A half-hour film shot by Chevrolet in 1936 showing the auto manufacturing process.
[youtube 8bT6txm4RpA]
Looks like an impressive mix of “dangerous” and “soul crushingly dull.” Still, there’s an impressive amount of automation shown here. Obviously nothing as smart as a robot… anything goes wrong, or goes out of kilter, and the system would need a human to directly intervene. But it’s still kinda cool.
Might be that by 2036, cars might be built in far smaller, virtually unmanned factories like the one shown in “Minority Report,” where cars were completely built and assembled in a facility the size of a modest warehouse. And in a few decades more… who knows, the distant descendant of the MakerBot might be a cubical frame that fits around the edges of your garage. When last year’s model becomes boring, you park the car in your garage, get out, and tell the AutoMakerBot to “attack.” It tears the car to bits, storing the various materials in separate bins… and then builds the new model.
The UAW, of course, will have a hissy fit.
This is the sort of sci-fi reality that I can see coming along fairly reliably. Not as spiffy as flying cars and rocketships, but still fairly cool. Of course, this sort of technology plays more directly into the culture of shallowness that sees people going bonkers for the newest iCrap, and would require little or no more effort on the part of the user than it would take to use the newest bit of consumer electronics – unlike what would be required of those who would patrol the spacelanes. Still, I’d love to have such a system. Might not make me a new model car… but I just might spend some time making a surprisingly detailed CAD model of a car-sized rocketship.