The truth about Chinese manufacturing in 2025 | Auto Expert John Cadogan

Video Description

Get a great deal on home solar (or add a quality battery to your existing setup): https://autoexpert.com.au/solar Save thousands on any new car (Australia-only): https://autoexpert.com.au/contact In this video, I visited Risen's factory in China, and saw truly cutting-edge manufacturing technology on a scale you will not see in Australia. Risen is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of solar panels. It has roughly 15,000 employees, of which more than 1000 professional propellerheads work in R&D. The company holds over 740 proprietary patents. You can’t miss them, because you have to drive past them to visit the production line… …which you can’t walk onto without wearing the full anti-static frock. And then, they blow you. With air. To make sure you don’t bring in any dust. It’s basically the full ‘Skynet’ freak show of cutting-edge robotic automation. Crystalline wafers that are less than four thousandths of an inch thick get scurried about by robots, and subjected to dozens of tightly controlled doping and layering processes in a surgically clean science-fiction set. It’s a decent 400- or 500-metre stroll from one end of the cell production line to the other. Endless processes with built-in testing take place. There are, of course, multiple lines in parallel. I had one impression in my head of manufacturing in China, and this, frankly, was not it. The minders who took us through were the full brainiac - they spoke binary. I struggled to keep up. I’ve been to car factories and R&D centres in Japan, Europe and South Korea. Risen’s factory is right up there. If I hadn’t been wearing a surgical mask, my jaw would have been on the floor. There are people at Risen, and all they do is think about heterogeneous junctions, zero busbar technology, optimising metallic paste, and advanced interconnection systems. It’s closer to rocket science than you think, and more reliable than SpaceX. This is properly advanced technology, and they develop it in-house.