Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com