Episode 6: The Tesla of Homebuilding

04/12/17 • 29 min

Have we hit a tipping point for residential construction where the cost and quality of a factory-built home always compares favorably to the cost and quality of a conventionally-built home? Are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists beginning to train their sights on this mammoth industry? In the sixth and final episode of a series on the future of homebuilding, Andrew discusses how entrepreneurs eager to disrupt this space might conceive of building and financing a modern homebuilding factory.

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SCG Heim – The Factory of the Future

If you’re interested in what the process looks like to build a house in a factory, you can get a pretty good idea just by searching on YouTube for the company that owns the factory. Most companies engaged in this type of manufacturing are proud to display their factories’ capabilities in videos. Amazingly, most of the factories in the United States are not what you would typically associate with the image of a modern factory. Inside of a huge hangar, you can see lots of people manually moving house components from one location to another with relatively few machines in sight. There’s an assembly line, for sure, but it looks more like what you’d expect to see in a factory from 100 years ago than something you’d associate with a modern factory operated primarily by robots.

If you look outside of the United States, you can find much more advanced homebuilding factories that are more evocative of the robotics-driven future that automotive factories like Tesla and Toyota have already made into a reality. The factory that most impressed me was the SCG Heim factory in the province of Saraburi in Central Thailand, northeast of Bangkok.

SCG Heim is a joint venture between The Siam Cement Public Company and Sekisui Chemical Group. SCG is the fourth largest company in Thailand, making chemicals, paper, cement, and building materials. Sekisui is a Japanese chemical company that also has a housing division. While I couldn’t get anyone from SCG Heim to speak with me for this podcast, the robotics visible in their video reflected as impressive a manufacturing process as any I had seen. They use light gauge steel for framing homes with fully-automated robotics supplied by Kawasaki. I read online that the factory has the ability to produce 1,000 homes per year.

In a factory run by SCG Heim, or even Tesla, you see giant machines with arms moving parts that are welded together by other giant machines with arms. So it’s easy to imagine if someone were going to literally copy this kind of automated factory for producing housing modules, the materials they would be using to frame the homes would be steel or aluminum.

Except, here in the United States, we have a long history of building our homes from wood. And with good reason. Unlike many other parts of the world, North America has a relative abundance of forests that can be harvested for wood. You can also generally expect the cost of labor to be cheaper if you’re framing a home with wood, as compared to bricks, for example, which is much more labor-intensive. So what would a factory with robots look like that makes housing modules out of wood?

Weinmann

Weinmann, located in St. Johann, Germany, sells more machinery worldwide for this type of homebuilding factory than anyone else. There are currently 5,000 Weinmann machines operating in 150 homebuilding factories worldwide. Weinmann won’t just sell me the machines for my factory. They’ll design the entire factory for me. Hansbert Ott is Managing Director for Weinmann and has worked at the company for 25 years.

Hansbert Ott: “We are building not only the machines. We produce the machines [here], install the machines in our company, make the test runs with the materials with the customer, and then the customer signs and says, ‘That’s fine, that’s OK.’ And then we are shipping the machine to the customer. And with our guys, we install the machines. Also, very important, we make the training, the education for the operators on the machines, and we are doing more . . . to be there during the production, to help and educate people for the customer . . . so that they have our support, so that they learn how to prefabricate elements and to deliver this high quality on-site.”

If I were going to build a factory, and I h...

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SCG Heim – The Factory of the Future

Weinmann

If I were going to build a factory, and I h...

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Episode 5: Cars, Mars, & 3D Printing

In 2012, six single-family homes were made by a 3D printer in China. The inventor of that technology is now working on a 3D printer designed to construct buildings on Mars. Does this technology have a future on Earth? Or does the future of homebuilding involve modern factories that leverage robots to build wood or steel framing similar to the types of machines you might find in modern automotive plants?

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3D-Printed Homes

In January of 2015, a company revealed a six-story home that they made with a 3D printer. The best to way to explain how a 3D printer works is to contrast it with a typical printer that uses ink to print on a sheet of paper. The thickness of the ink is so infinitesimally small that if you held the paper up to your face, you likely wouldn’t be able to see any elevation of ink on the printed area of the page.

Now imagine if the printer used a thicker type of ink and printed on that sheet of paper not just once, but in multiple layers over the same area. Eventually the inked area would become raised. If you used a different printing material other than ink, and you altered the printer’s instructions to achieve a certain height, you might eventually be able to print something like a plastic bowl. That’s how 3D printing works, and the options of materials and instructions you can use to print are only limited by your imagination.

3D printing is currently an explosive field where lots of entrepreneurs have trained their sights. Already, we have 3D printers that make toys, apparel, even car parts. How about 3D printing to make a home? The same company that used the 3D printer to make that six-story home in 2015 had a year earlier made 10 stand-alone one-story houses with a 3D printer from construction waste and cement.

Although, I must tell you that I wasn’t at all impressed by the video I saw of the 3D printed home on YouTube. The company that made these homes basically rigged a giant squirt gun to repeatedly squirt layer after layer of cement in a pattern that ended up forming the walls of each house. If 3D printing is going to revolutionize the construction industry, it certainly won’t happen with this implementation. Nonetheless, I wanted to speak to the inventor of this 3D printing technology to see how this technology might be used more effectively in the future.

Colonies On Mars And Machines In The Meteor Belt

Behrokh Khoshnevis is a professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California. He patented the Contour Crafting system that seems to have been sloppily implemented to 3D print the house in the YouTube video. Behrokh has no relationship with the company that built those homes.

If you really want to see the future of construction, you have to listen to how 3D printing would work in the most ideal circumstances. What I’m about to explore is out of this world. Literally. Behrokh is currently working with NASA to use 3D printers to build structures on Mars.

Behrokh Khoshnevis: “I approached NASA with a proposal to use lunar and Martian in situ material and build the structures. As opposed to all the proposed methods of taking stuff from here and building stuff on those planets, I recommended a much more viable approach. If there is a technology that can use what is up there, of course it would be economically much more attractive.”

Me: “So the extraterrestrial approach would be, you would transport the 3D printer, if you will, and the associated materials?”

This was a pretty stupid question. Prior to speaking with Behrokh, I hadn’t given any thought to the business of building structures on the Moon or Mars. But obviously, if you’re going to start construction there, and you want to build out of concrete, you wouldn’t bring the concrete from Earth. Concrete is made from sand or some type of gravel, water, and cement. So if it’s possible to get the sand or gravel from space, why carry it with you from our planet?

Behrokh Khoshnevis: “In situ materials. Use whatever is on the moon and whatever is on Mars and build with those. And I demonstrated that that can be done. We built pretty strong structures with the material that is up there. We made some kind of concrete without using water.”

Me: “That’s fasci...

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Episode 7: Can Online Voting Defeat the Broken Electoral College?

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a little over a half of the voting age population cast their votes and the candidate who won the presidency lost the popular vote. Is the problem with low U.S. voter turnout due to culture or lack of accessibility? Without amending the U.S. Constitution, is there a way to use technology to improve voter turnout and overcome the effects of the Electoral College?

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Every time I see a protest against Donald Trump, I wonder whether the protesters were there when progressives needed them most — namely, on Tuesday, November 8th, 2016. On the day of this last Presidential election, only 54.7% of eligible voters showed up to vote. Is it only now that people have seen Trump’s policies that they have begun to recognize the import of that election? Should we expect more people to show up to vote in the 2018 or 2020 elections? I would certainly hope so, but if history is any guide, we shouldn’t just expect an excited electorate to turn out in substantially greater numbers than they have in the recent past.

Scholars have been grappling for some time with why so few Americans show up to vote. Many argue that the Electoral College has the effect of rendering many votes in the United States meaningless, so people figure, ‘Why vote should I vote if my vote doesn’t count?’ Others suggest that if we made voting easier, we could increase turnout. In my new podcast series on the future of online voting, I set out to explore how to defeat the Electoral College and also how to make voting easier. Here’s what I found.

Getting Rid Of The Electoral College

The American Electoral College comes from Article 2 of the Constitution, which provides that each state shall elect a number of “electors” equal to the number of congressmen and senators from that state. We have a total of 538 electoral votes: 438 congressmen (that includes 3 from the District of Columbia) plus 100 senators.

It’s difficult to identify any redemptive aspect of the system today. The voting by electors, and not by the general populace, was designed as a safeguard to prevent an “unqualified” individual from taking the highest office in the nation. In the near term, I’m ruling out the possibility of abolishing the Electoral College. Because the Electoral College is a construct derived directly from the Constitution, its abolishment would require an amendment to the Constitution.

In order to pass a Constitutional amendment, you need to have a bill passed by 2/3rds of the members of House of Representatives and 2/3rds of the Senate, in addition to being ratified by 3/4ths of the state legislatures. To give you an idea how difficult it is to pass an amendment, the last amendment to the Constitution was passed in 1992. It required that any changes that Congress voted on to amend their own pay would not take effect until after the next election for members of Congress. When was this amendment first proposed? On September 25th, 1789. The last amendment that passed before this was the Twenty-sixth Amendment in 1971, which lowered the voting age to 18. Suffice it to say, it’s really hard to pass new amendments.

Eliminating The Electoral College Through State Legislation

There is one creative solution being implemented by some states that would have the effect of completely eliminating the power of the Electoral College without actually abolishing it. The formulation for this state legislation comes from John Koza, a former professor at Stanford and a computer scientist who drafted the original National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and is Chair for National Popular Vote.

John Koza: “Over the years, I followed the Electoral College and all of the strange things that happened, the near-misses, and of course, the 2000 election. And I also became aware of the fact that presidential campaigns were totally concentrated in a handful of battleground states so that the vast majority of Americans were left out of the presidential campaign. And those two thoughts came together with the idea that the states, since they have the exclusive control over the presidential elections, could change from our current winner-take-all system — which is what allows second-place candidates to become President and whic...