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.
Tesla still seems to have quality problems, and never delivered the promised $30,000 car. Although BYD did.
> Although BYD did
I don't believe this is true, due to the < $30k cars not meeting US safety regulations.
I can't attribute their lack of presence in the US market to them when their cars face a 100% tariff.
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-...
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.
Who learned Kaizen from an American.
Good ideas are useful to successful people.
It is not, why would you think such a thing?
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)?
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.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 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 ...