https://www.forbes.com/wheels/news/kia-hyundai-car-thefts-se...

Every manufacturer has got a story at this point.

Not to devil's advocate, but it's tough to prove a negative. All we can say for sure is that they've not been caught yet.

Georgia and South Carolina tend to be the poorest states. The Poverty rate is around 14.5% for both. Compare that to California where the poverty rate is 12.5%. Though the poverty rate is lower, California has more people in poverty than Georgia and South Carolina combined. Anyway, using the word "impoverished" is grossly misleading.

Problem is, it's not paying off - the state isn't benefiting overall from it, and as soon as they stop providing these sweetheart tax breaks and freebies, comopanies will pull up and move to the next state willing to do so

It's more likely that southern states are willing to throw huge incentive packages to these manufacturers. Probably not so much on the coasts or the northern states.

Also, unions are less common in the south; those states tend to be right-to-work states.

Finally, you used the word "impoverished", which is ridiculous. But wages are lower in the south so that is probably another reason.

Toyota has been good to the area.

Off topic, but is there a popular tech meetup in the state? Moved back a year and some change ago and would love to get more involved.

Not a Tesla fanboy (I'm turning mine in for a Rivian), but the OP wasn't saying this, not sure how you got that conclusion. They are saying for a car company they are (1) way behind and (2) any investments they are making won't reach fruition for years, nor likely make a dent in the industry.

Outside of MB and the Chinese EVs, the design of Tesla motors is far superior. Their build quality and finishing is awful however - something the traditional players do really well.

Telsa had to deploy their capital very efficiently in a capital intensive industry. Say their bet on the Shanghai factory, despite obvious IP leak risks and spawning deadly competitors like BYD, was their only choice to reach scale at a low cost.

the world is not only southern California and Sweden.

The same infrastructure they need for everything else in their life. I bet they have way better access to electricity than they do hydrogen. Or even gasoline, frankly. Solar panels are cheap.

It's already bad to have any sector that is protected from competition (foreign or domestic), why look to expand it?

Economics, Neoliberalism is dead. The pandemic killed it. Policy makers well understand the economy can tolerate a lot of disruption.

Politics: Dispossessed voters turning to fascism has sharpened politicians and sane business leaders minds.

Global Warning and new Tech: Solar, wind, batteries, and the need to faze out fossil fuels creates risks and opportunities. Risks will be born by those that try business as usual.

Increased automation: Low skilled dirt cheap labor is less important than it was 20-30 years ago. That changes the balance point between low cost offshored labor and the pain in the ass that offshoring is.

I think you need a blend of solar for that

https://www.energybot.com/electricity-rates/

The cheapest in the country is $0.1122/kWh in Utah. The average is $0.17/kWh

The real point is that Tesla has been driving prices lower than other manufacturers are willing to stomach, and that resistance to price matching shows up as cars sitting on lots.

Indeed. China had even more examples, but overall they found the winners and boosted them. The US instead defunded and now China produces 80% of all solar panels in the world. It's similar for VC firm, for example, they'll invest in 10 companies and expect only a couple to be profitable.

> If you look at growth charts in US factory capital it started spiking just before the signing of CHIPS act which was pitched to congress in 2019, which was a bipartisan effort seeded from the Trump admin.

Do you have those charts available? I was initially going to give a commendation for pointing out the Trump's administration's role in the Chips act, but... the Chips act was passed in late 2022! "The bill was signed into law by President Joe Biden on August 9, 2022." [1]

What's more, while the CHIPS act was initially bi-partisan, it passed in a relatively partisan vote: "Every senator in the Senate Democratic Caucus except for Bernie Sanders voted in favor of passing the CHIPS Act, and they were joined by seventeen Republican senators" [1]

Bottom line, seems like this bill was presented to Senators* in 2019 and then took time to work its way through Congress. It does not seem the Trump admin had much to do with this (I would more says the CHIPS act was seeded from an initial bipartisan effort that originated in the Senate; there's no mention I see that the executive branch had anything to do with it in 2019; if anything, it seems that congress of 2019 and whatever role the executive had at the time both _failed_ to get the CHIPS act through; it was the next congress that got it done in 2022)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act

* I'm not entirely sure if 'presented' to senators means there was an executive branch role. My reading of the wiki article is that it sounds like the original 2019 bill originated in the Senate. I just don't see anything that mentions the executive's role in 2019 or 2020.

But it is true that the CHIP had bipartisan support, but the ones who supported it were not MAGA types, but people like McConnell.

https://www.orrick.com/en/Insights/2022/11/Section-45X-of-th...

More generally, the IRA and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Investment_and_...

https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/manufactur...

There's also the CHIPS act.

By the way, anyone active in the green tech space knows that the IRA has been an absolute game-changer.

This was something the President activity campaigned on (Build Back Better), pushed through Congress, and signed into law as The Inflation Reduction Act.

While it did little to reduce inflation (outside of medicine), it was a massive win for people who wanted more investment in clean power generation, more funds for the ACA, lower drug prices, and higher taxes on certain corporate entities.

These empty promises are how we ended up electing Trump the first time and it's virtually guaranteeing that we'll elect him a second time.

Rural Kentucky is in horrible shape and a lot of people here were placing hope in this, much like they have so many other empty promises from their leaders, so at least stop acting surprised when the consequences show themselves.

Still, in my eyes that only makes it more intriguing how they bridge the cultural differences, since whatever they are doing seems to be working.

I was just quoting what the documentary said. There was so much contention between the management and the workers in the American glass factory featured in the documentary. In the end, the management hosted a competition between the American workers and the Chinese workers. Chinese workers won with a big margin.

kWh makes sense if your goal is to stimulate US battery production but I really wish there were an all-electric range requirement, A hypothetical 6.8kWh Prius Prime would get more range that the 21kWh Wrangler 4xe.

https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/credits-for-new-clean...

Tesla in Sparks NV, BMW in Greer SC, or Mercedes in Alabama and SC? It seems like those have more than paid for themselves by now. In at least one of those cases, they've had huge regional impacts.

AFAIK - they got $3B in FUTURE benefits - of which none came to fruition.

Foxconn delivered nothing and also got almost nothing (~1% of that $3B).

Yeah - it was a dumb political stunt - and it unfortunately worked for the time. But it wasn't the massive financial disaster people think it was.

When everyone else is subsidizing you have to subsidize too or you lose.

No one at these Toyota facilities has an appetite for that. The benefits package and overall lifestyle for a TMMK worker is quite nice compared to the average person in the Lexington metro and the jobs are competitive.

Perhaps ironically, when I was in school, the biggest issue was finding engineers that would accept the pay which was generally lower than guys on the floor.