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BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

press.bmwgroup.com

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Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#191

Post by earthnail »

samiv wrote: post #180
wenc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work for the US side of a German multinational (one of the largest in the world) and discovered the same thing when it came to software. 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 counterp…

As a non German but someone who has lived there for 10 years my take is that its cultural part of being Germans. They always seem to gravitate towards making things just a little bit more difficult. 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. Bu…

German here. Some of it I can agree with. The traffic light though is very simple. Yellow means “it was green and will turn red”. Red+yellow means “it was red and will turn green”.

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.

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#192

Post by airstrike »

Maxion wrote: post #23

Whenever I hear german companies mention digitalisation, I get reminded that they still use pen and pencil in production environments to log data, pass those sheets to secreteries who enter the data into legacy systems so data analysts can enter it into another system that then has an integration with SAP. Data from SAP then flows onwards to some buzzword filled Azure product that costs a few million a month from whi…

> Someone else downloads it as an xls and manually writes (not copy pastes) the numbers into a power point presentation and makes graphs by drawing shapes. This is then presented at some bi-monthly meeting.

I made an app that fixes this part of the problem. The rest is cultural.

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#193

Post by specialist »

joe_mamba wrote: post #118
pcurve wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users " 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 i…

>how cheap / penny pinching his German companies and their employees were when doing deals 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 th…

> blow your brains of how cheap

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.

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#194

Post by ivan_gammel »

shafyy wrote: post #177
0x000xca0xfe wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it's sheer stubbornness or they're just wired differently. As a German I believe it's more about demographics nowadays. The country and all large companies are run by older people who only saw rising prosperity their entire life. They all have settled in a comfortable place and do not seriously care about the future anymore. They just want to keep the system running until retirement. There is no long-…

You are right about the issue, but wrong about the action. There are things you can do. Vote for candidates and parties that genuinely want a different future. Become politically active yourself. Run for office. Work with your local community. Every bit of action helps.

There is no party in German political landscape interested, capable of solving or even understanding the problems that needed to be solved. We have lost political center to groups of special interests and medieval guides. The state sponsored tool for informing about political programs (Wahl-O-Mat) is biased towards political issues of the mainstream. E.g. nobody is talking about the suffocating monopoly of notaries or increasing the property ownership by any significant margin. Running for office is an interesting idea, but in party-dominated politics to achieve anything is a decades-long adventure.

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#195

Post by lnsru »

moooo99 wrote: post #184
tirant wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem with unions in Germany is that they block companies from adapting to changes in the environment quickly. Companies become heavy behemoths and end up suffering from it, which ends up damaging their own employees as well.

I‘ve read this frequently, but I have yet to be convinced. The union presence seems to be more of a correlation than a causation to me. Larger companies move slower, larger companies also tend to have a stronger union presence than SMBs

I can try convince you. In unionized companies one can’t fire employees from the 53rd birthday. That makes them similar to care home at the end. Young folks come and go and are minority at the end. Dynamics decrease not from the size, but from getting old. Since the salaries are more or less the same the oldtimers have maxed out bonuses. What do young guys get? Basically nothing since the bonus pool must be distributed equally in the company.

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.

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#196

Post by Zigurd »

I would place a bet that there are dozens to hundreds of German engineers gnashing their teeth over this travesty. This is a pure FOMO driven exercise, and the insulting thing is that BMWs management didn't even learn from Hyundai who ended up buying Boston Dynamics who started all of this madness with Atlas, which despite being the best humanoid robot still has no business case.

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.

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#197

Post by joe_mamba »

OKRainbowKid wrote: post #173
0x000xca0xfe wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it's sheer stubbornness or they're just wired differently. As a German I believe it's more about demographics nowadays. The country and all large companies are run by older people who only saw rising prosperity their entire life. They all have settled in a comfortable place and do not seriously care about the future anymore. They just want to keep the system running until retirement. There is no long-…

That's my impression as well. The future is being sold for the present.

>The future is being sold for the present.

That's where the famous high European pensions come from. In France now the average pension is higher than the average salary.

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#198

Post by markbravo0312 »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #194
shafyy wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right about the issue, but wrong about the action. There are things you can do. Vote for candidates and parties that genuinely want a different future. Become politically active yourself. Run for office. Work with your local community. Every bit of action helps.

There is no party in German political landscape interested, capable of solving or even understanding the problems that needed to be solved. We have lost political center to groups of special interests and medieval guides. The state sponsored tool for informing about political programs (Wahl-O-Mat) is biased towards political issues of the mainstream. E.g. nobody is talking about the suffocating monopoly of notaries o…

It seems to even get the compass needle pointing in the right direction would require immense personal sacrifice. This brings to mind a line I heard recently: “I burn my life to make a sunrise I will never see.”

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#199

Post by joe_mamba »

0x000xca0xfe wrote: post #141
pcurve wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if you've ever driven a German car, you'll realize that the car was built for engineers and not for end users " 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 i…

I don't know if it's sheer stubbornness or they're just wired differently. As a German I believe it's more about demographics nowadays. The country and all large companies are run by older people who only saw rising prosperity their entire life. They all have settled in a comfortable place and do not seriously care about the future anymore. They just want to keep the system running until retirement. There is no long-…

>who only saw rising prosperity their entire life.

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.

Re: BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time

#200

Post by dogemaster2025 »

earthnail wrote: post #191
samiv wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non German but someone who has lived there for 10 years my take is that its cultural part of being Germans. They always seem to gravitate towards making things just a little bit more difficult. 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. Bu…

German here. Some of it I can agree with. The traffic light though is very simple. Yellow means “it was green and will turn red”. Red+yellow means “it was red and will turn green”. 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 thi…

It’s so German to blame the user!
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