BMW

Why cars are brutal to manufacture: you can't hold the part in your hand

Adcock argues that mass production isn't Figure's hardest problem; intelligence is. Building humanoids is closer to consumer electronics, where parts fit in your hand, than to cars, whose lines chain hundreds of robots so that any single failure stops production.

“The reason why cars are so hard is that you can't hold the part in your hand. Phones you can just like always hold in your hand and go change or whatever, move and hold. Like cars you can't, you physically can't. So you need robots that like literally pass it to other robots that put things on the chassis. And if any of those break across like thousands or 800 robots, you're dead. It is. Your whole line's down.”