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Re:China Has Whole Towns Focused on Making Electric Cars by dmix on Monday June 03, 2019 @10:22AM (#20083352)
The US does all the innovation and R&D then China's manufacturing juggernauts do the building.

This is an old pattern that's just getting more efficient and China's able to sell to it's own markets. Freeing up more human and financial capital for China to do their own R&D/entrepreneurship.

Re:China Has Whole Towns Focused on Making Electric Cars by jbay808 on Monday June 03, 2019 @11:09AM (#20083928)
How do people expect to maintain an advantage in design and engineering when they have outsourced production? Where are the younger generations going to learn the things they don't teach you in university? Isn't it a huge advantage for a designer when you are the one getting your prototypes from the factory down the street?
Re:China Has Whole Towns Focused on Making Electric Cars by dmix on Monday June 03, 2019 @11:43AM (#20084409)
The issue is more about why not than why they should.

The biggest reasons are the loss of domestic experience curves [1] to other countries when we shifted to a service based economy. The second is the hyper politicized process of even creating a factory, let alone operating one, even when you have the direct backing of the executive branch [2].

The other one (allegedly) is the idea that the local labor workforce won't want to do any of the hard/dirty jobs or can't do them cost effectively, often because 1 and 2 but other reasons. So there are higher initial costs for automation.

But otherwise there are plenty of good reasons to operate production domestically once the technical and political environment supports such a thing. Which might happen in the future, although few mainstream parties seem to actually want that to happen without their idealized or prior worldview being appeased.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-06/inside-wi...

Re:China Has Whole Towns Focused on Making Electric Cars by bluGill on Monday June 03, 2019 @12:43PM (#20085216)
What makes you think manufacturing isn't done in the US? China has a lot of cheap labor so things that are best done by cheap labor move there. (less so now as China is moving up). There is a lot of manufacturing that remains in the US, anything that benefits from automation and cheap reliable energy is best done in the US where energy is cheap and reliable and there are automation engineers.
Re:China Has Whole Towns Focused on Making Electric Cars by jbay808 on Monday June 03, 2019 @11:06PM (#20091412)
There are also automation engineers in China, and they have the significant advantage of being able to easily observe the manual processes that they need to automate!
Re:China Has Whole Towns Focused on Making Electric Cars by StreamBright on Monday June 03, 2019 @10:45AM (#20083605)
Re:China Has Whole Towns Focused on Making Electric Cars by dmix on Monday June 03, 2019 @10:54AM (#20083725)
Yep my comment mentions that.