Tuesday brought us to Regensburg for a visit to Aumovio, a company that develops the internal display technology and circuit board systems that go inside modern vehicles. On paper, it sounds like one of the less glamorous stops on the itinerary. In practice, it was more interesting than I expected, though for different reasons than the other factory visits.
We started with an information session before heading to the floor, which was the right call because the context genuinely helped. Aumovio was formerly part of Siemens and Continental before carving out its own path, focused specifically on the internal electronics of vehicles. They even passed around printed circuit boards during the presentation, which was a nice touch and set up the factory tour well.
What stood out to me most on the floor was the sheer scale of automation and the defect numbers that came with it. The company cited a defect rate of roughly one in a million parts. One in a million. The capital investment required to achieve that level of precision, the quality control infrastructure, and the engineering overhead, it is an enormous operational commitment that most consumers never think about for even a second while adjusting their dashboard display. Before we could enter the production area, we had to suit up in lab coats and shoe covers, and the environment inside felt more like a laboratory than any factory we had visited. Sterile, tightly controlled, and buzzing with small machines doing extraordinarily precise work in every corner.
Regensburg, as a city, however, was the real highlight of the day for me. I was not fully prepared for how medieval and well-preserved it would feel. Walking through the old city center felt like stepping back several centuries, with narrow cobblestone streets, stone buildings, and Roman ruins woven into the fabric of everyday modern life. The tour of the historic town hall was fascinating, and the prison and torture chambers underneath were genuinely shocking in the way that only something that old and real can be.
The cathedral was something else entirely. The stained glass alone was unlike anything I have seen in person, and I have visited a fair number of churches across Europe at this point. Regensburg ended up being one of my favorite cities of the entire trip, and one I genuinely did not see coming.