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Comment by Closi

20 hours ago

> Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible!

Slight nuance - they have spent a [reasonable amount of money] automating production.

The trick to automating something that ‘isn’t a car’ is often to put in small bits of low-cost and flexible automation that can be moved around and repurposed. IMO this is often what we are bad at in the west - companies can/do setup massive automated sites at huge expense, but there aren’t the skills/infrastructure to do this at the lower end of production (eg if you want to deploy one AMR in the west the AMR companies don’t want to talk to you, and there isn’t really an easy way to get one yourself without talking to an integrator which will charge tens of thousands which will wipe out the benefit, and we don’t have the skills within most small production companies to get a small robot arm/AMR working without external integrators - but a one-AMR deployment might be a more common scenario in China).

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Closi

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Gustomaximus  19 hours ago

I was thinking the issue might be its much better for factories to automate sections of production over time.

It must be a huge expense with risk to design a new factory, automate it end to end and push live hoping the market expectation for the product exists and the automation is as good as planned.

Whereas if you have a manual production line you could have a massive advantage as they can automate out sections ongoing and it allows engineers to build skills in this also as they go.