> There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago.
The thing is, overcapacity combined with the 996 week and labor exploitation can be used to outcompete any Western company - especially the old ones, who are spread around the country. Look at the supply chain of the established (i.e. everyone but Tesla) companies... dozens of manufacturing plants, thousands of suppliers, almost zero vertical integration because "manufacturing batteries, ECUs or windshield wipers is not our core competency, let Bosch do that".
The only car manufacturer in the Western world not following that is Tesla. They have only very few, but very large factories that vertically integrate as much as possible on site, which not only gives them the advantage of cutting out the middlemen and their profit margin but also allows for much, much faster iteration cycles when everything is done in-house with no bureaucratic bullshit associated with change requests.
Typically, a car model, its design and parts are fixed for around 2-5 years after the prototype manufacturing run, no changes are possible at all outside of maybe the software, unless the design change is necessary to meet regulatory compliance or if it's something horribly defective. Then the model gets a "rebrush" integrating a few changes, which lives on for another 2-3 years, and then a fully new iteration crops up. Tesla (and SpaceX) in contrast, they do iteration times of weeks.
The disadvantage of that model is of course spare parts logistics and repair training, because holding stock for hundreds of subvariants and iterations is all but impossible, and that shows in every statistic for Tesla's average body shop waiting time.
And to come back to China's automotive sector - they're copying that model of iterative speed just as well. We've seen them come from piles of junk barely roadworthy (or not road-legal in Europe at all) a few years ago to be able to fight heads-on with the European car giants.
Tesla may be better than traditional auto companies, however it is not the wonder people talk about. They take years to get a car ready, WHEN they can do it. Think about the Cyber Roadster and the long iterations to the Cyber Truck.
Vertical integration, or a company claiming to take ownership of its supply chain, needs the democratic miracle that is exclusive security of supplies and their logistical distribution. No American company is ever going to militarily secure natural resources or a nanostate territory for its profits. And that's why all American companies (or any traditional, humanist company) will fail to achieve profits which ensure business survival.
Don't ever go long on an investment in the democratic military-industrial complex, surely. Elon Musk's Tesla and SpaceX are like baby boomers disguising themselves as healthy young kids of the future. Don't be fooled or tempted by the likely spiked Kool-Aid drink. Partaking in the ideology of techno-commercialist futurism will yield a negative return on investment. As the conceptual dynamics of optimal manufacturing methods' soteriology, looked at through democratic aspirations, is nothing but booby trapped thinking. In other words, much more blunt words, Tesla's theoretical economics and strategy is a wannabe Mark Zuckerberg, especially when there's an impending giant rug pull in the investment arena.
thats a whole bunch of handwaving without any fact nor supported argument
Everything rationally dismissive of ineffective economics and technology always appears negligent in scientific duties. But I'm actually monitoring the situation with great attention and caution. Because this is a global context I'm referring to. Which the soteriological expectations of populist manufacturing science and also optimal operations research have botched, as part of a normally occurring natural selection that wants to purge away all unmotivated and unskilled students of economics at the Malthusian cliff limits that we're presently at.
As long as your side of the discussion hasn't loaded the debate with propaganda-rich religious expectations like the modern implementation of capitalism being on the road to perfection, some sort of leftist-progressive singularity possible with enough faith based endorsement and mere belief, then I'm willing to have an argument founded on facts. Otherwise, your sociopolitically biased school of economics will have to forever deal with me presenting grounds for arguments as thoughtless speculation, due to the skewed perspective your political incentives create. In other words, I have already given basic facts from which tentative socioeconomic engineering arguments can be made. Namely that liberal democracy's military-industrial complex is a poor attempt at satisfying the requirement for both secure and intelligent domestic commerce.
It's actually not rocket science: it's more like a real time strategy game like Command and Conquer. Because what base building ever occurs without an area being violently secured from enemy ganks and such first? And, abstracting from this illustration, unless Elon Musk plans to form a private military company for his Tesla and Space X ventures like a proper cyberpunk megacorporation character, we shouldn't expect actually competent or pure vertical business integration. Instead, we should be expecting a ghetto version of what capitalism truly is. Because the best players, our wealthy and powerful billionaires, are not really wealthy and powerful, if you look closely at what capitalism means and what it means without semantically corrupting political lobbyists like Keynesian economics, supply and demand formulations, and just horribly ineffective fascist socialism high school type proposals.