Keith Bradsher

Now they're the least expensive place to make cars, batteries, all these other technologies.

And a big part of that is because they're making them in very advanced factories with more robots than anyone else in the world.

They're not completely immune, but they are a lot more resistant than anyone else expected.

Let me tell you about a car factory I visited some months ago in eastern China.

The very start of the process is making the car body components.

which used to be made mostly out of steel.

This was making it out of aluminum, which is lighter weight, works better with an electric car.

It's much harder to do, but they were doing it in a more advanced way than you see practically anywhere else.

There were robotic sleds carrying bars of aluminum to an automated elevator up, up, up, up to the top of a machine the size of a McMansion in the United States.

Wow.

I mean, this piece of apparatus was enormous.

And the elevator automatically dumps the aluminum ingots in a furnace, and that furnace turns them into molten aluminum,

that is then poured into precisely the shapes of the various car body components that are needed.

And then those car parts are taken still by human drivers with forklifts, although that will be automated at some point as well, into a very large warehouse from which they then feed the assembly line.

The assembly line is 820 robots.

It's a so-called dark factory.

That's exactly right.

You can turn off the lights, they keep making whatever they're making, and they are assembling all these components together.

into the skeleton of the car.

Now, some of that you find elsewhere in other car factories elsewhere in the world, but the integration of everything is very impressive.