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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

This looks cool.

> Steph and I have a history of working...

I have so many questions, since you are experienced.

Do you think there should be import tariffs on Chinese made EVs?

I know your gut is telling you, don't answer this question, but that is like, the biggest and most important story in autos manufacturing, no? It would be like saying, if cars were extremely cheap, so that everyone could have one, the manufacturing story for free cars must already be sufficient, and so there isn't much demand for innovation to make things cheaper. But in real life, the thing that makes cars cheap or expensive is a law, which could disappear with a stroke of a pen, so it's interesting to get your POV.

> On the backend we’re generating...

OpenAI, Anthropic, Stability, etc. have already authored 3D model to synthetic data pipelines - why won't they do this one?

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I'll answer in reverse order.

Making synthetic data from a 3D model is really nothing too special - it's just a tiny subset of what video game engine does. But there's one extra step required for defect detection: you need to think about where the defects occur (and where the non-defect witness marks occur) and simulate those. Like any startup our biggest advantage here over the big companies is we move fast and customers usually like us. Our second biggest advantage: defect detection just isn't sexy, so it's not top of mind for most folks.

I think yes there probably should be tariffs on Chinese EVs (we're pretty big on on-shore manufacturing) but that's essentially a crutch. We'll need a lot of automation and design work to push down US-made EV cost to be competitive. If we want electrification to increase and onshoring to occur we've gotta bring prices down to something folks can easily buy that solves their problems.

> We'll need a lot of automation and design work to push down US-made EV cost to be competitive.

What kind of automation and design work would "push down US-made EV costs" more than corresponding automation and design work in China?

Do you see what I mean? Technology doesn't change the relative costs, which matter, even if it changes the absolute costs, which don't.

> Do you see what I mean? Technology doesn't change the relative costs, which matter, even if it changes the absolute costs, which don't.

I get what you're saying, and I somewhat agree. But I think it does leave out the desire some consumers have to purchase domestic. For example, I might be willing to buy a domestically made vehicle if the price is under $25K even if it's more than a similar vehicle made overseas. But if the price is over that, I'm going with the cheaper import.

The idea of the domestically manufactured vehicle is just that, an idea.

There's the fiction of quota and part manifests.

Then there's the reality that, well I assemble a thousand parts in China into one "part" then I import that one "part."

There are a ton of people employed by the autos industry in the US but that's so broad. It basically means there are a ton of people employed by organizing our life around cars. While some are involved in some kind of manufacturing, relative to the amount of manufacturing and manpower in China, it is small.

So every way you look at domestic, it seems less and less like it really means "domestic," and more and more like it's a form of vague but powerful storytelling.

I don't think it's good for anyone to be so wedded to storytelling. And anyway, you could try e-biking in weather, it's fine, sometimes it's even fun, and then suddenly you're like, well do I need more than the occasional rented car?

That's a fair point. Personally, I don't want a car at all but it's highly impractical for me not to have one where I live. I didn't own a car until my 30s and before that I biked or took the bus everywhere. However, where I am now public transit is severely lacking and the weather is often not conducive to biking.

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