serious, it would have a wheeled box on the bottom half.
excalibur | 20 hours ago
maxdo | 19 hours ago
ofrzeta | 18 hours ago
ofrzeta | 15 hours ago
tonyedgecombe | 10 hours ago
I don’t know which is worse, your comment or the original article.
ofrzeta | 8 hours ago
hnburnsy | 17 hours ago
>. In 2026, Giga Berlin is the pilot site for the "Optimus" Gen-3 integration—humanoid robots performing repetitive tasks in the battery pack assembly area. IG Metall views this not as progress, but as a threat to job security.
https://www.teslaacessories.com/blogs/news/the-giga-berlin-s...
umpalumpaaa | 13 hours ago
I mean the union is correct in this case. Robots will replace jobs. A union’s job is to make sure there are jobs for people in the company they are already in.
Usually unions would speak the truth (“robots = jobs go away”) but pair this with some suggestions: eg trying to upskill the affected worker so that they can be moved to a different department).
While I was working in Germany I always felt better at a company with a strong union.
tirant | 11 hours ago
moooo99 | 8 hours ago
Larger companies move slower, larger companies also tend to have a stronger union presence than SMBs
lnsru | 7 hours ago
I like the concept of the union, but I think that IG Metall is not the good implementation of that. At least not for white collar workers.
servo_sausage | 11 hours ago
pocksuppet | 9 hours ago
LarsDu88 | 16 hours ago
The problem humanoid robots solve would be addressed better by simply altering the design of the car to not require humans to do that stuff.
What we actually see is humanoid robots deployed to do tasks that can already be done with simpler robot arms...
GuestFAUniverse | 15 hours ago
I mean: yeah, it's easier to think for a human how to operate a human. Is this the Pareto optimum? No low hanging fruits left?
Does anyone here with years of experience in robotics have a better explanation? (I hope so, because all the domain experts I met, always could tackle questions that pop into the mind of a layman without even breaking a sweat. Experts being experts, obviously)
hybridtupel | 12 hours ago
attheicearcade | 12 hours ago
shellfishgene | 12 hours ago
rvz | 11 hours ago
mtct88 | 11 hours ago
I’m all for automation in industry, but the "human simulation" approach (where a robot mimics a human on a production line instead of using a process optimized for machine operation) just doesn’t make sense to me.
ReptileMan | 10 hours ago
menaerus | 10 hours ago
pocksuppet | 9 hours ago
menaerus | 8 hours ago
MagicMoonlight | 8 hours ago
jillesvangurp | 10 hours ago
Employees cost roughly 70-120K per year. A lot of work in automotive is skilled work that pays relatively well. So, the economic case is easy to understand.
That's why there are lots of companies trying to produce humanoid robots. If they get good enough, lots of companies would buy them. A humanoid robot costing about 100K that can work around the clock (minus charging, battery swaps, servicing, etc.) doing work that otherwise would be done by a person could earn itself back in well under a year. Maybe it will cost a bit more or a bit less.
Will they be able to do anything? Not right away probably. But they'll probably be able to do useful things which means people don't need to do these things and can do more valuable things with their time.
Underqualified | 9 hours ago
moooo99 | 8 hours ago
But the humanoids are not competing with custom automation.
Judging by some of the footage from BMW and the humanoid manufacturers themselves, they very frequently boil down to pick n place tasks, which is a field where lower to low cost automation solutions have been available for a while. Often times with significantly higher throughput as well.
Its been a while since I was dealing with shopfloor stuff and I am not an expert, but I do not see these humanoids anywhere near as compelling as many people pretend they are
wwosik | 6 hours ago
and they will gradually get complicated tasks
actually sounds like a trainee
mtct88 | 9 hours ago
Robots costs have a fixed CapEx that humans don't have. If they become expensive you can move the factory to a cheaper nation.
People keep saying that a humanoid robot will cost around €30,000, but is that just for the hardware, or does it include all the additional services required to operate it? Will they be as interchangeable as humans, who can be reassigned to a different task in 30 minutes without notice?
Honestly, it still doesn’t make sense to me; to use an analogy, it's like you're building and "horseless carriage" instead of a car.
khalic | 11 hours ago
Slap a "head" on an industrial machines and watch investors go brrrrrrrrr
amai | 10 hours ago
BMW really needs to change its strategy to build cars for the future ( battery electric vehicles ) and stop churning out all those heavy diesel SUVs.
Because it doesn't matter how efficient you produce something, if it is the wrong thing you produce. Actually producing the wrong product highly efficiently makes matters even worse. It's like running in the wrong direction, but faster.
oblio | 9 hours ago
Almost half a million sold in 2025 (out of 2.5 million).
amai | an hour ago
oblio | 21 minutes ago
The German car brands are better positioned than especially Americans are giving them credit for, especially people affected by Tesla's reality distortion field.
Heck, Toyota is better positioned than many believe.
They are just being cautious but they all have access to the relevant tech.
EVs will become the majority of cars sold in major markets in maybe 5 years, and BMW, VW, Mercedes, etc. all have relevant EVs and many types, and they will have even more by then.
They can't compete with subsidized Chinese EVs, but that will be solved soon as nobody wants to see a repeat of phone/smartphone industry destruction, but this time with cars. Yes, through tariffs and trade barriers.
frigg | 9 hours ago
Says you and not the guys with the big pockets that actually do market research? Until you solve the charging times problem, the mileage problem and the amount of available charging stations problem you will not see wide adoption. Most people don't want them and petrol is still king for many years to come.
ablation | 8 hours ago
- In the US in 2025, 35% of vehicle shoppers say they are at least "somewhat likely" to consider purchasing an EV, with 24% saying they are "very likely" to do so. [1]
- Among younger consumers, more than two-thirds of Gen Z (72%) and Millennials (70%) say they would consider purchasing an EV. [2]
- In Germany, EV purchase intent rose 8 percentage points in a single year, with 30% of consumers planning a fully electric vehicle as their next car, which is the highest BEV intent of any surveyed European country. [3]
- The median range of new EVs hit a record high of 283 miles per charge for the 2024 model year, more than four times higher than in 2011. [4]
- The average EV range in 2025 has increased a further 4% over 2024, now reaching 293 miles, while fast charging speeds have improved 7% over the 2024 model year. [5]
- DC fast chargers can bring an EV battery to 80% charge in as little as 20 minutes. [6]
- In 2025, battery electric cars reached a historic 19% share of all new car registrations across Europe - the highest annual share ever recorded - with total volumes up around 31% compared to 2024. [7]
- Germany and France reached a combined battery electric and plug-in hybrid market share of 30% and 27%, respectively, while Italy and Spain are catching up at 12% and 20%, respectively. [7]
- Several smaller EU markets are already well ahead of the European average, including Belgium at 34%, Luxembourg at 27%, and Portugal at 23% BEV market share in 2025. [8]
- Europe's public charging network surpassed 1 million charge points in 2024 - a 35% growth in a single year with fast chargers now available every 50 km on over 75% of European highways. [9]
I own both an EV and a gasoline car, and feel there are upsides and downsides to both.
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[1] https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2025-us-elec... [2] https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/usa/article/detail/T0442867EN... [3] https://www.mckinsey.com/features/mckinsey-center-for-future... [4] https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1375-dece... [5] https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/new-ev-market-trends-... [6] https://www.transportation.gov/rural/ev/toolkit/ev-basics/ch... [7] https://theicct.org/pr-europe-battery-electric-market-closes... [8] https://eleport.com/ev-sales-in-europe/ [9] https://www.virta.global/global-electric-vehicle-market
moooo99 | 8 hours ago
Zigurd | 7 hours ago
It's especially funny to have a demo of human shaped robots doing low productivity tasks in a staged environment in a factory that has dozens of real robots doing real work faster and more productively than humans. Real robots work behind barriers because they are strong enough to be dangerous. But that hasn't got a sci-fi narrative for the public to latch on to.
generic92034 | 4 hours ago
Wait till they are controlled by ASI - there is your sci-fi for real.
specialist | 5 hours ago
The use of (general purpose) humanoid robots in manufacturing will fail. BMW is just accelerating that outcome.
Then Tesla's market cap will implode.
Note that Tesla's business is pivoting to batteries. Demand is basically infinite. They'll kill it, basically printing money, if they survive the transition.
Pass the popcorn.
joelthelion | 4 hours ago
CommenterPerson | 4 hours ago