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Comment by freeopinion | Hacker News Reader

Today, those three bolts are done by robots. Perhaps a modern very expensive consultant builds the AI to "interrogate" the robots for useful suggestions.

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Do you really put it past a big company to have two robots with different screw heads on them for the three bolts?

Some maintenance guy who works the floor knows they don’t need two of them but no one will listen.

There is still room for a highly paid consultant.

Is that actually true? My understanding is that there is still a lot of human labor necessarily baked in, and attempts to robotize everything largely have failed for a multitude of reasons (Tesla most famously so), but the most unsolvable is that of flexibility to change something fundamentally on a dime.

Elon Musk said the thing that was really hard to automate was putting in wiring. Tesla has now developed a whole new type of wiring system that is much more amenable to automation.

Tesla uses more workers per car in assembly than other major manufacturer. By a lot. They are not the people to look for in terms of automating auto assembly anecdotes despite their PR efforts.

I googled but didn't see anything, source?

The german auto-makers like BMW / VW build their own robots for assembly, I would look up there.

Tesla bought the german manufacturing automation company Grohmann Engineering in Jan. 2017, so there that also.

Elon Musk spends a lot of money/effort not to get stuck in local maxima. I guess time will tell if Tesla's trying lots of new ideas works out for them.

I work in manufacturing automation so I may be biased, but attempts to robotize the manufacturing of a product that's being iterated on continuously (Tesla) or automating the assembly of lots of low-volume products is always going to go poorly.

Large car companies like GM or Ford hire automation companies to build automation equipment that meets a very specific spec for assembly steps, tolerances, rates, etc. They design components with ease of manufacturing as a significant factor. How something will be assembled is a constant consideration while designing. The product being run on these lines never really changes and human are only used when the the operations are so complex that the equipment doesn't pay for itself in (typically) 2 years. This is very rare, mostly people are only there to keep the machines filled with parts.

In the sequence of

  design -> automate -> manufacture

manufacture needs to be much larger than the others have good margins. You can't iterate on design without iterating on automate, so if you change the design a lot it's probably best to avoid trying to automate.

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