More than three decades after Honda Motor Co. first built an Accord sedan at its Marysville, Ohio, factory in 1982, humans are still an integral part of the assembly process -- and that's unlikely to change anytime soon. Even as doom-and-gloom reports suggest robots are poised to replace human labor and automotive upstarts like Tesla Inc. aim to largely remove people from the production line, workers keep toiling side by side with machines in Marysville. And Honda's approach is working: The Accord won the prestigious North American Car of Year award at last week's Detroit auto show. "We can't find anything to take the place of the human touch and of human senses like sight, hearing and smell," Tom Shoupe, the chief operating officer of Honda's Ohio manufacturing unit, said in an interview. Markus Schaefer, production chief at Mercedes-Benz, in 2016 said the carmaker was de-automating and relying more on humans to install the endless array of options that luxury customers demand.

On the assembly line in Toyota's low-strung, sprawling Georgetown, Kentucky factory, worker ingenuity pops up in the least expected places. For instance, normally in auto plants installing a gas tank is a tedious, relatively complicated procedure. Because the tank is so heavy, a crane usually positions and holds it against the skeletal frame while employees tighten its straps and bolts from under the chassis, a strained and time-consuming maneuver that requires keeping arms up in the air for long periods of time. To allay the obvious shortcomings in this process, a group of Toyota workers designed an ingenuous device–a multi-armed piece of industrial machinery that in a single action lifts the tank in the air, places it in its crevice and reaches underneath the vehicle's skeletal body to permanently attach the tank to the chassis. The process is fast, seamless, and ergonomically safe.

President Trump applauded Toyota and Mazda's plan to set up the joint venture in the USA and create up to 4,000 jobs. Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda and Mazda CEO Masamichi Kogai celebrate a partnership between their companies to develop electric vehicles and self-driving cars and build a $1.6 billion U.S. plant. One of biggest potential job-creating bonanzas in the country, a giant new auto plant proposed by Toyota and Mazda, began in secret with a mysterious code name. Now it has become a full-blown race among states to try to reel in the $1.6-billion project that will create 4,000 good-paying direct jobs and thousands of other indirect jobs. The two Japanese automakers recently issued a blind request for proposals to states in the Midwest, mid-Atlantic and South, according to two people familiar with the plans who were not authorized to speak publicly because the process was confidential.