[alborzb]

I can't answer most of your comment's questions, but to just answer the first point - it's about cost of labor.

Tata motors are made in India. BYD is Chinese. Both involved much lower cost of labor, both from the engineering perspective and the manufacturing too.

Heck, even Tesla themselves have a factory in China and from the most recent figures I could find, their Chinese built Tesla's are 40% cheaper than the American built Teslas -- https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicl...

[hakfoo]

Serious question: how much of the cost of a car is labour? I figure they've probably automated as much human work out of the product as possible, both as a money-saver and to deal with human limits on consistency and the ability to chuck 500kg assemblies around a factory floor.

If they can make a $15,000 car in China, they can make it for $18,000 in South Dakota.

[jjk166]

A $100,000 robot arm that runs 24/7/365 for 10 years is still about $0.60 per hour to operate before you even consider maintenance. That's about 3 times what entry level Chinese factory workers make on a per-hour basis.

[gertop]

Yeah, cost of labor excuse seems to be mostly bullshit. Half the parts in a Tesla are still made in China. How many hours truly go in assembly and giga pressing in America?

The price difference is simply due to Tesla having bigger batteries, bigger motors, bigger hype, and I'm going to assume all those FSD engineers aren't cheap (Even though they have yet to produce anything of value).