Name: ABB IRB 6710
Brand: ABB Robotics

Who's exposed

Jobs in the threat radius

automotive spot welder (body shop)
stamping press tender
foundry die-cast machine operator
palletizer
CNC machine tender
riveting and flow-drilling operator

Deployment status

Shipping, and already installed at volume. Volvo Cars ordered more than 1,300 ABB robots and functional packages for its next-generation EVs, with deployment beginning in 2024 at Torslanda in Sweden and Daqing in China; The Robot Report names the IRB 6710, 6720 and 6730 as the models involved, doing spot welding, riveting, dispensing, flow drilling and ultrasonic weld inspection. ABB's own release describes the order without listing model numbers, so the model attribution rests on the trade-press account rather than the manufacturer. Beyond Volvo we found no other publicly named customer, plant or unit count for this family — ABB's later coverage is launch and demo-cell material. Division-level figures are the firmer evidence: ABB Robotics turned over $2.279bn in 2024, down from $2.452bn in 2023. In October 2025 ABB agreed to sell the entire robotics division to SoftBank Group at a $5.375bn enterprise value, cancelling a previously announced spin-off; the European Commission cleared it in March 2026, and as of ABB's Q2 2026 report on July 16, 2026 the deal had still not closed, with completion expected in the second half of 2026.

When this hits the labor market

Already done, and that is the point of carrying this entry. A 210 kg arm on a body-in-white line is not a coming threat to spot welders; it is the reason the line looks the way it does. The near-term movement is at the margin: ABB claims up to 20% lower energy use and pose repeatability of 0.03 mm against the previous generation, and improvements of that kind extend robot reach into work that was still manual because the old machines were too imprecise or too costly to run. Over 1-3 years that means retrofit rather than greenfield displacement — plants replacing IRB 6700-era cells with denser, faster ones and staffing the replacement line with fewer people than the old one. Over 3-5 years the variable to watch is not the hardware but the ownership: SoftBank is buying this division explicitly to fuse it with AI, and if that produces arms that can be reprogrammed by demonstration rather than by a robotics engineer, the economic floor for automating a small-batch task drops sharply. That would open up the high-mix, low-volume work that has so far been too expensive to automate — which is where a great deal of remaining manual machine tending lives.

The arm that replaced the arm we retired

This catalog carried exactly one ABB robot, the IRB 6700, and last week it went to discontinued — ABB has phased it out of production, with service and spares continuing. That left the catalog with no live entry from one of the four companies that built the modern factory floor. This is the fix, and it is also the more interesting machine.

The IRB 6710 is the volume workhorse of the family that succeeded the 6700: four models, 22 variants between them, 150 to 310 kg of payload across the range and 175 to 210 kg on the 6710 itself. It reaches just under three metres, weighs about 1,150 kg, and holds position to within four hundredths of a millimetre.

Where it already works

Volvo Cars is the one deployment anyone has put a number to: more than 1,300 ABB robots for its next-generation electric cars, going into Torslanda and Daqing from 2024, welding and riveting and drilling car bodies. Trade press identifies the 6710, 6720 and 6730 as the models in that order; ABB’s own announcement never names them. We looked hard for a second named customer and did not find one, which is worth stating plainly rather than papering over — large industrial arms sell through integrators, and integrators do not issue press releases.

What ABB does disclose is the shape of the business, and it is not a growth story. Robotics revenue fell from $2.45bn in 2023 to $2.28bn in 2024. In October 2025 ABB stopped trying to fix that and sold the division outright to SoftBank for $5.375bn, abandoning the stock-market listing it had announced six months earlier. Brussels approved the sale in March 2026. It had still not closed when ABB reported in July.

Why we care for LostJobs

Humanoids get the coverage; this is the machine that actually took the jobs. There were 4.66 million industrial robots working worldwide at the last count, and 542,000 more went in during 2024 alone. Against that, US welders are projected to grow 2% through 2035 — slower than average, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics noting in its own outlook that factory automation may hold demand down. Metal and plastic machine workers are projected to shrink 3%.

So the honest framing for anyone in a body shop or a press room is not that a robot is coming for the job. It is that the robot has been there for thirty years, and each generation quietly moves the line a little further. The 6710 is roughly a fifth more energy-efficient and considerably more precise than what it replaces, and precision is what decides whether a task stays manual.

The thing to watch now is who owns it. SoftBank did not pay $5.375bn for welding arms; Masayoshi Son bought them to put AI inside, alongside AutoStore, Agile Robots and Skild AI. The arms are already good enough. What has kept small-batch work in human hands is the cost of the engineer who programs them — and that is precisely the cost this acquisition is aimed at.