Manufacturing 50,000 Humanoid Robots Next Year | Bernt Børnich, 1X

Ti Morse (0:00)

Today, I am sitting down with Bernt Børnich, the founder and CEO of 1X. You want to ship 50,000 humanoid robots next year. So can we start off with you just walking me through, how do you actually go from just R&D to actually shipping that number of robots in 12 months?

Bernt Børnich (0:13)

Yeah, so, I mean, the factory we're in now in Hayward is built out to a capacity fully ramped about 10,000 units. So that's really been like the goal this year.

We're not gonna do 10,000 because we're gonna be pretty much at the end of the year when the line is fully ramped.

But in parallel, we're building out San Carlos. So to make this happen, we have to do some parallel building. And that's gonna be 100,000 units at full capacity per year. So 110K per year, but of course, most of that volume is gonna come online pretty late next year. The real gating item here is really kind of like, not just shipping 50,000 units, but ensuring that you don't get them back, right? So we have to kind of scale our volume at a rational rate. Prototypes are easy, like it's a cliché, but it's true. Prototypes are easy, production is really hard. We've turned through a lot of issues here to kind of get to where we're confident in ramping volume, but whenever you take the next big step on the volume, you always find things that you don't find in the previous one. So it's just statistics, right? When you do 100 units, you don't find the same things that you find when you do 1,000 or 10,000, because things that are rare just get statistically significant like your yield really needs to come up. So we hope to find a good balance where we take the time to really iterate on the product and get the lessons learned and get it back into the fleet and then go into larger and larger volumes as we kind of cross these gates, quality gates, but the goal is 50,000. So it's going to be a lot of work.

Ti Morse (1:45)

I was thinking about like cars when you were talking and with a car, if you're testing some car just yourself, you're going to experience most of what it is to own a car, just driving around. Whereas with a humanoid robot, the number of random, super unusual behaviors that someone might have this robot in is like multiple orders of magnitude, more than a car. And so going from like to 50,000 cars is incredibly difficult. Going to 50,000 robots is like, I think probably like one or two orders of magnitude more difficult. How do you kind of plan for that?

Bernt Børnich (2:19)

As I think there's pros and cons, right? So a humanoid robot is a lot of parts, quite complicated, but it is not the same number of parts as a car. And I see a lot of companies kind of compare humanoid robots to cars. And I think if you do that, you should kind of like take a step back and think about what you've made, because a car is like 50,000 parts. A well-designed humanoid robot is probably about 1,000 parts. And a car is like 4,000 pounds. A well-designed humanoid robot is hopefully less than 70 if it's going to be safe. So it is actually a simpler system in that sense, so the individual complexity and the number of moving parts is larger. So you get some on that side. But you're of course entirely correct also that it's a way less constrained environment that you're deploying into. So you're going to see a lot more weird shit. That's just the way it's going to be.

I think a lot of it comes down to expectation management. It's going to be bumpy. It's not going to be perfect.

I really hope we can provide a very good customer service and ensure that whatever happens, we're treating you well and we really figure this out, iterate on this, and make sure that you don't have to face the same problem repeatedly.

But of course, we also need to deploy into some quite structured, more like, less variance type environments for parts of the volume, and not have 50,000 robots into 50,000 different tasks. That would not be manageable.

Ti Morse (3:51)

Some employees have the robots in their own home, and I think you're one of them that's just got this robot walking around this environment and like experiencing it, and you're kind of like a few years ahead of everyone else. The other thing too, is you probably had multiple versions of your robot in your home, and so I'd like to know what it feels like on just a personal experience level to have the first evolution of that bot in your home environment and also how that's progressed and how the trust has been built over time.