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I got a boner watching that!

Mesmerizing to watch the blend of machine and man. I’m in awe of the precision of the process.

The machines used to make the cars are just as cool as the cars themselves. Except, of course, for the current lack of a manual transmission in the US ‘09 A4. :-(

Also check out the commercial by KUKA (who are making most of the automotive industries robots): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h31mcihNBO4

only in germany would they have models assembling cars

Seems like the video is gone. Alternative links?

nothing special – advanced robotic manufacturing. people like robots, robots like people. It would be nice to see Intel manufacturing process – 2 engineers for the whole plant )

I get the feeling someone over at 37S owns one?

Just for the record, there’s an ad entitled “Alternatives to Basecamp” showing up there, in case you’re bothered.

Also, nice to see the HQ(ish) in YouTube.

This video reminds me of making process of our daily rails server rental service in the cloud (http://tinysvr.com). To create automated services, many trial&errors should be iterated. I wonder how many vehicle bodies engineers at Audi scrapped to achieve the welding automation part. In our case, I probably wasted more than 30 servers (but they are “instances” thanks to amazon ec2) to automate everything in setting up a rental server.

Jason, this is just one way to build a German car. Here’s a much more famous one: Building Trabant, an East German Car

When you see that, it’s kind of surprising that cars are not more expensive than they are. Think about all the people involved (designers, engineers, manual workers…), all the very specific tools, the materials themselves, shipping…

Nice reminder to be in awe for some things we take for granted.

@Tim

If you’re able to purchase one of those cars, you’re most likely taking a lot of things for granted already.

Absolutely and totally agree:

If you’re able to purchase one of those cars, you’re most likely taking a lot of things for granted already.

:*

@Luke

A walk through Toyota wouldn’t look that much different, you know.

I also don’t see much correlation between wealth and taking things for granted.

German car tech girls are hot.