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Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

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-...

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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.

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?

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