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YC: Requests for Startups

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514 points sarimkx | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.4s | source
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advael ◴[] No.39373528[source]
It's bizarre to me that Tesla gets cited as an exemplar for operating as an American manufacturer for physical goods, given that it's been the subject of numerous scandals regarding quality control of the physical components manufactured there, many of which I've found out about through this very site. If manufacturing comes back to the US in the form of more companies that operate like Tesla, I would guess that American-manufactured goods would come to be distrusted more

Of course, to put this solely on Tesla isn't completely fair. A lot of the problems with how Tesla does business are symptoms of the larger crisis in how businesses are run here, but I think that trying to bring manufacturing back without solving the corporate governance problems that make doing it well infeasible (and indeed caused a lot of the offshoring in the first place) is likely a fool's errand. Most businesses face little discipline on quality in the form of either regulation or competition (which tends to be eaten by mergers even when it arises), and intense pressure from investors to cut corners at every turn

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1. hash872 ◴[] No.39376742[source]
>given that it's been the subject of numerous scandals regarding quality control of the physical components manufactured there

They're very young as far as automotive manufacturers go, and this is a pretty normal part of the 'figuring out how to build a car' learning cycle. South Korean car companies had dismal quality issues decades after they were founded, and now they're much better. Manufacturing complex goods at scale is just really really hard and takes a ton of process knowledge and human capital. Tesla it at a normal part of the automotive manufacturing lifecycle