The Surprisingly Manual Process of Building Automotive Wire Harnesses

I used to build a custom product for my side business that had a 50-conductor wire harness and a couple smaller ones (around 20 conductors each IIRC). I learned a few things:

* The article is absolutely correct: It's a difficult task to automate and humans are still very competitive.

* The peripheral bits that the article doesn't get into, like making the individual conductors and attaching terminals, is best done by machinery. That's a far easier task to automate and the machines are very fast. Even at my low volumes, I could save money by farming out cutting & stripping wire and crimping on terminals instead of doing that part by hand.

* It's annoying, fiddly work and I'm amazed that there are people who have the patience to do it all day long. More power to them I guess!