BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by shafyy » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 2:59 PM UTC

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…

For me personally, Die Linke is hitting many spots. Of course, nobody will ever be 100% aligned with a political party's program, but that's ok.

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

#202

Post by labcomputer » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

throwaway2037 wrote: post #89

SoftTalker wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I distinctly remember reading that the entire bill of materials for building a Boeing 747 was managed in Excel. I have not been able to find that claim since then but it was so amazing to me that I remember it. 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.

Assume that later models of the 747 were managed in Excel. No trolling: What is wrong with that? You can write insanely powerful software using (1) formulas on the sheet (which are essentially functional programming) and (2) imperative logic in VBA (HTTP calls, database calls, file system, etc.). For years, I used this model and wrote pretty powerful software. Sometimes, I miss it for the encapsulated system. These d…

> No trolling: What is wrong with that?

Because you can't define a named custom formula by composing the built-ins. So every cell is just the same copy-pasted formula string. When you need to change something, you have to change it everywhere and pray that you didn't miss one usage.

I can't count how many times I found a bug in a spreadsheet because someone (who might be me) missed one or two instances.

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

#203

Post by aeyes » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

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…

I don't get any of your examples.

There are many different keyboard layouts, at least nowadays there is only one German layout. For Spanish there are 2 different layouts which are both actively sold.

The meaning of yellow on traffic lights is no problem, you'll see it for no longer than 2 seconds. Unless it flashes yellow which means that the traffic light is shut off, then "right before left" applies. Some countries only have a green light, no red and no yellow. Now that is a problem because if the light is off because you a) don't see it, you have to know that it is there, and b) don't know if it is operational.

The end of a speed limit indication means the same as no speed limit indication. The lawful limit for the type of road applies, 50 in the city, 100 for rural roads, unlimited for Autobahn. Thats why on the Autobahn there will be a speed limit indication after every on-ramp, if there is no speed limit sign then it is unlimited.

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

#204

Post by dogemaster2025 » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:08 PM UTC

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #179

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-…

>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 However bad Germany is in this regard, I suspect the US is far worse. There is no cohort in the US who remembers living in "East US" to temper the exces…

Certain liberal cities are the “East US.”

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

#205

Post by piquadrat » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:09 PM UTC

speeder wrote: post #166

jarek83 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BMW's most recent infotainment is a big step backwards to me in both areas - aesthetics and UX. Its previous generation was one of the best in the market also in both. I literally don't consider buying the newest 4-series just because of it, especially of the ultrawide driver's "monitor" - it's just so ugly, and I regret it, since on the outside the car appeals me so much more. I'd rather spend the same on previous y…

I worked on BMW infotainment for a time. My opinions are my own obviously, I don't even work at BMW anymore. So, when I was working, I found the decisions regarding the infotainment mind boggling, to me they made zero sense, until I found some random documents deep in the BMW intranet, where I found the logic of it all: The focus was actually increasing the car range, so for example instead of having one infotainment…

Isn't what you are describing known as Zonal Architecture (as opposed to Domain Architecture) and supposed to be the hot new way of architecting automotive platforms? Tesla was pioneering it. The Volkswagen Group spent billions to get their hands on Rivian's zonal architecture platform.

https://insideevs.com/features/724945/zonal-architecture-sof...

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

#206

Post by samiv » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:21 PM UTC

aeyes wrote: post #203

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…

I don't get any of your examples. There are many different keyboard layouts, at least nowadays there is only one German layout. For Spanish there are 2 different layouts which are both actively sold. The meaning of yellow on traffic lights is no problem, you'll see it for no longer than 2 seconds. Unless it flashes yellow which means that the traffic light is shut off, then "right before left" applies. Some countries…

I know how the traffic lights work, point was that there are just excessively many of different combinations in Germany rather than just a single standard green/yellow/red.

"The end of a speed limit indication means the same as no speed limit indication. The lawful limit for the type of road applies, 50 in the city, 100 for rural roads,"

See, that's already wrong because the "Landstraße" may be 70, 80 or 100 depending on the exact road. If there's construction you might have a lower speed for the construction and then "end of limitation" at which point you have to remember whether the road is 70, 80 or 100.

Another example, if you have a Landstraße that is 100km/h, but you have a section that is 80km/h which has construction that has 50km/h, after construction you see "end of limit" what's the speed you're allowed to drive? 80 or 100? If you just had the speed limit sign all this confusion would simply not exist.

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

#207

Post by logicchains » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:22 PM UTC

twoodfin wrote: post #165

joe_mamba wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I’m told that Germans in general are “cheap” and that this is an expected consequence of their economic policies designed to reinforce their industrial base. I wish I could find the reference I’m thinking of, but the idea was that Germans buying absurdly cheap wine and their constantly underfunded trains were part of a pattern of deliberate domestic under-investment to keep exports competitive. Someone ITT surely kno…

Surely not as cheap as the Dutch, who'll apparently send you a bill for a couple dollars worth of snacks you ate at their house.

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

#208

Post by any1 » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:23 PM UTC

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…

That reminds me.

I worked for a company where we punched in using an iButton (it's a pretty neat 1-wire thing that fits on a key chain).

The punch clock system was logged and then at the end of the month, they printed out a single A4 sheet for every employee for us to make corrections and sign. Of course, someone had the unenviable job of going over all those and applying the corrections.

We also had to write down hours spent on different projects in a completely different system that wasn't at all integrated with the punch clock system.

At some point in the last couple of years that I worked there, they switched to Workday. That was not an improvement.

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

#209

Post by samiv » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:23 PM UTC

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…

"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”."

That was not the point, that's the standard way the lights will work.

The point is that sometimes you have a light combination where actual light post only has yellow/red for example (no green light). Sometimes you have a light post that has red only (on, off).

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

#210

Post by nradov » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 3:30 PM UTC

testing22321 wrote: post #81

torginus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction is that by the time humanoid robots actually make it to the factory floor, they'll be pretty un-humanoid. 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…

I toured a major US OEM assembly plant recently, and there were a TON of humans working insanely repetitive tasks. 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.

Many of the largest US auto assembly plants aren't unionized.