Western manufacturing tends to be much more automation heavy. Chinese manufactures don’t bother with buying a $100k machine that can make a car part when they can just hire 10 guys at $10k/yr to make that same part with a $50 drill press and some hand files.

It’s not that it all strictly balances out, but if we actually gave a shit we could potentially be cost competitive for a lot of price brackets, especially given the costs to move whole ass cars across the Pacific.

Bear in mind these sub $10k Chinese EVs are not something US consumers would really be interested in buying, they are basically tiny car shaped golf carts with extremely minimalist feature sets. Think ‘no audio system at’ all type interiors.

Or not subsidize oil and gas to the tune of ~$20 billion/yr and corn at $2.2 billion/yr and redirect that towards EVs.

There might be a few layers to this one. Drones are becoming a central part of strategic production and the US doesn’t really have many competitive companies manufacturing small ones at volume.

They need to force the domestic market to build up local expertise and manufacturing capacity in the event that small drones are the direction warfare ends up going more broadly.

The us defense apparatus is still on the fence about this given that their volume of use in Ukraine could be more of an aberration due to the respective industrial bases and static nature of the war. That said the numbers are insane enough that they warrant some action just in case.

The unspoken part is that unless Gabe has a very strong plan involving some sort of employee co-op, when he retires or dies the company will likely get sold by the estate to private capital which is 100x worse than being a public company.