The countries without a sea connection, or energy pipelines to such a country are having harder time getting energy. Mostly German automotive firms and their supply chain have factories and those usually have some unionization, though truly not as strong as in the Nordics, and the workers can indeed be paid with lower wages without inducing discontent.
But the striking Swedish Tesla workers aren't working in production, they're working in services. So even if Teslas would be made in Romania or Bulgaria, you still need to service them in Sweden, you won't send them to Bulgaria for service.
>of course lacking infrastructure would make it harder
What infrastructure is lacking? Poland, Czechia and especially Romania are already quite big auto manufacturing hubs.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585024/leading-car-autom...
Edit: That statistic only shows number of cars coming out the assembly lines but the automotive sector is way bigger than that. There's also OEM suppliers and parts manufacturing, including SW, that also contribute to the auto sector.
There must be some reason Tesla decided to build their massive factory in Germany?
The same reason cheaper cars are made in lower-cost countries and premium cars in high cost countries, and Tesla is still a premium car.
Tesla went to Germany because it has the best infrastructure for automotive and they're making premium cars and can afford the higher costs of building in Germany as time to market was more important for them to gain market share than reducing costs. Cost reduction comes at a later stage.
But that doesn't mean Eastern EU countries have bad infrastructure, otherwise nobody would build cars there.
If we want EVs to get cheaper to rival those from China, then either those German workers will have to accept lower wages, or the EVs will have to be made in lower labor countries. There's no free lunch.
But we still agree that they have worse infrastructure and that lower labor costs and no pesky unions didn’t seem to offset that in Tesla’s case.
> If we want EVs to get cheaper to rival those from China,
Higher tariffs would also be a perfectly reasonable solution.
Because, like I already said, Tesla had to enter the EU swinging to quickly maximize market share. And since its vehicles are all premium anyway, it could afford the higher cost of German manufacturing, but as the EV race heats up in the future moving into the lower cost segment, I'll bet you factories in the East will happen otherwise you can't have cheap EVs.
>Higher tariffs would also be a perfectly reasonable solution.
Do you want an EV future or not? Because as long as EVs stay more expensive in the EU, the average joe will keep buying ICEs, and EU EV industry will fall behind the Chinese one anyway making them uncompetitive exports. The EU car makers need to haul ass on the EV side kicking and screaming otherwise tariffs won't save them forever from going bust.
Sure, you can put tariffs on Chinese imports and tariffs already exist, but then the Chinese will do in the EU, what the Japanese did in the US: build local factories in low wage areas to build affordable cars, and still undercut the local competition.
Not at the cost of the European car industry.
> Because as long as EVs stay more expensive in the EU, the average joe will keep buying ICEs
Why would tariffs affect EV prices disproportionately more than that of ICE cars?
> US: build local factories in low wage areas to build affordable cars, and still undercut the local competition.
Which is IMHO probably thr best outcome. You’d have actual competition driving prices down but Chinese manufacturers wouldn’t have unfair advantages like when they are allowed to import cars from China.
Also US has much higher tariffs than thE EU. So I don’t think they are necessarily hurting electrification that much.
This might be the one move stupider than starting this fight, an innovator's dilemma [1] own goal.
The Nordics are a high-income EV beachhead. Tesla has best-selling cars. This entire fight is currently intrigue. The risk is it metastasising into a political crisis. What makes that crisis a crisis is it threatens those sales. Decamping--in effect, surrendering--positively nukes them.
In Hungary when driving along the Budapest-Wien railway I can often see trains full of cars on some stations waiting for their timeslot (passenger trains have priority over freight in Europe).
Why? What does it have to do with the “innovators dilemma”?
Beachhead. You’re opening a beachhead for a competitor to start small with ample margins.
They petrified when they became inflexible. Adaptability, not orthodoxy, is how challengers win.
To be clear, I don't think we'll see some pan-European labour movement against Tesla. But I do think it's becoming increasingly lucrative to take pot shots at the firm. If that starts happening in EU capitals, that's twenty-eight needless distractions to dispatch.