John Arnold

And the way that the story is told is that China realized that they were behind on ICE cars and were always going to be playing catch up, and that if they could leapfrog to the next technology, then they could have an advantage on the rest of the world.

And so right now, there's apparently over 100 different manufacturers of

EVs in China.

Now, many of these have a contract manufacturer.

And so you can send in your design and do your branding independently of the manufacturing.

But there's many manufacturers there who actually have their own plants.

And we went to this one for NIO, which is kind of the upscale Chinese car in the $40,000 to $80,000 range, although they've recently released one that's below $10,000.

Wow.

Going to their factory and seeing, number one, how quickly that factory was built.

So they went from first shovel in the ground to the first car coming off the line in 17 months, which was just phenomenal.

And then second, the factory automation that they had.

And there were certainly people on the assembly line, but much of the process was done via robotics.

You start looking at what are the auto plants we have in the United States.

We still have a plant that was originally built 100 years ago operating outside of Chicago.

We had an average age of U.S.

plant, a little hard to get, but roughly 40 years ago.

Now, they've been upgraded over time, and there are certainly robotics in American car manufacturing, but I don't think they replicate what's happening with robotics in China.

And so they have this combination of being able to do things really quickly with a skilled but low-cost labor force.

And then add on the robotics has just allowed China to create a quality product at a price that nobody in the rest of the world has really been able to figure out yet.

Do you have anything about robotics or AI that surprised you?