Manufacturing was always going to be temporary in the USA. You just can't win at manufacturing cost sensitive goods when all your workers want to be highly paid.

Should have gone the Apple route - design in the USA, make in China, and use a walled garden to ensure hardware clones aren't desirable and can't run any of your apps/features.

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ZeroGravitas 2 days ago | parent [-]

Tesla makes more than half its cars in China. They are generally regarded as better in quality than the US built ones.

	▲	londons_explore 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		But they have no walled garden... They should by now have some kind of platooning feature where you press a button and it'll hook up to the Tesla car ahead of you for long distance journeys. Or a 'tesla miles club', where driving 100k miles gets you perks like free insurance, theme park tickets etc. Or something like 'free parking when you park with a friend who also has a tesla'. Basically Tesla needs the equivalent of the iMessage blue bubble lock in effect and the 'all my stuff is on iCloud it would be too hard to move to android' effect.