🤖 Trade, globalisation and 3-d printers

Using 3-d printing to skirt around trade wars. But does it promise more?

Hello!

Here is another brief for EV Premium members on a topic I’ve been mulling for a while. I’d love your comments.

I am making the post available for non-members until Saturday 29 February. If you want more like this, you can subscribe

Dematerialisation is an important trend in our economies. They increasingly require, and value, intangibles. What something is worth is now disconnected from the weight of its raw materials or the human-hours put into assembling it. Rather, it is encapsulated in design, knowhow, brand and similar.

I found this tale about Pix Moving, a Chinese startup an intriguing case study. Pix Moving routing around Trump’s trade war by sending blueprints for components to 3-d printers in the United States. 

Says founder, Angelo Yu:

We don’t export cars to the U.S. We export the technique that is needed to produce the cars.

Pix Moving uses (unspecified) AI systems to help design components giving it a speed advantage. Vehicles can be designed in a year, about a third …