41–50 of 449 posts
Why should a GIGA factory be located near the airport and in a city ? A factory meant to mass produce something should be somewhere the land is cheap should not it be ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Berlin is about 230 km (140 miles) away from Wolfsburg, where Volkswagen is located. Pretty sure there is infrastructure and are suppliers nearby.
Talent. It's why you see clustering of industries.
https://www.thelocal.de/20150924/what-the-vw-scandal-means-f...
Germany is the home of Mercedes, BMW, and VW (which owns Porsche and Audi and is one of the largest car manufacturers in the world). Their economy is very dependent on the auto industry. They are also home to many automotive suppliers including bosch and kuka. They are also one of the largest markets in Europe.
So yeh it's all these reasons: logistics, infrastructure, talent. Plus they need German's to think of Tesla as a local brand. Imagine if Tesla is gutting market share from these other companies and they were in another country. It would engender resentment.
Plus Berlin is a cool city :-)
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21517549
Good strategy from Treelon overall. You'll have Tesla producing cars and employing thousands of workers in the U.S, China & Germany so that no one would stifle the company's path towards autonomous EV's. This will produce pressure on Europe to ease for instance the AI regulations and basically removed Customs tax from many other countries because Tesla can send the cars from three different locations. I just don't un…
ROI may be? the market size in Israel is not as big in other countries, so it makes sense to target bigger audience first. Also does Israel have any good local EV manufacturers that can give Tesla any competition?
Why, comma, you say that as if building a car outside of Germany and selling it inside of Germany would face some sort of unfair obstacles, rather than being a straightforward and painless process as it ought.
Good strategy from Treelon overall. You'll have Tesla producing cars and employing thousands of workers in the U.S, China & Germany so that no one would stifle the company's path towards autonomous EV's. This will produce pressure on Europe to ease for instance the AI regulations and basically removed Customs tax from many other countries because Tesla can send the cars from three different locations. I just don't un…
It sounds likey they've been hiring in Israel. Maybe that will change soon.
German labour laws are very well suited plus there labour pool of qualified people is also very large.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that most automotive talent is clustered in the south of Germany (greater Stuttgart and greater Munich), not in Berlin. If you do a quick job search, those places have the most jobs in Auto and also the highest wages.
Berlin has a very large tech industry, a lower cost of living, and lower wages.
For the US it usually means some successful SV FAANG type software company.
For Germany it's usually some successful hardware engineering company (Siemens, Bosch, Mercedes, Arri, Infineon, Continental etc.). Those companies can afford to pay the equivalent of FAANG wages in Germany albeit at a smaller scale.
Southern Germany has more experience and talent in the latter while Berlin has more software startups and web devs, similar to the former.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are the temperatures in Israel? I could imagine the summers get too hot for Tesla to guarantee battery performance?
Way colder than in Nevada. And also they already have them in Jordan next to us so that's not the culprit.
They obviously needed to get one built in Europe sooner rather than later to boost marketshare there and stay ahead of demand without needing to ship from China or the US, but why Berlin? Does anyone know if they got subsidies out of it?
Germany is a very stable robust economy that might be their #1 'export source' - there's a lot of related knowledge - and in a 'cramped Europe' - the Berlin area is wide open.
FYI Berlin has 'wide avenue streets' which are totally unlike most other European places, sometimes it feels like Los Angeles and not Europe.
It might have been possible to go to Czech/Poland but there are just a large number of 'little things' that can go wrong over there, issues best left to those who know and operate the market well.
Compound this with the probable politics of the game and it makes sense.
In a way it's the most obvious choice.