I wish I was making this stuff up.
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).
I've formed the impression that every country's engineering and design cultures are essentially aesthetics.
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.
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.
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.
Lmao. Yes it's a pretty good summary of what happens in the corporate world, and not only in Germany.
>. 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...
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.
https://robotics.hexagon.com/product/
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/hexagon-robotics-ai-software-a...
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
(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.)
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 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.
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.