Automotive OEMs love to show off their automated body-in-white assembly lines. Commercials invariably feature dozens of six-axis robots producing showers of sparks in choreographed routines. 

BMW has been at the forefront of Industry 4.0 for years. For example, the company was an early adopter of additive manufacturing, and today prints hundreds of thousands of production parts annually. 

Like many long-established car manufacturers, the company that would become Škoda Auto started in the early 1890s by making bicycles. Today, you won’t see velocipedes rolling off of Škoda assembly lines, but you just might see plug-in electric vehicles.

In this episode of Assembly Audible, we speak with Douglas Schuster, vice president and general manager for global systems at Johnson Controls International.