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Post by FD1000 on Jan 6, 2021 19:37:59 GMT
After reading the other post about EU-China deal I was thinking about Tesla. China opened the door really wide for Musk. Of course, they did. Musk looks at his own bubble while China looks long term. Within several years, China will make much better EV vehicles than they have today and cheaper than Tesla, after all, they will get or steal Tesla secrets. ( link) "About 30% of the parts now used by the Shanghai facility are sourced locally, and the company plans to increase that to 100% by the end of 2020, said Song, the manufacturing director, on Dec. 30." So, Tesla gets the edge in the next 5-10 years but what would happen after that? Exactly what happened to electronics and pharma products. |
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Post by chang on Jan 7, 2021 1:13:29 GMT
I can go to the Silom night market here in Bangkok any time and buy a Rolex, Omega, Breitling, IWC or Patek Philippe watch for $35. Made in China, they look so good that sometimes only an expert can tell them apart. But take my word for it, they're no substitute for the real thing.
Maybe Teslas are like Rolexes; nothing can touch the original. One thing about Elon Musk I think I can safely say: don't underestimate him.
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Post by rhythmmethod on Jan 7, 2021 1:36:00 GMT
I can go to the Silom night market here in Bangkok any time and buy a Rolex, Omega, Breitling, IWC or Patek Philippe watch for $35. Made in China, they look so good that sometimes only an expert can tell them apart. But take my word for it, they're no substitute for the real thing. Maybe Teslas are like Rolexes; nothing can touch the original. One thing about Elon Musk I think I can safely say: don't underestimate him.Yep. He'll own the solar system before this is over. He is a TRUE BIG BANGER!! |
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Post by FD1000 on Jan 7, 2021 4:21:51 GMT
I can go to the Silom night market here in Bangkok any time and buy a Rolex, Omega, Breitling, IWC or Patek Philippe watch for $35. Made in China, they look so good that sometimes only an expert can tell them apart. But take my word for it, they're no substitute for the real thing. Maybe Teslas are like Rolexes; nothing can touch the original. One thing about Elon Musk I think I can safely say: don't underestimate him. These are all gadgets. Instead of iPhone I bought Motorola for a fraction of the price because it does 80%, and why it's worth it. Vehicles are similar, Lexus ES 250 vs Toyota Camry ( link). Is Lexus worth 50% more? of course not. But I can compare Camry to Mercedes C-class which is smaller and more expensive than the Lexus? is it worth it? nope, Mercedes has worse reliability too. So, you pay for a name and show off. Why they sell more Camrys than the others because the price is much cheaper and it does everything else pretty good and sometimes better. If a Chinese manufacture will offer 80% of Tesla capability for 60-70% of the price game is over, price matters to most customers. BTW, I would gladly buy a fake Rolex. Last time I was in Bangkok was 1985. They were selling fake Lacoste shirts on the street for $10 (real price was about $22), after a lot of haggling I bought 20 shirts for $30. I used 10 shirts for presents and I wore the others for over 10 years. I have friends that bought suits tailors from a magazine for 20% of the cost. Please do ahead and buy me shirts  |
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Post by chang on Jan 7, 2021 5:02:25 GMT
You missed my point. A $30 Bangkok Rolex works for about 48 hours; a week at the outside. After that, it's only good as a paperweight, worth maybe $1. Point is: the fake Rolex isn't worth squat.
Will the Chinese EV car be like your Toyota-Mercedes comparison? Or will it be the Bangkok Rolex?
Neither one of us can answer that question. Only time will tell.
Second point, and I don't know how to re-phrase it better: don't underestimate Elon Musk.
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Post by FD1000 on Jan 7, 2021 5:17:20 GMT
China doesn't have global vehicles, I thought by now they would. They are more complicated to make.
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Post by Norbert on Jan 7, 2021 7:01:37 GMT
The Germans are astounded that Tesla's market cap is now higher than VW +BMW + Mercedes. They also don't understand why Big Tech is mostly made in America.
So, Merkel is pushing her China deal to support the auto industry. As with her 2015 decision to open the nation's borders, she only thinks short term. It's a disaster for Germany and Europe.
It's true that Elon Musk should never be underestimated, but China's mercantilist policies continue to damage Western economies. Lots of people just look at price and ignore quality.
N.
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Post by FD1000 on Jan 7, 2021 19:48:04 GMT
The Germans are astounded that Tesla's market cap is now higher than VW +BMW + Mercedes. They also don't understand why Big Tech is mostly made in America. So, Merkel is pushing her China deal to support the auto industry. As with her 2015 decision to open the nation's borders, she only thinks short term. It's a disaster for Germany and Europe. It's true that Elon Musk should never be underestimated, but China's mercantilist policies continue to damage Western economies. Lots of people just look at price and ignore quality. N. Tesla market cap is bigger than all the auto companies. Germans and Germany don't think as much outside the box. In order to be an innovator you must have the money, melting pot, crazy bold ideas and willing to fail. That's what Silicon Valley has. Israel has it too. That's why Tesla was born in CA. But Silicon Valley is unique. I worked 37 years in IT, 10 years in Israel typical companies and 27 in the USA, not in Silicon Valley, but at a typical US companies (Xerox, Home Depot, Macys, others). It was so different. In Israel, they demanded us to bring new ideas, brainstorm, nothing considered crazy, you can disagree with your managers including the CEO. In the US, don't consider new great ideas, god forbid if you disagree with your managers in any meeting. That's in a nutshell. The Germans autoworkers are unionized, Musk hates it and must win over them. Below are several parts from a good article( link) "But there’s one corner of the German economy where the lovefest feels more like a standoff: the powerful 2.3 million-member IG Metall labor union. The group is on a collision course with the billionaire that threatens to either undermine Musk’s ambitions or diminish the power of an organization that’s long had an outsize role in the country’s auto industry with its demands for better wages and shifts in strategy, backed up by the very real threat of strikes.
Musk, too, has plenty of power, experience, and especially money—in November he surpassed Bill Gates as the world’s second-richest person
The Tesla factory, Germany’s first new auto plant in two decades, promises to create as many as 40,000 jobs in eastern Germany, a region that lost most of its heavy industry during World War II and atrophied during the country’s decades of separation. It’s being built as domestic manufacturers and suppliers lay off tens of thousands of employees in anticipation of the shift to battery-powered vehicles, which require fewer parts assembled by fewer workers. The site is central to Tesla’s European growth plans and sends a signal to BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen that the U.S. upstart they long belittled or ignored has arrived on their doorstep.
Musk is no friend of organized labor. When an employee at Tesla’s plant in California in 2017 sought assistance from the United Auto Workers to unionize the site, Musk fired off an email suggesting the man was seeking to undermine the company and later hinted that organizing the factory would mean no more stock options. A judge last year reprimanded Tesla for repeatedly violating the National Labor Relations Act, a ruling the company has appealed, saying it was the result of a “smear campaign” by the union and unsupported by the facts.
For IG Metall, the concern is that Tesla will follow in the footsteps of Amazon.com Inc., which has expanded in Europe’s biggest economy without signing wage deals for its warehouse workers despite years of union-organized protests. Musk wants to run his plant like a Silicon Valley startup—luring workers with unregulated salaries and stock options and promising perks such as a “mega rave cave” party space featuring a sound system the size of a car. If he succeeds, he might well threaten IG Metall’s ability to get what it wants from other automakers.
The conflict centers on Tesla’s refusal to sign the kind of collective wage agreements that are standard in Germany. After the company ignored a letter from IG Metall seeking a dialogue, things started getting testy. At a protest in Berlin, hundreds of workers decried Tesla’s poaching of a key manager from Daimler AG. And a local union leader released a statement admonishing Musk not to view wage accords as “the work of the devil,” but rather as essential to maintaining peaceful labor relations. “It’s not good for an automobile manufacturer to be in permanent conflict with IG Metall,” says Christian Bäumler, deputy leader of a labor-affiliated faction of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party. “The union has organizational power, it has money, it has experience. It can endure a long fight.”
Despite the threat Musk’s company poses to Germany’s big automakers, his foray into the birthplace of the combustion engine may ultimately prove a blessing in disguise for an industry that can be slow to change, says Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, director of automotive research at the University of Duisburg-Essen. For unions, by contrast, there’s little upside as Musk’s arrival represents a growing peril to a model that may have run its course. “Our corporate culture tends to keep things the way they’ve always been,” Dudenhöffer says. “Musk is someone who can break that open, and that is the major opportunity here—also for the German carmakers.”Price and quality: up to a point. Making a vehicle is a complicated thing but there are many simpler electronics that China makes and are pretty good for the price. Laptops and cell phone are a good example. Below is a list of countries who make laptop and their reliability. You can see that Levono is number 2 and their prices are cheaper. Levono also make Motorola cell phones. They are cheap, reliable and excellent and what I have been using for many years. It gets "worse", I worked with IT developers around the world, the Chinese are very cheap but excellent, that is scary. Attachments:
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Post by Chahta on Jan 7, 2021 20:08:58 GMT
China may not build electric cars, but batteries, motors and other parts might be up their alley.
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Post by Capital on Jan 7, 2021 23:24:45 GMT
China may not build electric cars, but batteries, motors and other parts might be up their alley. I'm not so sure I want to be going down a dark alley with the Chinese  |
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Post by Chahta on Jan 8, 2021 0:41:32 GMT
China may not build electric cars, but batteries, motors and other parts might be up their alley. I'm not so sure I want to be going down a dark alley with the Chinese Chicken... |
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