A big sticking point in contract talks between Detroit automakers and the United Auto Workers union is the popular assertion that it takes fewer workers to manufacture electric vehicles (EVs) than conventional cars.
A big sticking point in contract talks between Detroit automakers and the United Auto Workers union is the popular assertion that it takes fewer workers to manufacture electric vehicles (EVs) than conventional cars.
GM got in trouble inn the 1960s for telling the unions that every strike and pay raise makes automation that much cheaper. However that is truth and as automation advances more and more things that used to be done manually will be done by hand. The union people need to adapt, that means many need to get retrained to do something more productive than repetitive assembly.
That’s not really true though. In my experience automation is either way way cheaper than manual labor, so much so that there’s no competition, or it’s completely impractical to implement.
Usually it’s not 5% cheaper or something like that.
As for the last point, with AI we are trying to automate intelligence, which is a completely different thing than classic automation
Automation typically costs millions to implement the first time, but then replaces labor that is paid every year. So you lose money the first 5 years, and after that it is a lot cheaper.
Don’t forget that technology marches on. When GM started automation in the 1960s it was doing a lot of design work on it in house, so it was several million $ to replace a few people making $10k/year. Now you can buy CNC machines to make many of the parts off the shelf, and those machines directly hook up to the CAD your engineers are designing parts in, so automation is cheaper in just days (and the machine probably holds tighter tolerances for more quality). Even today though there are a lot of things that are we could automate, but it isn’t practical as the custom machines needed would be more cost than doing the work manually - but there are less and less such things all the time.