Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

The reason Tesla is in Fremont is not for proximity to Silicon Valley, which has not benefited Tesla in any way. They are in Fremont because they could move into an already-built Toyota assembly plant and hire abundant local autoworkers.

View on HN

For those not aware, the plant used to be called NUMMI which was a joint venture between Toyota and GM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI). There had been an GM plant there since the 60s, many Corollas were built there for the CA market. Many things about NUMMI were very interesting but eventually GM went bankrupt and Toyota moved Corolla production elsewhere.

There was a good This American Life episode about the NUMMI plant https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

Close proximity to a large volume of people with $100k salaries and who strongly signal that they value reducing their carbon footprint was not factored in when he first started selling premium electric vehicles nearby? That's an interesting hypothesis.

There’s no reason to have a factory there. It’s not as if Apple manufacturers iPhone in California, or anywhere near it.

Hm, I can’t claim to be an expert, but my first thought is that the logistics of transporting thousands of iPhones is very, very different from transporting thousands of cars.

It is. You can build parts of a car anywhere in the world. But because the cost of shipment will be so high you have to build the car in the same part of your continent if not the same country or state.

There was no significant shipping/logistics advantage to manufacturing cars in Australia.

After 30 years of increasing imports when government subsidies ended so did local manufacturing. Most cars sold in the country are now built in Thailand, South Africa, Japan, Europe and increasingly the USA - without any kind of huge price jump over locally produced vehicles.

Likewise no expert, but at the price point cars sell at, I doubt the cost of shipping vehicles was a primary concern. Consider that Australian vehicles are made everywhere except Australia, even commodity cars, and Australia is notoriously expensive to ship to.

We even had factories here, but they were too expensive to run. It's cheaper to ship them from overseas.

Do people buying the cars really care where it was made? I'm sure Tesla would have sold just as many if they were made in say, North Carolina.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com