Name: Inside China’s Dark Factories Where Robots Run the Show
Uploaded: 2025-07-18T04:00:00Z
Duration: 5 min 36 s
Description: Inside China's 'dark factories,' robots help to build electric cars around the clock, transforming Chinese EV industry into an existential threat to American and global automakers.

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Inside China's 'dark factories,' robots help to build electric cars around the clock, transforming Chinese EV industry into an existential threat to American and global automakers. Photo: WSJ

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250718/0bab0212-de97-4843-be77-82df366b53ea/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Inside China's 'dark factories,' robots help to build electric cars around the clock, transforming Chinese EV industry into an existential threat to American and global automakers.

Inside China’s Dark Factories Where Robots Run the Show 

Reporter: With lights dimmed and no workers in sight, this car factory in China uses hundreds of robots to churn out dozens of electric vehicles an hour 24/7. This is a dark factory, an area of the plant so automated and with so little human presence that in theory the lights could be completely shut off. Factories like this one are part of China's bid to use hyper automation to dominate the electric vehicle or EV market. But the furious trade war between Washington and Beijing raises a key question, who is going to buy all these new cars? For decades, the abundance of cheap labor explained why China was seen as the world's factory floor, but the economy is changing.

The labor costs had been going up in China for many years. I think it happened faster than many people in the West expected. And so if you're a factory owner, you wanna find a way to blunt the impact of that and automation is one very obvious way.

Reporter: Rapid advancements in robotization has helped create what is now known as dark factories. This is ZEEKR, a Chinese luxury EV maker founded in 2021, whose cars cost up to $125,000 a piece. In its flagship factory in northeastern China, the automaker can already produce up to 300,000 cars a year or more than 800 cars a day. For comparison, Tesla has similar production levels, but it took more than a decade to achieve this volume. For ZEEKR, robotization has a double advantage. Some tasks still require a human touch, such as the meticulous assembly of the cables that run throughout the car. Workers also go into the factories to perform tasks like robot maintenance. The company's ambition is to keep automating, to deliver its cars to customers even faster. In China, ZEEKR is not an outlier in automation. According to the International Federation of Robotics in 2023, every other industrial robot installed in the world happened in China. The country's levels of robotization have grown sevenfold since 2015 when President Xi Jinping introduced a Made in China 2025 initiative to transform its image from the world's factory into an innovative manufacturing powerhouse.

And the aims are to be able to produce more of what China needs at home and to get to a level of technological advancement where they don't need to rely on the US and Western countries anymore for inputs or to reduce that reliance as much as possible, and even to be able to produce enough that they can export. And part of that was to have robotics play a larger role in the Chinese economy.

Reporter: Some American automakers believe China's widening EV lead boosted by cheap state loans and subsidies, poses an existential threat to the industry.

When you have a country like China where much of the auto industry is increasingly automated, the sky is the limit in terms of what they can produce. And if that means a flood of EVs or other vehicles on global markets, that is going to have the effect of just pulling down prices, and that's gonna hurt Western automakers that are trying to compete with these.

Reporter: Unlike their Chinese rivals, companies like Ford and GM have scaled back ambitious EV expansion plans hampered by high battery costs and the slow rollouts of EV chargers. Staffing costs and labor laws in the West are another disadvantage the US faces.

China has a lot less in the way of labor regulation than many Western countries. They don't have labor unions to deal with in the same way, so there are fewer impediments to automating.

Reporter: But China's EV landscape is a crowded space and fast robotization makes this competition even tighter. Chinese companies already turn out more EVs than all other car makers in the world combined. But Western concerns about Beijing's EV expansion have so far largely kept Chinese brands out of their markets.

Countries that have friendlier relations with China, like Brazil, countries in the Middle East, in Africa, in Southeast Asia, are worried as well about their own domestic industries and don't want to see a flood of Chinese products undermine those industries. If you have automation enabling China to go even faster and produce even more of this stuff, then this political problem becomes perhaps even greater.

Reporter: As a result, most of these cars are sold inside China, making over capacity a huge issue for the industry. But this doesn't dent ZEEKR's confidence in China's capacity to consume.

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