Tesla planning a Chinese manufacturing plant in the "next 3-4 years"

Good lord, the comments on that article are awful.

But interesting news, thanks for sharing.

Does Musk really mean what he says, or does he just say something to please his audience ?

Are we thinking this will be something like Tilburg?

mkjayakumar said:

Does Musk really mean what he says, or does he just say something to please his audience ?

Click to expand...

With Elon Musk the general rules are:
(1) Believe what he's saying: his past record suggests he means it, quite literally at times.
(2) Ignore when he's saying: take any timeline he gives and double it.

China is such a huge potential market and has such strong protectionism that they'd definitely look to put manufacturing there. It'd lower costs significantly in the Chinese market and that market has huge potential.

ItsNotAboutTheMoney said:

With Elon Musk the general rules are:
(1) Believe what he's saying: his past record suggests he means it, quite literally at times.
(2) Ignore when he's saying: take any timeline he gives and double it.

Click to expand...

(3) Don't bet on either unless you're the willing-to-lose-it-all gambler type.

Isn't there some sort of requirement from the Chinese government that in order to manufacture, you must have a Chinese partner? Also, the "partner" gets your technology?

If this is still true, there may be a downside here.

ItsNotAboutTheMoney said:

With Elon Musk the general rules are:
(1) Believe what he's saying: his past record suggests he means it, quite literally at times.
(2) Ignore when he's saying: take any timeline he gives and double it.

China is such a huge potential market and has such strong protectionism that they'd definitely look to put manufacturing there. It'd lower costs significantly in the Chinese market and that market has huge potential.

Click to expand...

If you take his comments from an engineer's perspective, it makes sense. The broad outlines what he is communicating and they've already worked many of the details out. However, sometimes people/governments/issues are more intractable or things just don't work out the way one envisioned. Therefore, things usually take longer and occasionally, one has to change strategy altogether.

I believe that he believes right now that they will be looking to build Tesla's in China in that timeframe. Often, he doesn't seem to have the PR filter that many people in his position often does and so his statements are often far more frank.

I believe China was only willing to give it's EV rebate/discount/whatever it is to EVs built in China, so that would explain the plant there (that, and the shipping and import costs right now when they expect China to be their largest market)

It seems the supercharger is going to be set up in Beijing, here comes the pictures, I believe that Elon will give more details about it this afternoon at the delivery ceremony in Beijing.

I know we tend to parse Elon's statements more than most, and I didn't read the original, but didn't he say a "manufacturing" plant in China in 3-4 years. It's Yahoo and others who said they would build cars. I think it would make sense to build a battery factory in China in expectation of Gen III. If you got China to buy in on helping to finance factory #1 in the US with the promise of factory #2 in China for electric cars and battery backup for rooftop solar - now wouldn't that be a hoot.