Very cool, but probably not solving the factors involved in housing unaffordability.
Everything is cut from full sized boards as needed on site and installed right there.
It works because wood working machinery is fairly cheap, not heavy and works off standard electric power.
In other parts of the world, you standardize cabinetry sizes and just build for that.
Then a long list of providers offer cabins that fit.
Custom sounds expensive and hard to replace when needed -- what's the upside?
But for them, better than https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3_ug-IGBJY
Unless you were doing a _lot_ of cabinets, the labor cost of an idle cabinet maker overwhelms the shipping cost.
On-site, you're paying the cabinet maker to sand the wood.
Assembling building panels with robots in factories with has been done, but it takes a bigger factory, because what's being made is large.[2] That's a legit video showing the whole process of making housing panels.
Connecting and disconnecting these utilities requires special skills and doing it wrong has major consequences. Special licenses and permits are almost always required by government regulators.
It's the "HVAC guy problem", writ large.
Porsche has a 2.1 MWhr battery trailer that can deliver 3.2 MW peak they bring to electric track days to keep all the cars charged. That's enough power for some serious industrial processes, and if more is required horizontal scale is pretty simple.
A quick trip overnight to a high powered car charger could fill the batteries by morning. For many loads a simple grid connection constantly trickle charging would be enough power to operate indefinitely.
In the UK, prefab house panels can often larger than a container and constructed on large platforms
I live in a relatively rural place in Canada where residential construction is on of the primary drivers of the local economy and one of the last bastions of well paying local jobs. You start shipping in a bunch of these "Microfactories" or transition to prefab construction done offsite in some "Megafactory" somewhere, and you put a heck of a lot of people who are supporting families and spending their incomes in my local community out of work.
Rather than a whole town's worth of construction workers swinging hammers making a decent local buck, you now have a scant few foreign billionaires capturing most of the profit in the residential construction value chain. We're being sold the concept on the bullshit promise "Cheaper houses" but all we're going to get is the enshitification of the construction industry, as like with everything else, once startups and VCs get involved in an industry, a few people make billions, but everyone else ends up worse off.
The framers, dry-wallers, concrete pourers, etc. aren't "Retraining" to be "AI prompt engineers" or whatever bullshit we're being fed will be the "Jobs of the future" either, they are going on government assistance or taking minimum wage retail jobs, never financially recovering from the loss of stable, relatively well paying local jobs, and ultimately pulling their families and entire communities down with them.
Meanwhile 1/100th as many people as have been put out of construction jobs around the world are now employed in a few factories owned by billionaires, who then use their wealth to influence public policy to engage in regulatory capture of their industry, and entire swathes of communities become soulless cookie-cutter corporate suburbs of identical, shoddily built pre-fabricated "Homes" that were designed to maximize corporate profits, not for people to actually enjoy living in.
I see the writing on the wall here, as between robotics / automation, economies of scale and VCs pouring billions into businesses that will operate at a loss while they gobble up market share, I definitely think we're going to see a pretty rapid transition to factory built pre-fabricated homes in the next couple decades, as traditional local scale builders just aren't going to be able to be cost-competitive, but from where I'm sitting this is a terrifying rather than hopeful proposition, as at least where I live, it's not going to make housing any cheaper, but its definitely going to put A LOT of people out of work, and we don't really have anything else for those folks to do, so while it is almost certainly inevitable, the transition to pre-fabricated construction is going to absolutely decimate my community and a great many communities just like it around the world.
mschuster91•6mo ago
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@cyfyhomeinspections
runsWphotons•6mo ago