The potential with arms and other humanoid robotics is to be able to plug them into existing processes without having to make massive structural changes. Robot arms in car factories look like an evolution from a human production line, rather than a completely redesigned production line (or a mashup of the two). Still, redesigning the production around the robot still makes good sense: consider a dishwashing android vs a regular dishwashing machine. We have had dishwasher tech for a long time but we are still very far from a dishwashing android. It's just that maybe that humanoid robot could also hang up the laundry, look after the kids, drive you to the supermarket etc. There is so much room to grow in the "hard automation" space, where scale makes having specialized machines doable - as opposed to a household having to buy a dishwasher, washing machine, roomba, etc.
Didn't Tesla try this for the Model 3 (a fully-automated factory) and it turned out to be a total disaster?
Are they too far ahead of the curve? Or is it just rare that your task remains identical enough (i.e., textiles) for the decades it takes to optimize hardware?
A bit of both, I think. To do this is really hard. And requires some changes to how the car is made. Some of these lessons learned are presumably are being introduced into the Model Y, like the single-piece rear casting.
There's also a ton of engineering needed to go into how to make better robots.
