BMW i3 Factory Production Tour
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as a vivid example of modern, highly automated manufacturing with few workers, and of carmakers as robotics companies.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2016 to 2017.
What Hacker News said
Recommends justsaysmthng · 2016-04 · on “BMW Loses Core Development Team of Its I3 and I8 Electric Vehicle Line”
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.
Recommends retSava · 2017-09 · on “Dyson to make electric cars from 2020”
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"
Cites justsaysmthng · 2016-04 · on “BMW Loses Core Development Team of Its I3 and I8 Electric Vehicle Line”
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
Cites tonyedgecombe · 2016-11 · on “Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why”
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.
Cites delegate · 2017-08 · on “Mercedes kills their only electric car”
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.