On a related note, I think you have to consider very carefully whether or not you can manufacture in Sweden. For some companies like Teenage Engineering, Elektron, etc.,it can make a lot of sense as your labor cost is such a small fraction of the total value of the product. But if you are in some kind of competitive market where the labor cost has the potential to erase your margins (and therefore return on the project investment) then I don't think it makes sense in this globalized economy to base in Sweden.
Where do electric vehicles fall on this spectrum? I don't know TBH. I would suspect the Model S and Model X it doesn't matter really ... but say for batteries or the Model 3 ... maybe Sweden is a bad choice. The Chinese are very smart about how they base their manufacturing. Tesla should be smarter too. You can't just get around 50 years of labor interests.
And paying workers a lot is not enough ... labor interests want more than just high pay ... there's lots of other restrictions and controls on what you can do. You have to let them control how labor works in your plants. You can't just innovate on process however you like if you are at large scale. That's how Europe works. Everything is slow and deliberate with a pace that runs over decades or sometimes generations. You can't just fire/hire/automate/reconfigure on the fly as you evolve processes. Go to China or Texas if you need that.
That has nothing to do with whether or not quality vehicles can be produced in Sweden, and whether or not the European attitude towards labor is unsustainable.
But if you are in some kind of competitive market where the labor cost has the potential to erase your margins (and therefore return on the project investment) then I don't think it makes sense in this globalized economy to base in Sweden.
Where do electric vehicles fall on this spectrum? I don't know TBH. I would suspect the Model S and Model X it doesn't matter really ... but say for batteries or the Model 3 ... maybe Sweden is a bad choice.
This is a heavily subsidized project situated by geopolitical concerns ... not a practical calculus based on economics.
Even so, even after so much government coddling, it has an uphill battle for raw materials and labor flexibility.
I wish it well as its one of the few Western projects that can rival the gigafactories of China. Its a very bad outcome for the democracies of the world if China remains the only hardware supplier for our automated and electric world.
You say decades, but we don’t know whether it works over decades. For all I know, France is famous for strikes and we’ve lost all manufacturing. Almost all of Europe lost that, and it’s not like we’re good at startups either, we make some (heavily public-funded) and not even appear near the top #100 startups.
I don’t even remember meeting a single factory worker for the last ten years. Even ports: All of Marseille went on hard-core strikes, now it’s all done in Rotterdam. France is famous for the Saint Congés Payés in 1936, well, if we didn’t dance that much, maybe the Germans wouldn’t have invaded us like a walk in a park.
We can’t say that works over decades when all industries have fled (and I say fled, like one flees a socialist country, when factory managers were subdued into a cave and beaten up until they signed personnel agreements in the 1990).
Where do electric vehicles fall on this spectrum? I don't know TBH. I would suspect the Model S and Model X it doesn't matter really ... but say for batteries or the Model 3 ... maybe Sweden is a bad choice. The Chinese are very smart about how they base their manufacturing. Tesla should be smarter too. You can't just get around 50 years of labor interests.
And paying workers a lot is not enough ... labor interests want more than just high pay ... there's lots of other restrictions and controls on what you can do. You have to let them control how labor works in your plants. You can't just innovate on process however you like if you are at large scale. That's how Europe works. Everything is slow and deliberate with a pace that runs over decades or sometimes generations. You can't just fire/hire/automate/reconfigure on the fly as you evolve processes. Go to China or Texas if you need that.