My company is quoting a project in China vs in-house right now. Ironically, the parts are cheaper to make here, making the BOM about $2-3 cheaper. Yes our labor is probably minimally higher, but their price isn't including VAT or shipping costs. I believe the high price is because the vendor is farming most of the parts to outside vendors (adding middleman cost) and simply assembling everything in their factory.

The only reason we are on the fence is because their tooling is roughly half the cost of US tooling.

I've worked at companies before where everything was designed in America, but manufactured in China or Mexico.. and believe me, unless you have good management at either you will get crap quality. Being that pinball is really low volume compared to most industries, and the designs are cranked out so quick, and there are SO many parts to keep track of, it would be very hard to remotely assemble them. Like said above, only reason why it will work out for homepin is because the owner lives there and works in the factory every day.

No, but if we make the cabinet out of solar panels they can be self-powered
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-09/turning-trump-s-border-wall-into-a-solar-plant-is-probably-a-bad-idea

I don't know what the regulations are in Europe, but in the US they say even if you decided to build a new nuclear plant tomorrow, it would take 20 years to get built because of the red tape and stricter regulations. The electric grid is incredibly complicated, demand constantly rising and falling, and local power companies having to adjust in real-time to handle it.

This is a documentary about batteries, but it does show how power grids are complicated

That's the dumbest question I've heard in this thread.
Why would anyone compare one economy to another? Every nation has their own currency value and cost of living. Right now the exchange rate is 6.80 US dollars to one chinese Yen. I would expect the average chinese worker to make $1.14/hour, and they probably do. Also China is very strict on hours, the last company I worked for the China factory got fined because some of the engineers had to work 50 hours that week to get 3d models ready for tooling. Meanwhile companies in the US like American Pinball can have employees working 12-18 hour days, 7 days a week (salary, so there's no incentive) but we don't call that slave labor.. We call that Crunch time, or working for their passion.

I think I heard one story of an uber driver attacking a passenger (and technically I think it was someone posing as one, not an actual drive). However, I have heard many stories of passengers attacking uber drivers, including one not far from me a couple weeks ago:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/lincolnwood/news/ct-lwr-man-stabbed-to-death-in-lincolnwood-tl-0608-20170530-13-story.html

I think if designed properly in newer homes where wiring and plumbing is modular, and anyone with reasonable skills can just replace entire chunks cheaper than hiring someone to troubleshoot and fix. Think about pinball, used to be if you had board issues, you'd pay a guy $150-$250 to troubleshoot it and perhaps replace perhaps a 20 cent capacitor. Now if that board is available as new, sometimes it's cheaper and easier to just replace the entire board and sell your old broken one on ebay and let someone else troubleshoot it. This doesn't mean it will completely eliminate jobs, there are always lazy people that would prefer to pay someone, but it would certainly change the landscape.

As far as self-driving cars, Elon musk plans to have an update next year to self-drive from LA to NY. Now that's not to say it's 100% perfect, there are always situations where bad weather can impair the vision of the car but you can say the same thing about human error. It's been proven that self-driving cars statistically are FAR more safer than human drivers. I also say that in 5-10 years, so many cars will be self-driving that insurance companies will give those cars breaks on their insurance rates, and those that choose to drive themselves (or not upgrade their car) will face price hikes because they are a bigger risk. I also envision hundred of thousands of jobs to disappear very quickly (cabs, limos, truck drivers, pizza delivery drivers). If a company like say uber can suddenly have an army of self driving electric cars that self re-change and pickup passengers, they now have a huge cost benefit over any other company.

Australia will be very pleased, they are getting hosed by the import taxes, shipping, and conversion rate. Oddly I would trust your quality over a Stern any day, and it doesn't seem like their prices are getting any lower (street price of a pro are at $5400 now). Can't wait to hear what title 2 is.

Shady auto lenders already have that ability

I prefer using a credit card over debit, discover has incredible heuristics to detect fraudulent spending (and I get a text anytime I spend over $20, or anyone else for that matter). Is it a pain in the ass to move auto billing over to the new credit card? Absolutely. Until banks start adapting smarter technology, we are all at risk (and no, the chips embedded in them don't do crap):

No, it would likely slow down and perhaps stop until the camera was cleared. On my wife's mazda cx-5 it has a camera sticking straight out of the windshield (For auto cruise control), and if it so much as gets fogged up, the instrument dash tells you to adjust your interior settings until it clears up

Society as a whole, absolutely. Now that many have auto braking, people think they can look at their phones even more (Oh the car will slow down and stop for me). There was a case where a guy loved his Tesla and it's auto pilot, so he decided to watch a harry potter movie on his tablet while he rode home. The bright sun reflected off of a semi making a turn, camera couldn't detect it as an object, it smashed right into it. BUT, at this point, Tesla hasn't said that auto pilot is trustable at this point.. It still requires you to generally be paying attention.

Depends on the car / failure. I remember prius was having an issue where the gas would get stuck, and Wozniak was able to reproduce it consistently so he lent toyota his car. From what I've seen with Tesla, they seem to be building a pretty robust smart system, but no electronics are completely failsafe. It was amazing how many toyotas during that "unintended acceleration" period. Crashing at 110mph because the person behind the car didn't think to maybe turn off the key, or perhaps throw the transmission into neutral until the engine redlined into destruction (or kick it into reverse until the transmission locks up).

There are some miltary aircraf t that are so complicated, there is no such thing as manual control. As a pilot, you are telling an AI pilot how you want to fly. Of course part of that could be that some aircraft costs upwards of 20 million a piece and reducing human error reduces the chance that a pilot is going to make a mistake and throw a big chunk of money down the drain.

agreed.. it was sort of like when Illinois (and I imagine other states) wanted to push everyone to get I-pass so they could reduce labor, and reduce traffic from manual tolls. How to do that? why, you keep the toll rate the same for everyone with an I-pass, but double the rate for those that refuse to get a box in their car that "tracks" them.

My 2010 Scion XD is manual. When I bought it in 2011 there was only one dealer that was 300 miles away with a manual in the color I wanted (charcoal grey). They had one manual on the lot that was silver I could drive the same day. Because it had 6 miles and had been sitting on the lot for a year, I got a good deal on it.
When I test drove a honda fit about a year ago with the CVT transmission I loved it, felt like I was driving electric not feeling shifts. Only drawback with a CVT transmission is that they are only good up to about 200hp. Anything beyond that and you can kill it during hard acceleration. The new civic with the 1.5L turbo engine is pretty nice, it's too bad they can't (or won't) shove that engine in a fit.. ultimate pin hauler.

Yes

apps like waze tell you when it sees cops, detours, heavy traffic, etc by users inputting. I would imagine if Tesla could auto connect to meta data like that, it could update itself on the current speed limit (so long as someone is populating it).

For gas cars, yes. So many sensors (which false diagnose), so many moving parts that can fail. It's my understanding that Tesla is effectively a brushless motor, controlled by a speed controller (like a hobby R/C car might have, just a ton more amps), paired up to a gearbox (single gear, no transmission because electric motors have huge amounts of torque), and there's a giant bank of batteries underneath. Yes there's a ton of other things like the cameras to sense the environment, other typical wear items like brakes and tires, but from a maintenance standpoint it's night and day. When the batteries go bad, typically they replace the entire bank, I'd imagine if the motor develops issues it would be the same thing (and get rebuilt in a factory much like alternators do now).

I work in an industry that is dominated by single stroke small gas engines, but we are slowly transitioning into electric. By comparison, electric is super simple.

clearly I was out to lunch when I wrote that