[moltuae]

Originally Posted by tintin

...according to Herbert Deiss, not me

https://electrek.co/2017/08/04/vw-br...in-competitor/

When Tesla originally set up shop in the San Francisco Bay Area, many thought it would be impossible to do car manufacturing in an area with one of the highest costs of living in the world. After all, Toyota and GM had tried the same with the NUMMI plant, which had failed – and Tesla ended up purchasing the factory for pennies on the dollar when Toyota was trying to get it off of their hands.

But this decision may be the secret to Tesla’s product as well. Diess stated in the interview that one of the reasons Tesla is ahead is because roughly half of the engineers at Tesla are software experts.

I think this is an interesting point.

It was once the case that manufacturing would gravitate towards poorer, developing nations. In the 70s all the cheap stuff was made in Japan. A decade or so later it was Taiwan. Now it's mainly China or sometimes places like India. Historically it seems that, from a manufacturing point of view, each nation becomes a victim of it's own success. Manufacturing creates jobs and wealth which ultimately leads to higher pay and the decline in manufacturing. If you go far enough back, even Britain once had a thriving manufacturing industry, producing textiles on a huge scale that brought wealth into the country, leading to higher standards (and costs) of living, resulting in the eventual decline of manufacturing in the country as it shifted to more economically viable areas overseas.

I always considered that fact to be an inevitable cycle of the economics of manufacturing until I watched a documentary a while ago. What the documentary showed was how robotics and automation (the very things often blamed for the loss of jobs) were potentially changing that. In manufacturing plants that have a high degree of automation, it often makes little or no difference economically where they are sited. In fact being sited in areas like Silicon Valley, where there's a high concentration of technical skills and knowledge, can be an advantage, despite the much higher cost of living.