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Comment by leobg | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful. Sounds like they’re doing with pens in Maryville what Tesla did with the Model S in Fremont.

> Peterson […] found that the factory could use robots to do an increasing share of the packing. But he decided to keep the employees who knew the company and convert their jobs to roles such as automation engineering. In that case, an employee would fix a robot instead of packing a box. Peterson estimates the average wage at its Maryville facility, which employs 550 staff, has gone up some 50% over the past five years—without a change in head count.

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Isn't Tesla Fremont widely considered a failure?

The Model S was an expensive car with a bad reputation for quality. Then in 2017 they introduced the Model 3 and their "Alien Dreadnought" automation. That significantly delayed mass production of the Model 3 and almost bankrupted the company.

Tesla turned things around by building a factory in Shanghai, and learning how to build a car from the Chinese. They then basically copied the Shanghai factory to Germany.

no, that factory makes a ton of cars. had teething problems like every other car factory in the world. source: my significant other worked at tesla for a decade, now at Rivian.

What's are your metrics of "failure"?

Fremont factory has produced 3 million cars, in a manufacturing hostile/barren California (and thus Nevada gigafactory), covering ~50% cars produced yearly. [1]

> Tesla turned things around by building a factory in Shanghai

~50% are made in China, with ~50% of those being sold in China (well until this year), avoiding significant Chinese tariffs. [2]

[1] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-fremont-nevada-3-million/

[2] Nice historic graph, including poor sales this year. https://carnewschina.com/2025/03/10/tesla-exports-3911-cars-...

Sure, and the vast majority of those 3 million were cars were built after they disassembled their "alien dreadnought" factory and Tom Zhu et al went to China to learn how to build cars, and brought that knowledge back.

And all the other US manufactures originally learned how from Japan.

Some of their original manufacturing ideas didn't work out, and they iterated to better processes. That's not failure. That's plain old boring fucking engineering.

Do you think China is bad or something? Everyone, especially in the industry, knows that there's more manufacturing expertise in China, because that's where the vast majority of the world has outsourced their manufacturing (and pollution), for decades, and the forseable future. Just ask the politicians, who have been singing "manufacturing is never coming back to the US" for decades, to justify their policies that prevent people from manufacturing in their backyards.

> And all the other US manufactures originally learned how from Japan.

Who learned Kaizen from an American.

And the good ideas go round and round.

If your goal is proving inherent superiority of one group over another, you've already failed.

Good ideas are useful to successful people.

> If your goal is proving inherent superiority of one group over another, you've already failed.

It is not, why would you think such a thing?

Just wanted to point out that California, for being barren of manufacturing and hostile to it, is actually the largest manufacturer in the USA in terms of people employed and economic output.

https://nam.org/mfgdata/

> in terms of people employed

It's also multiple times the size of most states. Per capita is probably a better metric, where it ranks 34th.

> and economic output

I can't find the raw data, so I'm not sure what they're counting. It says "computer and electronics" is highest, which is 2x above chemical, which makes me very suspicious. I work in manufacturing that happens 100% in China. Would I be counted? Are they counting AMD or Qualcomm, where their chips are manufactured in Taiwan (or Arizona)? How much of this is military/government contracts (which aren't subject to many of these pressures)?

That's because it's so much more populous. That link shows that CA is 34th in % of workers employed in manufacturing (similar to TX and MA). CA is tops in many, many absolute measures because it has almost 10M more people than the next state, TX.

Is the argument then that it's better to manufacture in Rhode Island than it is Los Angeles?

If you're an individual looking for a manufacturing job, then yes, absolutely.

Just that "largest manufacturing state in the USA" isn't a very helpful measure, since the largest state in basically every measure of development. This tweet shows the same problem with absolute numbers giving misleading appearances: https://x.com/xkcd/status/1339348000750104576:

  There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than NY, more Trump voters in NY than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.

There's network effects in manufacturing and not so much in presidential voting, size actually does matter. It's one of the things people always rave about with China.

I'm somewhat surprised that the other response to me thinks the market that is ~1/10 the size of the other is obviously a better place to work. I guess cost of living can have a big impact.

That was a Musk problem. His two lead manufacturing execs quit when he wanted the plant automation installed without the usual factory testing, to cut the time to production in half. It didn't work. For a while, Tesla Fremont had a huge work force working in tents in the parking lot. Cost per car went up and quality went down, but cars came out.

Tesla still seems to have quality problems, and never delivered the promised $30,000 car. Although BYD did.

Chevy did, with the Bolt.

> Although BYD did

I don't believe this is true, due to the < $30k cars not meeting US safety regulations.

They're meeting the EU regulations and selling the entry level electric for €23k in Germany.

I can't attribute their lack of presence in the US market to them when their cars face a 100% tariff.

Someone from BYD remarked that a current goal is to dominate in the 100+ countries that don't have a domestic auto industry. They can afford to wait out countries with tariff barriers. Meanwhile, BYD has a bus factory in California. Stanford's in-house bus line uses them.

> Tesla turned things around by building a factory in Shanghai, and learning how to build a car from the Chinese.

That has very little to do with Fremont the facility.

The Fremont facility is where Toyota showed GM how to build cars properly--an expensive lesson which GM and Tesla both decided to ignore.

I would suggest that the real "innovation" of Tesla's foreign factories was simply getting them far enough away from Musk that he couldn't easily screw them up ...

>Sounds like they’re doing with pens in Maryville what Tesla did with the Model S in Fremont.

Hopefully without all the illegal toxic waste dumping, forcing people to work during quarantine and ignoring crazy homophobic / racist environments and suing/harassing whistleblowers. The Fremont plant is not something to strive for in any way other than "it's a plant that manufactures things in the US".

corporations doing retraining, what a concept

So a business used automation to decrease COGS? Doesn’t sound noteworthy.

The US has (near as I can tell) forgotten even the basics.

Like a coder writing code (by hand!) to make things more efficient somewhere, also seems noteworthy now.

I don’t know what forgotten the basics means, but US manufacturing output in terms of USD is quite high relative to its population:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing

17%+ with 4% of the world’s population means there must be some kind of automation expertise.

The US has steadily gone ‘up market’, and automated heavily in most industries.

Skills like manual machining, and manual welding have gotten much harder to find and a smaller portion of the economy.

As to if that matters?

What Sharpie did in the US is super simple table stakes for manufacturing anywhere, it’s only notable because it can be used in a larger political story.

I really despise this talking point.

Before Boeing had its epic fails, usually they were talked about as the prototypical “we make airplanes instead of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong” example.

But it neglected to show that Boeing outsourced a huge portion of the actual skillsets needed to build each individual component.

There is utterly no comparison to $100B of airplanes being sold a year vs. $100B of various goods of diverse complexity and quality in terms of impact to the economy, workers, manufacturing knowledge, and even national security.

If we had simply gone up market and retained useful engineering and manufacturing skills/talent pipeline/capacity I’d totally agree. But we have not. Not to any appreciable degree by any metric other than numbers on a spreadsheet.

We are talking about this in a thread discussing manufacturing markers in the US as some sort of large win. If this article had been discussed in these contexts 60 years ago it’d have been seen as utterly pathetic.

Measuring in currency can be rather misleading. Consider one country that manufactures a billion dollars of diamonds per year, and another that manufactures half a billion dollars of steel per year.

Which has more industrial might? You need to compare what's actually being made and how much to draw conclusions.

What's noteworthy is that an American company didn't immediately fire its employees to make way for the cheapest experts it could find for the new roles. Instead, they retrained their existing people for the new roles.

It's a small thing but it's these little victories that give me a much needed ethics boner.

doubt it's some altruistics thing, likely retraining existing box packers were cheaper than hiring tech grads

Seems like you and Adam Smith put different weights on the value of altruism.

> It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

No one implied they were doing this altruistically. It's noteworthy simply because they bucked the conventional wisdom (offshore everything, US manufacturing cannot compete etc etc) and succeeded financially.

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