BMW i3 Factory Production Tour
europeanautosource2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2016–2017
documentary · general · 2016–2017 on HN
A 41-minute factory tour showing how the BMW i3 electric car is built from start to finish, in the style of a Megafactories documentary. It shows a highly automated production line with carbon-fiber body construction and robots doing most of the work.
Cited as a vivid example of modern, highly automated manufacturing with few workers, and of carmakers as robotics companies.
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5 comments from Hacker News
I can recommend this video: link "Tearing Down the Model T of Our Time - Autoline After Hours 284" and ▶ this video "BMW i3 Factory Production Tour"
Here's a video of the i3 production line: ▶ this video As can be seen, they are not joking around. To me it looks like technology brought by aliens from the future.
Respectfully, I disagree. Their tech is not the cars themselves as much as the robots/software building those cars, so they have slowly moved from being car companies to robotics/tech companies. They build computers with wheels. ▶ this video While the Americans do have a taste for disruption, these Germans have a taste for getting things done well. The wise thing to do is collaborate, which I hope we'll end up doing sooner or later despite all the barriers that some politicians are trying to raise between us.
America is the 11th richest nation in the world (per-capita), if they wanted to find the money they could do it right now. I'm not saying America doesn't have a balance of trade problem, I just think people put too much faith in a resolution to that. This ▶ this video is what modern manufacturing looks like, note there aren't many people working there.
Sensationalist clickbait title. There's mention of 4 i-series executives leaving (BMW has over 100,000 employees), which is somewhat expected, given that the article mentions that i sales haven't been stellar. True, I haven't seen too many i models on the streets, but I haven't seen too many of competitor's electric models either. So the market is still not quite ready for them and the manufacturers, I guess, are wary of betting it all on the electric card. Of course there'll be people moving from company to company, just like people from Apple move to Google and vice-versa and it's normal, but the tone of this article is like "BMW is collapsing and everyone is running for their lives... to China". Why is this even in the news ? Press is so unreliable and sensationalist these days .. Or has it always been like this ? Edit: ▶ this video