Ask a European regulator how to handle a new technology, and the instinct is predictable: find someone to blame, then write a rule so it can't happen again. Only once both are in place do they move, caution that looks responsible from the outside. Prof. Dr.-Ing. Achim Kampker, Chair of Production Engineering of E-Mobility at PEM RWTH Aachen University, argues it's the opposite: waiting for perfect conditions isn't caution. It's the fastest way to lose relevance.
In a recent episode of the Beyond Cost podcast, Achim Kampker traced that same pattern through four very different settings: the autonomous driving debate, Europe's battery investment strategy, the cost line nobody budgets for on the factory floor, and the technologies manufacturers are too slow to adopt. Different settings, same instinct. For cost engineers and procurement leaders, that instinct has a direct cost consequence: the slowest path is being mistaken for the safest one.
Start with the clearest example: the autonomous driving debate. Achim Kampker explained that every expert he has spoken to agrees automated driving would cause significantly fewer road deaths than human drivers do today. The public discussion, though, fixates on a different question: who is to blame when an autonomous system causes a death.
He flips that question around: who is responsible right now for the people dying in excess on the roads today? The easy answer, our podcast guest points out, is the driver who caused a given accident, since fault can be assigned cleanly. But he argues that reflex, that a society needs someone held accountable for everything, is exactly the mechanism that has to break.
The same instinct, Achim Kampker argues, shows up across European industrial policy more broadly:
He is not arguing for recklessness; deliberately negligent work still has to carry consequences. The point is that a society and an industry that demand zero risk on every decision will, by construction, stop making decisions.
That same allergy to risk shows up in how Europe is trying to close its battery gap, just dressed up as a capital allocation question instead of a regulatory one. Europe's battery deficit gets discussed as a single number: years behind Asia. Achim Kampker frames it instead as a structural choice. Volkswagen built its own cell production plant in Salzgitter, on German soil, a step Achim Kampker has previously called necessary but only a first one. Catching up, in his view, takes sustained capital over many years, not two or three, because the ecosystem Asia built (machinery, materials, supplier networks) took decades to assemble.
The zero-risk instinct here is to wait for the one safe, certain bet before committing capital. Achim Kampker's answer is the opposite of waiting:
Putting all capital into one mega-factory, he argues, means betting the entire strategy on one technology choice at a moment when battery chemistry, format, and process are still shifting. The niches he names are concrete: dual-use cells for defense and logistics, batteries for critical infrastructure, and specialized formats for medical devices or agricultural robotics, where standard cells do not meet the spec and customers will pay a premium for supply security. Niches also generate the operating experience needed to scale the bigger bets later, lowering the odds that everyone in Europe repeats the same costly mistakes in cell manufacturing independently.
Risk-aversion at the policy and investment level decides whether Europe builds battery capacity fast enough. Inside the factories that do get built, the costs that decide competitiveness are far less glamorous. Asked directly what the most underestimated cost factor in e-mobility production is, Achim Kampker did not hesitate: scrap rate. Not a hidden defect or a supply shock, but scrap.
The example he gave is wire bending for electric motor windings. Every batch of wire arriving from the supplier is slightly different, and that variance alone drives significant scrap. His proposed fix is not tighter incoming-material specs, but a production-floor AI that learns the variation and adjusts the machine in real time, doing what currently requires an experienced machine operator to catch by eye. The same logic applies to laser drying in cell production, replacing a conventional drying step that limits throughput.
For cost engineers building a should-cost model, the implication is direct: a model that prices materials and labor accurately but treats scrap as a fixed percentage is missing the line item Achim Kampker considers the largest blind spot in the calculation.
Fixing scrap is one example of a broader pattern: the technologies that cut cost fastest right now are exactly the ones manufacturers are slowest to adopt, because adopting them feels like the riskier move.
Achim Kampker is equally specific about where automation pays off and where the debate around it gets distracted. Clean rooms and dry rooms for battery production are expensive largely because they are built around human ergonomics: ceiling height, access, and ventilation. His proposal: humanoid robots, which do not need the room sized for human comfort and can work in orientations people cannot.
On the "robots take jobs" argument, he draws the same parallel agriculture went through with mechanization: jobs were lost in that transition, and new ones were created in industry. "I don't think that not mechanizing would have been the right strategy," he said. His conclusion for manufacturing: "Work is not going to run out for us. What we have to do is move much faster."
A third application he is actively researching: embedding sensors directly into battery cells during R&D to measure real temperature distribution and validate the simulation models built before the cell existed. Closing that gap between simulated and real thermal behavior, he estimates, is worth ten to fifteen percent on fast-charging performance alone.
Every example above points to the same practical question for anyone shadow-costing a bill of materials or running purchasing for a manufacturer: where is your organization choosing the slow, familiar path because it feels safer, when that choice is itself the bigger risk?
Prof. Dr.-Ing Kampker's advice to anyone shadow-costing a bill of materials or running purchasing for a manufacturer is to widen the aperture past the components that have always mattered. Electronics, software, and battery raw materials now carry supply risk that traditional steel-and-aluminum sourcing never did, and that risk does not show up as a cost line until a supplier can no longer deliver.
The balancing act he describes is precise: "I might be the cheapest supplier today, but unable to deliver at all in three years. That's a bad scenario. I position myself to always be twice as expensive, and then nobody wants my product either." Lowest cost and supply security are in genuine tension, and the skill procurement needs now is finding the substitution that resolves it, swapping a scarce material for one that performs as well without depending on a single region.
That is also why Achim Kampker's RWTH institute runs executive education for purchasing and engineering leaders directly, not just degree programs for new graduates. The technologies a cost engineer needs to understand today, such as AI-driven process control, new battery formats, and supply chain exposure on components that didn't exist in a bill of materials ten years ago, weren't on any curriculum when most of today's procurement leaders were trained.
This article draws on a longer conversation between host Jakob Etzel, VP Customer Success at Tset, and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Achim Kampker on the Beyond Cost podcast.
Listen to the full episode to hear more, including Achim Kampker's case for why Europe needs less state involvement rather than more, what he would tell a young engineer to study that didn't exist on any curriculum ten years ago, and his rapid-fire take on whether batteries or fuel cells will dominate heavy-duty transport in ten years.