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Tesla should be very wary of the very real threat from corporate espionage in China. Brining a factory to China would allow a bad actor to really get into enter

Tesla should be very wary of the very real threat from corporate espionage in China. Brining a factory to China would allow a bad actor to really get into enterprise and create even better clones. Tesla wouldn't be able to keep up financially if Chinese manufactures built cars using Tesla research resources. side thought: Maybe TESLA turns into a research company that sells its IP to manufactures instead of actually building cars.

eithe 8y ago
If we'll be getting a cheap electric car thanks to that I'm fine with a bit of espionage
- kittiepryde 8y ago
  You won't. If a company can't reap the rewards of it's own research, that will stop. Then we race to the bottom with price leadership instead of feature leadership.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
    I think you might be surprised just how many people care more about price leadership than feature leadership.
JanSolo 8y ago
Teslas stated goal is improving the adoption of sustainable energy; selling cars is only a part of it. Perhaps they feel that a little espionage is worth it to get 500000 electric cars a year onto Chinese roads?
- madrox 8y ago
  Came here to say this. Considering Tesla has already opened up their patent library, I think they're begging the industry to copy them.
- duxup 8y ago
  Tesla stockholders might feel differently maybe?
ricw 8y ago
I'm doubtful this will happen, based on what we've seen in the car industry in the past. Foreign car companies have had to build cars via Chinese joint ventures for decades, and as yet, not a single Chinese car company has seen any large success outside of China.
- foepys 8y ago
  The Chinese market is large enough for them to not care about anything outside of China for now. There are various cheaply made clones of popular Western cars in China and none of them will pass any Western crash test. The advantage of those cars on the Chinese market is that they cost only a fraction of any Western car and middle-class Chinese can actually afford them.
- tachyonbeam 8y ago
  AFAIK, Chinese people themselves tend to prefer foreign cars, see them as higher quality status symbols.
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    Indeed. Some cultures in Asia are very "look at what I have", BMW and Mercedes do a lot of business over there to their equivalent of middle and upper classes.
  - taobility 8y ago
    Difference classes have different preference. For normal families, they would prefer affordable domestic brands, and for higher classes, they would buy foreign brands, or fully imported cars. But most people would buy domestic ones which is easy to understand
- mywittyname 8y ago
  Chinese companies don't need success outside of their domestic market to become powerhouses. American truck sales have subsidized Ford and Chevy's international divisions and, while the USDM is currently larger than the Chinese market, that won't always be the case. It's very likely that the manufacture who displaces VW as top car producer in the world will be primarily focused in the Chinese domestic market. Additionally, the sheer number of copycat vehicles available from Chinese automakers suggests that distribution of IP and technology within the industry is pretty common. Be it from sharing, theft, or reverse engineering.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pavs 8y ago
Doesn't Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, AMD already do that?
staunch 8y ago
The advantage of a great technology company is its ability to continue innovating, make hard decisions, and maintain a commitment to quality. You could take all of Tesla's IP and hand it to any company and they couldn't do anything with it except use it to burn money. Tesla is the first choice for great engineers interested in its fields of work. The reason is that Elon Musk wants to help them do great work and he actually knows how to help them do it. He's not perfect but he's the best there is today and he's only getting better. Great technology companies are like massive gravitational anomalies for a specific field. Until their power fades or a more powerful anomaly comes along it's impossible to beat them.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  You could take all of Tesla's IP and hand it to any company and they couldn't do anything with it except use it to burn money. So far, that's all Tesla has managed to accomplish as well... The advantage of a great technology company is its ability to continue innovating, make hard decisions, and maintain a commitment to quality. One noted problem that Tesla faces is that Musk is frequently unable to make hard decisions because he spends so much time micromanaging...he's easily distracted by the latest new "thing" he wants each car to have. As for quality...many people who have ridden in or owned a Tesla would dispute the notion that Teslas are quality cars. You can get much better built ICE cars for a quarter of the money, hybrids for half the money, and competing EVs for 2/3rds of the cost of a Tesla. Tesla is the first choice for great engineers interested in its fields of work. The reason is that Elon Musk wants to help them do great work and he actually knows how to help them do it. The many engineers and AI scientists who have left Tesla in the past year would strongly disagree with that statement. Musk has frequently forced his engineers to do things based on marketing goals rather than sound engineering principles.
SCAQTony 8y ago
Ancient Rome exported its wine agriculture technology to France so wine could be created in abundance and cheaper. Look how well that worked out for Italy. "...The founding of France's other great wine regions is not as clear. The Romans' propensity for planting on hillsides has left archaeological evidence of Gallo-Roman vineyards in the chalk hillsides of Sancerre. In the 4th century, the Emperor Julian had a vineyard near Paris on the hill of Montmartre, and a 5th-century villa in what is now Épernay shows the Roman influence in the Champagne region.[13] "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Rome_and_wine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Rome_and_wine
- danans 8y ago
  From the same wiki article: "The wine trade in Italy consisted of Rome's sale of wine abroad to settlements and provinces around the Mediterranean Sea, yet by the end of the 1st century AD, its exports had competition from the provinces, themselves exporters to Rome. The Roman market economy encouraged the provinces’ exports, enhancing supply and demand. An elevated supply of wine meant lower prices for consumers." If that's true, then it worked out well for Romans wine consumers, likely freeing them from local wine-making monopolies, and also for the development of regionally unique varieties of wine. Also, what is the relationship between Roman wine making technology and Teslas? It's not like China doesn't know how to make electric vehicles - they already produce many more that the US does.
hrktb 8y ago
I’m not into cars, sorry if it’s a stupid question. Does Tesla have that much valuable research ? I thought their manufacturing process came from external actors with experience in “legacy” car makers. Same with their batteries technology, didn’t big players like Panasonic intervene to bring their experience ? Regarding AI or software they don’t seem to be ahead of the other players either. From a distance, Tesla looks like a company that believed in bold ideas and had the chops to execute on them. Is there a “secret sauce” outside of that ?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jdblair 8y ago
  Tesla invented battery management technology to scale up bundles of small lithiun ion cells. This requires significant engineering to get right: cells charge and discharge at different rates, heat must be managed and failed cells taken out of the stack. Nobody was doing this commercially when they built the first roadster. IIRC they shared this tech with Toyota pretty early on. This is all basic electrical engineering, and now reproduced by other carmakers, but Tesla did it first. For example, when I was at National Semiconductor working on Solar tech (2010ish), another team was building systems for lithium ion battery management for cars. They did this to sell the tech to car makers.
  - ferongr 8y ago
    >Tesla invented battery management technology to scale up bundles of small lithiun ion cells. I dispute that claim. They may have created a solution for use in their vehicles but did not "invent" anything, they just upscaled existing solutions and used existing know-how.
    - xanderjanz 8y ago
      Thats how all invention works. Scaled up versions of existing tech.
- leesec 8y ago
jonknee 8y ago
So China can steal Tesla's method of sloppily making fewer cars at a loss? If they have a secret sauce it surely isn't inside the factory.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  Upvoted for funny.
mbesto 8y ago
> side thought: Maybe TESLA turns into a research company TESLA's secret is that they're a battery company. I don't think people understand how big of an issue energy storage is, and what the resulting opportunity is. Energy storage to Tesla is what AWS is to Amazon.
- jeffreyrogers 8y ago
  Panasonic makes Tesla's batteries, and as far as I know Tesla doesn't have any proven battery technology that's better than anyone else's. I know people who work on battery technology. Pretty much every chemistry department at a major university has people working on batteries. You often see publications about breakthrough's in battery tech from these universities. Very few of these alleged breakthrough's make it to market, so I'm skeptical that Tesla can succeed where so many others have not.
  - codeulike 8y ago
    A battery pack in a Tesla car has much more to it than the cells themselves. There are cooling systems, monitoring systems etc. Tesla's battery packs are way ahead of anyone elses and produced at a lower cost per kWh E.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/08/18/how-teslas-battery-strategy-could-drive-strong-margins-on-model-3/#4335e0055cc9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/08/18/ho...
    - makomk 8y ago
      I'm pretty sure that GM have been doing their own battery pack testing, R&D and integration for quite some time now, even partnering with a local university to train people on this. The main component they outsource which Tesla develop in-house is the motor and its controller, and that's obviously pretty vehicle-specific.
  - GW150914 8y ago
    You have to understand the narrative you’re responding to. It goes something like this: Elon Musk doesn’t care about making money, he wants to save the world. The money he makes, he just wants to spend on achieving that goal. SpaceX isn’t about making money as a cargo service to Low Earth Orbit, it’s about establishing Mars colonies and the LEO technology is just fundraising for Mars. Tesla isn’t a car company, it’s trying to bring unit price of batteries down, it’s a solar/battery company, the future of clean energy. The whole car thing is just fundraising/PR for world-saving business. If you point out that Tesla is a car company using Panasonic batteries, you get speeches about how they’ll be the next GE and you don’t get it. If you point out that Tesla is up to its eyeballs in debt and can’t peoduce even the cars it tries to make without serious flaws, in a tent, you get speeches about WSJ, Big Oil, Shortsellimf conspiracies. The True Believers ignore the reality of a publicly traded company struggling, in favor of a narrative spun around Musk’s tweets and promises. It’s a cult, I think one born of existential dread about environmental collapse and a desire to see it fixed by a visionary billionaire who tells them they don’t have to make any sacrifices, just buy a fast car. I think that arguing with them ends up with a similar response as criticizing Google 7 or 8 years ago. Some things just have to play out, and until then it’s all “crush the non-believers!” Edit: Again, don’t just downvote, downvote and rebut.
ryanmercer 8y ago
Do you really think a Chinese company hasn't bought a used Tesla, put it in a cargo container, and shipped it back to dissect physically and to try and reverse engineer every last scrap of code they can get at?
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  I mean, all they need is a few hand tools and an optical comparator for the parts and some creativity for the code.
alexc05 8y ago
Aren't TESLA's patents all openly available anyways? https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-y... I mean maybe some research espionage might steal a technology from them before they patent it - but if they wait until AFTER then they can use it.
dmode 8y ago
This doesn't really makes sense. Apple has been manufacturing there forever and in the process became the most valuable company in the world.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
omarforgotpwd 8y ago
If someone wants to spy on Tesla and steal their secrets having the factory in the US or China or both is not going to make a difference.
beenBoutIT 8y ago
"Chinese car" will end up becoming synonymous with bad AI and fundamentally unsafe.

eithe 8y ago

If we'll be getting a cheap electric car thanks to that I'm fine with a bit of espionage

kittiepryde 8y ago
You won't. If a company can't reap the rewards of it's own research, that will stop. Then we race to the bottom with price leadership instead of feature leadership.
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
  I think you might be surprised just how many people care more about price leadership than feature leadership.

JanSolo 8y ago

Teslas stated goal is improving the adoption of sustainable energy; selling cars is only a part of it. Perhaps they feel that a little espionage is worth it to get 500000 electric cars a year onto Chinese roads?

madrox 8y ago
Came here to say this. Considering Tesla has already opened up their patent library, I think they're begging the industry to copy them.
duxup 8y ago
Tesla stockholders might feel differently maybe?

ricw 8y ago

I'm doubtful this will happen, based on what we've seen in the car industry in the past. Foreign car companies have had to build cars via Chinese joint ventures for decades, and as yet, not a single Chinese car company has seen any large success outside of China.

foepys 8y ago
The Chinese market is large enough for them to not care about anything outside of China for now. There are various cheaply made clones of popular Western cars in China and none of them will pass any Western crash test. The advantage of those cars on the Chinese market is that they cost only a fraction of any Western car and middle-class Chinese can actually afford them.
tachyonbeam 8y ago
AFAIK, Chinese people themselves tend to prefer foreign cars, see them as higher quality status symbols.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  Indeed. Some cultures in Asia are very "look at what I have", BMW and Mercedes do a lot of business over there to their equivalent of middle and upper classes.
- taobility 8y ago
  Difference classes have different preference. For normal families, they would prefer affordable domestic brands, and for higher classes, they would buy foreign brands, or fully imported cars. But most people would buy domestic ones which is easy to understand
mywittyname 8y ago
Chinese companies don't need success outside of their domestic market to become powerhouses. American truck sales have subsidized Ford and Chevy's international divisions and, while the USDM is currently larger than the Chinese market, that won't always be the case. It's very likely that the manufacture who displaces VW as top car producer in the world will be primarily focused in the Chinese domestic market. Additionally, the sheer number of copycat vehicles available from Chinese automakers suggests that distribution of IP and technology within the industry is pretty common. Be it from sharing, theft, or reverse engineering.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pavs 8y ago

Doesn't Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, AMD already do that?

staunch 8y ago

The advantage of a great technology company is its ability to continue innovating, make hard decisions, and maintain a commitment to quality. You could take all of Tesla's IP and hand it to any company and they couldn't do anything with it except use it to burn money. Tesla is the first choice for great engineers interested in its fields of work. The reason is that Elon Musk wants to help them do great work and he actually knows how to help them do it. He's not perfect but he's the best there is today and he's only getting better. Great technology companies are like massive gravitational anomalies for a specific field. Until their power fades or a more powerful anomaly comes along it's impossible to beat them.

gamblor956 8y ago
You could take all of Tesla's IP and hand it to any company and they couldn't do anything with it except use it to burn money. So far, that's all Tesla has managed to accomplish as well... The advantage of a great technology company is its ability to continue innovating, make hard decisions, and maintain a commitment to quality. One noted problem that Tesla faces is that Musk is frequently unable to make hard decisions because he spends so much time micromanaging...he's easily distracted by the latest new "thing" he wants each car to have. As for quality...many people who have ridden in or owned a Tesla would dispute the notion that Teslas are quality cars. You can get much better built ICE cars for a quarter of the money, hybrids for half the money, and competing EVs for 2/3rds of the cost of a Tesla. Tesla is the first choice for great engineers interested in its fields of work. The reason is that Elon Musk wants to help them do great work and he actually knows how to help them do it. The many engineers and AI scientists who have left Tesla in the past year would strongly disagree with that statement. Musk has frequently forced his engineers to do things based on marketing goals rather than sound engineering principles.

SCAQTony 8y ago

Ancient Rome exported its wine agriculture technology to France so wine could be created in abundance and cheaper. Look how well that worked out for Italy. "...The founding of France's other great wine regions is not as clear. The Romans' propensity for planting on hillsides has left archaeological evidence of Gallo-Roman vineyards in the chalk hillsides of Sancerre. In the 4th century, the Emperor Julian had a vineyard near Paris on the hill of Montmartre, and a 5th-century villa in what is now Épernay shows the Roman influence in the Champagne region.[13] "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Rome_and_wine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Rome_and_wine

danans 8y ago
From the same wiki article: "The wine trade in Italy consisted of Rome's sale of wine abroad to settlements and provinces around the Mediterranean Sea, yet by the end of the 1st century AD, its exports had competition from the provinces, themselves exporters to Rome. The Roman market economy encouraged the provinces’ exports, enhancing supply and demand. An elevated supply of wine meant lower prices for consumers." If that's true, then it worked out well for Romans wine consumers, likely freeing them from local wine-making monopolies, and also for the development of regionally unique varieties of wine. Also, what is the relationship between Roman wine making technology and Teslas? It's not like China doesn't know how to make electric vehicles - they already produce many more that the US does.

hrktb 8y ago

I’m not into cars, sorry if it’s a stupid question. Does Tesla have that much valuable research ? I thought their manufacturing process came from external actors with experience in “legacy” car makers. Same with their batteries technology, didn’t big players like Panasonic intervene to bring their experience ? Regarding AI or software they don’t seem to be ahead of the other players either. From a distance, Tesla looks like a company that believed in bold ideas and had the chops to execute on them. Is there a “secret sauce” outside of that ?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jdblair 8y ago
Tesla invented battery management technology to scale up bundles of small lithiun ion cells. This requires significant engineering to get right: cells charge and discharge at different rates, heat must be managed and failed cells taken out of the stack. Nobody was doing this commercially when they built the first roadster. IIRC they shared this tech with Toyota pretty early on. This is all basic electrical engineering, and now reproduced by other carmakers, but Tesla did it first. For example, when I was at National Semiconductor working on Solar tech (2010ish), another team was building systems for lithium ion battery management for cars. They did this to sell the tech to car makers.
- ferongr 8y ago
  >Tesla invented battery management technology to scale up bundles of small lithiun ion cells. I dispute that claim. They may have created a solution for use in their vehicles but did not "invent" anything, they just upscaled existing solutions and used existing know-how.
  - xanderjanz 8y ago
    Thats how all invention works. Scaled up versions of existing tech.
leesec 8y ago

jonknee 8y ago

So China can steal Tesla's method of sloppily making fewer cars at a loss? If they have a secret sauce it surely isn't inside the factory.

solarkraft 8y ago
Upvoted for funny.

mbesto 8y ago

> side thought: Maybe TESLA turns into a research company TESLA's secret is that they're a battery company. I don't think people understand how big of an issue energy storage is, and what the resulting opportunity is. Energy storage to Tesla is what AWS is to Amazon.

jeffreyrogers 8y ago
Panasonic makes Tesla's batteries, and as far as I know Tesla doesn't have any proven battery technology that's better than anyone else's. I know people who work on battery technology. Pretty much every chemistry department at a major university has people working on batteries. You often see publications about breakthrough's in battery tech from these universities. Very few of these alleged breakthrough's make it to market, so I'm skeptical that Tesla can succeed where so many others have not.
- codeulike 8y ago
  A battery pack in a Tesla car has much more to it than the cells themselves. There are cooling systems, monitoring systems etc. Tesla's battery packs are way ahead of anyone elses and produced at a lower cost per kWh E.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/08/18/how-teslas-battery-strategy-could-drive-strong-margins-on-model-3/#4335e0055cc9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/08/18/ho...
  - makomk 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure that GM have been doing their own battery pack testing, R&D and integration for quite some time now, even partnering with a local university to train people on this. The main component they outsource which Tesla develop in-house is the motor and its controller, and that's obviously pretty vehicle-specific.
- GW150914 8y ago
  You have to understand the narrative you’re responding to. It goes something like this: Elon Musk doesn’t care about making money, he wants to save the world. The money he makes, he just wants to spend on achieving that goal. SpaceX isn’t about making money as a cargo service to Low Earth Orbit, it’s about establishing Mars colonies and the LEO technology is just fundraising for Mars. Tesla isn’t a car company, it’s trying to bring unit price of batteries down, it’s a solar/battery company, the future of clean energy. The whole car thing is just fundraising/PR for world-saving business. If you point out that Tesla is a car company using Panasonic batteries, you get speeches about how they’ll be the next GE and you don’t get it. If you point out that Tesla is up to its eyeballs in debt and can’t peoduce even the cars it tries to make without serious flaws, in a tent, you get speeches about WSJ, Big Oil, Shortsellimf conspiracies. The True Believers ignore the reality of a publicly traded company struggling, in favor of a narrative spun around Musk’s tweets and promises. It’s a cult, I think one born of existential dread about environmental collapse and a desire to see it fixed by a visionary billionaire who tells them they don’t have to make any sacrifices, just buy a fast car. I think that arguing with them ends up with a similar response as criticizing Google 7 or 8 years ago. Some things just have to play out, and until then it’s all “crush the non-believers!” Edit: Again, don’t just downvote, downvote and rebut.

ryanmercer 8y ago

Do you really think a Chinese company hasn't bought a used Tesla, put it in a cargo container, and shipped it back to dissect physically and to try and reverse engineer every last scrap of code they can get at?

ryanmercer 8y ago
I mean, all they need is a few hand tools and an optical comparator for the parts and some creativity for the code.

alexc05 8y ago

Aren't TESLA's patents all openly available anyways? https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-y... I mean maybe some research espionage might steal a technology from them before they patent it - but if they wait until AFTER then they can use it.

dmode 8y ago

This doesn't really makes sense. Apple has been manufacturing there forever and in the process became the most valuable company in the world.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

omarforgotpwd 8y ago

If someone wants to spy on Tesla and steal their secrets having the factory in the US or China or both is not going to make a difference.

beenBoutIT 8y ago

"Chinese car" will end up becoming synonymous with bad AI and fundamentally unsafe.