TL;DR: Hyundai plans to sell the Boston Dynamics Atlas robot for around $320,000 to undercut the cost of human factory labor.
Hyundai just threw a massive price tag onto the Boston Dynamics Atlas robot. They are aiming for $320,000. Sure, that sounds like a fortune. But here’s the catch.
They’re pricing it specifically to be cheaper than paying two human manufacturing workers in the US over a two-year stretch. The goal here isn’t to get a robot into your living room to fold laundry. They are going straight after the factory floor.
If companies can actually hit that two-year return on investment, we might see a very sudden shift in how manufacturing plants hire. The math is brutal, but it works.