Lights-Out Manufacturing: From GM's Dream to ABB Robots

A lights-out factory runs without people on the floor, so in principle nobody needs the lights on. Lights-out manufacturing has been promised since the 1980s, and in 2026 the idea is back in the news, usually as the "dark factory" and often about China. This post goes from General Motors' costly robot push and FANUC's robots that build robots to the automated plants of Xiaomi and Zeekr. It also looks at how ABB makes its own robots in Shanghai, where flexible cells and people still share the floor.

ABB's robotics factory in Kangqiao, Shanghai, which opened in December 2022, seen from the air. Photo: ABB

How the dream of the empty factory began

One of the earliest descriptions of an automatic factory in fiction is Philip K. Dick's 1955 short story "Autofac". In the 1980s General Motors chairman Roger Smith tried to build the real thing, with lights-out factories in which the only employees supervised robots and computers. Over the decade GM spent upwards of $90 billion trying to remake itself, including a joint venture with Japan's Fujitsu-Fanuc, GMF Robotics, which made GM the largest manufacturer of robots in the world. It went badly. The new robots famously painted each other instead of the cars or welded doors shut, and some of the automation was removed soon after it went in. The new plants Smith used to display the technology, such as Poletown on land cleared under a 1981 Michigan Supreme Court ruling, could not flexibly produce different models, and critics called them obsolete on the day they opened.

An engineer with a hand-held controller beside Unimate PUMA robots, 1986. Photo: UL Digital Library via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

FANUC, which started as Fujitsu's numerical control business and whose name stands for Fuji Automatic Numerical Control, came closer. The company, headquartered in Yamanashi Prefecture, has run a lights-out factory since 2001. Robots there build other robots at about 50 per 24-hour shift and can run unsupervised for up to 30 days. FANUC vice president Gary Zywiol said that besides the lights, "we turn off the air conditioning and heat too." In the Netherlands, Philips makes electric razors with 128 robots from Adept Technology and only nine human quality inspectors at the end of the process.

Yellow FANUC robot arms run an assembly demo at Tesla's newly reopened Fremont plant in 2010. Photo: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Where dark factories stand in 2026

This year most of the attention is on China. A DPA report on 29 September, drawing on The Detroit News, said experts know of no fully lights-out mass-vehicle plant yet, but Zeekr, BYD and Xiaomi have automated large parts of their operations, and robots reportedly build luxury electric cars in the dark in parts of a Zeekr factory in north-eastern China. More than half of the world's new industrial robots in 2024 were installed in China. Xiaomi's 860,000 square foot factory in Changping, Beijing, can make 10 million smartphones a year on 11 fully automated lines.

ABB robots in the body shop at BAIC's electric car plant in Qingdao, China. Photo: ABB

Equipment makers are selling the idea as well. At a beverage technology fair in Shanghai this month, Newamstar showed a lights-out package covering changeovers, quality inspection, ingredient blending, material handling and truck loading, built around a combined blow-molding, labelling, filling and capping unit rated at 48,000 bottles an hour. Elsewhere the language is more careful. Lear reportedly ran a fully lights-out shift on automated injection molding machines at a plant in Germany, while Bosch's Paul Thomas called the dark factory a goal for a "perfect world" and said Bosch is focused on people working alongside robots.

Beer bottles on the filling line at the Staropramen brewery, 2009. Photo: Petr Kadlec / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ABB's own robot factory takes a middle path. In 2018 Reuters reported that robots would make robots at a planned $150 million ABB plant in Shanghai, and in December 2022 ABB opened the 67,000 m2 site in Kangqiao. It has no fixed assembly lines. Modular production cells are networked and served by autonomous mobile robots, AI-powered robot systems handle screwdriving, assembly and material handling, and a digital twin lets changes be tested before they reach the floor, much as cells are tried in RobotStudio. ABB also says its cobots let people work beside robots and even share tasks, so the plant is automated without being dark.

ABB's Flexley Mover P603, a compact autonomous mobile robot built for moving loads around plants. Photo: ABB

What still keeps the lights on

Lights-out production is spreading shift by shift. Many factories run lights-out between shifts or as a separate shift to meet demand or save on labour. CNC machines can run unattended at night and at weekends, though someone usually stays nearby, and people are still needed to remove finished parts and set up the tombstones that hold new ones. Chip fabs working with 300 mm wafers are the furthest along: the whole process is automated, and workers mainly keep it running and repair faulty machines. As PwC's C.J. Finn put it, "The more simplified the manufacturing process, then the greater potential for it to go dark."

Rows of CNC milling machines making guitar necks at the Taylor Guitars factory, 2009. Photo: Marcin Wichary / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Jobs are the sharpest open problem. According to the DPA report, the UAW criticised GM for adding dozens of cobots at Factory ZERO in Detroit while more than 1,000 workers remained laid off, and Ford's $2 billion overhaul of its Louisville Assembly Plant for an electric pickup will mean around 600 fewer employees. The UAW's Shawn Fain said of AI, "We are in a fight for humanity." Tu Le of Sino Auto Insights argued that "we can't compete unless we automate our factories," while Jeff Burnstein of the Association for Advancing Automation asked, "I mean, don't we still want the people?"

Engineers working with a tablet and VR headsets at ABB's robotics site in Shanghai. Photo: ABB

Cost and skills come next. Stäubli's James Cook argues that compact robot cells let manufacturers fit more production into the same building without adding heating, lighting or cooling. Someone still has to program and repair those cells, and ABB says it has trained more than a million people in China since 2005 through schools and universities. For households the results are already in the shops, since Xiaomi phones and Philips razors come off lines with very few people on them. Our post on five million factory robots shows how many machines are already out there.

A display area with robot arms at ABB's robotics factory in Shanghai. Photo: ABB

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