Are Teslas any good?

[tintin]

Originally Posted by moltuae

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 bought 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.

Couldn't agree more Mark - I spend most of my working life advising clients on how they could run their businesses more effectively. Many of them offshored and/or outsourced work to cheaper locations overseas over the last two decades, and I've always advised them that that's just a short-term (and often wrong!) tactic on the road to optimising their operations, and many of them are now either using robotics and/or eliminating the unnecessary complexity instead - and in many cases bringing operations back to their UK locations

Tesla excels not only in technical expertise - leading to smarter ways of making things - but also in avoiding complexity, and both of these factors will keep them ahead of other manufacturers for years, if not decades.