[throwawayEV]

> - Turkey is the perfect size for a relatively beefy electric car battery to make through in one charge, effectively removing the range anxiety.

I would also like to buy one 2.000 km battery. Where are they sold and what are they made of?

> - Lastly, Turkey has been building cars for the past 35 years and it’s gotten pretty good at it - many of the entry to mid level marques of European conglomerates are built in Turkish factories. This is an entry into luxury segment, it is not an entry into car manufacturing. That knowledge of being able to build safe and solid European cars already exists in there. If you’ve visited Europe, you likely already ridden a Turkish-made car (taxis) and if you live in Europe, chances are you might own one without knowing.

Having been working for large OEMs (Bosch/Continental - the primary components such as brakes, infotainments, sensors, etc., essentially the Legos that all "completely different" marques use to put their cars together, regardless whether being an EV/ICE/flying saucer/whatever), I cannot see how being a manufacture for a foreign car brand helps in any way in building your own car.

Have you ever been in a car factory? It is full of bio-robots. Go here, press this button, put the torque wrench on this until it makes "wrrrrr" and that's it. Yes, you save pennies on low-skilled labor to staff your factory, but you need a complete different skillset to start producing your own car. I'm not familiar with what is actually being done in Turkey, maybe they have some awesome R&D, but using an argument like "everybody has already driven a Turkey-made car" is like saying "country X can start its own space program, because major LEO launch paths go over that country, so every rocket has flown through there"...

No offense to Turkey, I'm from a (different) country where many foreign brands assemble their cars too, and it is just that, trained assemblers, not at all helpful at launching your own brand/model.

[alanbernstein]

Are you saying that there is no advantage to having experience in designing and operating a car factory? The stories about Tesla seem to provide arguments both for and against that idea. They made choices for speed and efficiency that no other manufacturer would have tried. Those tradeoffs seem to have paid off so far, but not without some significant cost. It seems plausible that a car maker starting from scratch might make a simple, dumb mistake, that totally compromises the reliability of the car.

[rumanator]

> Are you saying that there is no advantage to having experience in designing and operating a car factory?

The point is that they don't design the factory, and at best they operate in the sense that they are cogs in the machine.

The presence of a car industry does help because when VW launches a plant, that jump-starts demand for some sub-components to be built domestically as well, and that opportunity tends to open the door to some domestic initiatives. But that's it. VW cars are still designed by VW, VW engineers still come at the VW plant to instruct how VW products are assembled, and once sub components or components or even the finished product is assembled then VW's logistic chain picks up again.

At best the existence of a car industry helps out by giving a nationalist leader a set of sub-components built domestically to pick and choose to assemble their domestic product,but that's far from the challenge.

Let's put it differently: look at Tesla. The US has a car industry. Was Tesla's challenge to put their cars out of the factory floor an easy one?