San Gottardo

The situation for UK passport holders at LHR is usually much much better: whilst there can be very long lines at the UK/Europe in-person control line, there are just so many more automatic gates that UK and European citizens can use, which make waits for the automatic gates much shorter. To contrast things a bit: LHR Terminal 5 has about twenty or so. London City airport with its 4.3 million pax per year has four automated gates. At Paris CDG with I don't know how many more pax (definitely more than 4.3 million, which would present only 6.5% of CDG's total) there are three. And bear in mind whilst LHR T5 only needs to process London-bound passengers, CDG has both Paris-bound passengers and those continuing to a Schengen destination. The LHR gates are often plagued with bugs and maintenance issues, the overall number of available gates is still much higher than CDG, where availability rates vary between 0% and 66%.

Frankfurt as well has many more automatic gates, and I have never seen people lining up to use them. And I've never seen them down, they just seem to work (although I do not assume that this means 100% reliability, just more than in the UK and France).

Thus: the situation is much better for UK and German passport holders (and those with a biometric passport from other EU/EEA/CH countries) simply because there are more automatic gates.

The system in the UK is a French one. It is by Automatic Systems, which is a company of the Bollore Group (which may explain its Renault-like low reliability?).

But other countries seem to have systems that work well. UAE, Qatar, Germany...