BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time
press.bmwgroup.com
press.bmwgroup.com
I wish I was making this stuff up.
I think pencil is more efficient than SAP.
As we've seen in the Iran conflict, datacenters are a target and result in extended outages.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lmao. Yes it's a pretty good summary of what happens in the corporate world, and not only in Germany.
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.
A merge between Palantir and SAP would dominate the market in a way there wouldn’t be any competitor left.
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).
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've formed the impression that every country's engineering and design cultures are essentially aesthetics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://insideevs.com/features/724945/zonal-architecture-sof...
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).
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.
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 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.
And unfortunately the focus on austerity post-2008 spearheaded by Germany only held the EU economy back compared to the US.
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.
I don't know if it's sheer stubbornness or they're just wired differently.
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.
That's where the famous high European pensions come from. In France now the average pension is higher than the average salary.
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.
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?
It's not a bias. I think you're misunderstanding the meaning of the word. We vote for parties and the wahl-o-mat compares the opinion of these parties. It would be biased if it would give an unfair advantage or disadvantage to one or some parties. The parties' opinions not being a good representation of the important challenges we face is not a bias of the wahl-o-mat. You can question its usefulness but calling it biased is calling it dishonest.
And honestly? That sucks. You can question its usefulness but please don't call an initiative that aims to give the populace a better political overview biased for no reason. You're not helping shape political discourse for the better here. I just checked: There weren't any no google results for "wahl-o-mat bias" yet. Now there are.
Edit: the word „Bias“ may not exist in Google search, but this topic is certainly discussed in German language space and it is easy to find:
https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2025-02/peter-mueller-bundesverfa...
> Die Mietpreisbremse in baden-württembergischen Städten und Gemeinden soll abgeschafft werden
> Länger leerstehende Mietwohnungen sollen ihren Eigentümerinnen und Eigentümer konsequent entzogen und vermietet werden.
Why do you think those options are not good options to address the housing crisis? Are there other levers? Of course, but Mietpreisbremse (freezing rents) and Leerstand (empty houses) are certainly key levers. And the point of the Wahl-o-Mat is to give you an indication over overlap, not to list and let you decide on single political initiatives.
What exactly is not true?
> Are there other levers? Of course, but Mietpreisbremse (freezing rents) and Leerstand (empty houses) are certainly key levers.
They are not the key levers, which everyone with basic knowledge of economics should understand immediately.
Regardless of whether certain segment is operated by market, by regulation or by combination of two, it is always about supply matching the demand. If you have more demand than supply, either prices will increase or you enter the state of deficit, where non-market mechanisms will decide who will get home and who will not. In either case prolonged state of reduced supply leads to crisis. Neither of those levers does solve problem of supply reliably. There’s simply not enough empty homes on the market to consider efficient management of them a solution. Rent controls also do not help here, because they actually reduce supply, by creating black market of subleases and reducing mobility (people stick to their regulated contracts).
The solution to the problem requires multiple reforms at once, which will fix short term and long term supply:
1. Dramatically deregulating supply side and reducing NIMBY influence. Project approvals should not take 7 years as in Berlin Friedrichshain and should not be blocked by survival of some rare toads like in Berlin Pankow.
2. Streamlining microdistrict planning, where one project includes construction of thousands of homes along with the necessary infrastructure. May include rapid construction tech (Plattenbau 2.0). It is not enough to build one building here and there, we need to build a lot more.
3. Shifting from majority rental to majority ownership model in which mobility is supported by market, low commissions (remove notaries, reduce taxes) and fast registration of property rights. It must be possible to sell and buy in 2-3 weeks maximum. The large landlords should be re-privatized: first, state takes over, then rentals are converted to subsidized lease deals with tenants with transferrable rights, in which tenants will effectively own their homes, while continuing to pay the current, never increasing amounts.
4. Progressive tax on property ownership kicking in from 0% on 3-5 apartments to significant percentage of rent value on 50+ apartments. The for-profit landlord business model must become unattractive, while not putting too much pressure on small landlords which are more market-friendly.
This kind of reform is neither left, nor right. It’s anti-capitalist, because it prevents concentration of capital and negative redistribution, but it is also pro-market, because it hands over the ownership to millions of people which can then freely sell and buy for their own use.
Honestly, I'm not a big fan of the thing myself and I agree that most of your proposals would improve the tool. But calling it a tool that compares political parties biased makes it sound deceptive. And I don't believe that it's deceptive. It's just ineffective.
The fact that it gives an "unfair advantage to incumbents" also isn't really a bias of the tool. It really just is the most obvious fair way to structure it. Large parties are large because a large amount of people vote for them. So they obviously have more visibility.
But I also agree that the majority rule of an ageing population in Germany is problematic. With most incumbents seemingly agreeing to not talk about the future.
Let’s say there are parties A, B and C. A and B offer something populist solutions Sa and Sb to very important problem X, C does not promise anything on it, but offers solution for less important problem Y (single issue party). If voter thinks that Sa and Sb are the only choices, they may choose A or B, because it feels right. If voter was informed that neither Sa, nor Sb solve the problem, but some other solution Sx not supported by any party would do it, party C could become a reasonable choice - at least you get something done this way. This would be impartial judgement. Wahl-O-Mat inhibits this scenario, so yes, it is biased, it is deceptive.
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).
Or is this just lazy bigotslop?
East Germany introduced the Transsexuellengesetz in 1980, which allowed people to change their first name or gender, as long as they provided, among other things, two psychiatric evaluations to ensure the condition was permanent, and not some decision driven by some temporary influence or fashion, but a full diagnosis of transsexualismus.
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.
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.
Spend your money elsewhere, perhaps?
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.
At least Volkswagen is still building relatively cheap and reliable cars for the masses- they can compete with Kia and Skoda.
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.
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.
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.
Now do an alternator on a VAG car :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
(Except Deutsche Bahn; no-one argues at criticism there. It’s quite refreshing!)
(He loved his time there and the people of course).
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 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 encountered oil wells essentially controlled by post-it notes passed around an office.
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.
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.
I prefer to do it with VBA code because I find it easier to manage, but it's also possible without VBA using just the built-ins in the spreadsheet directly.
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 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.
That's the fundamental reason they're using humanoid robots - industrial robots have a hard time holding pencils.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>. 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...
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.
Larger companies move slower, larger companies also tend to have a stronger union presence than SMBs
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.
https://robotics.hexagon.com/product/
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/hexagon-robotics-ai-software-a...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
And if they are made redundant by automation, how will economy or even society function. Currently everything revolves around work.
I don’t know which is worse, your comment or the original article.
Give Hyundai and BMW time.
>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...
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.
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.
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
and they will gradually get complicated tasks
actually sounds like a trainee
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.
Slap a "head" on an industrial machines and watch investors go brrrrrrrrr
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.
Wait till they are controlled by ASI - there is your sci-fi for real.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I'd buy a Kia PV9 in a heartbeat.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Total-Optimization-Meridian-Book-1-eb...
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.
Almost half a million sold in 2025 (out of 2.5 million).
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.
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.
- 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
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...
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.
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
(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.)
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...
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 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.