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Foxconn wants one million new workers, must be robotic
We saw this coming when we met FRIDA, and now it's apparently happening. According to Xinhuanet, Foxconn's founder and chairman chose a workers' party last Friday night to reveal plans for a surge in the company's robot contingent. There'll be 300,000 robots in operation by next year and a swarm-like 1,000,000 within three years -- versus just 10,000 today. The bots will be required to spray, weld and not kill themselves. We can only imagine how this news went down at the party, but soon stuff like that will hardly matter.
BMW commits to Megacity EV by 2013, will start by testing ActiveE all-electric 1 series next year
BMW's first all-electric regular series production vehicle, the Megacity EV, has now been set in stone and inserted into the company's roadmap for a commercial launch in 2012 or 2013. The Bavarian automaker has gone official with word that it plans to use its Leipzig assembly plant to produce the car and further notes that it'll feature a similar setup to the ActiveE concept (pictured above), which is set for field testing in 2011. Essentially a 1 series that feeds off the electric grid rather than the nearest diesel pump, the ActiveE runs off an array of lithium-ion batteries á la the well liked but recently troubled Tesla Roadster, and will serve as a test mule for refining the underlying technology. Generating up to 170bhp might not sound all that impressive, but it should be more than sufficient for the urban commuters these vehicles will be aimed at. Now we just need Mercedes and Audi to match that release schedule and the electric car should finally have its day in the mainstream sun.
