Partially agree, but here is the problem: Musk is by this point at his what... 5th good high tech venture?
Zuckerberg has bought a lot of IP, but has nothing to show for it beyond the continued operational capacity.

A small caveat: There isn't a "next cheap country" because the CCP bulldozing and industry of scale is keeping the costs reasonable.
"Move" and the Chinese will just keep the factory going and sell a competing product. Or the production line is China remains competitive because the infrastructure around it works, and the bribes needed to keep it running for import and export isn't a hassle.
And I find this.... very interesting.

At the current iteration of slashdot, your argument won't be challenged. Not because its wrong, but because it fails to address there is a even easier chink in the armor to aim for:
Aptera has still NOT shipped a "production vehicle".

Use case? Cost? Driving dynamics? Unsprung weight?

" sixth prize for Economic Sciences, endowed by Sweden's central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, and first presented in 1969, is also frequently included"

Sometimes, you do not pay for the service or parts. You pay for the possibility of buying another product down the line.
Sometimes an entire industry will collectively pay, to make sure their supplier will exist in a decade. And with the market slowly shrinking due changes in technology... you either got bankruptcies, selling IP, or success stories like Leica.

If any comparable organization is counted by region/city, then yes. But that is just splitting hairs.
Its also a matter on if you are just counting the doctors and technicians, nurses, low level healthcar staff, and the janitors.

At the same time, as a counterpoint... one could always just post the real world charts of what the actual real world wattage is for cars: The measure method is using the defined speed(90kmh or 120km/h, a few on 200km/h) via cruise control at highway, in similar weather conditions, blasting the climate system.
https://docs.google.com/spread...

A quick peak will lend such insights as: The refresh 64kWh Nissan Leaf has the same power consumption at 90km/h as a Tesla Model 3 Highlander at 120km/h.
There being a correlation between lower rim size and lower power consumption, Horsepower do not correlate with power consumption
This is all current consumer level technology, available right now even 2nd hand.

Its almost as if this kind of things define the difference between first and third rate OPSEC.
Why buy from a distributor instead of buying directly from China? Why not verify the logistic route? Why not verify the parts? Why not dismantle a few completely to verify integrity? Why one brand of pagers, not several?

>clearance to allow for tire chains
Isn't that like 1/20 of the suspension travel? What kind of question is that?

Alibaba exist so you can FIND AND NEGOTIATE DIRECTLY with a Chinese factory. 10.000 ekickbikes with some modifications? Sure. Copies of decrapted Swedish mining drills from the 1970s out of production? Sure. Copies of various larger construction equipment? Yupp
Shein, Temu, Aliexpress and others exist so you can buy cheap consumer goods almost directly from the first or second redistributor warehouse near manufacture. The entire point of it is that your local home improvement + automotive store Biltema or Harbor freight has a markup that is quite significant, and they might not import the gizmo you want to your region. The same is sometimes true for electronics.
Sure, you can attempt to dropship of Shein/Temu/Aliexpress/DX/etc, but its not in the economic of scale compared to Alibaba.

People used to pay for shipping to get a create of various samples, so they could order creates of only the samples.

After thinking long and hard about it, the government view in a lot of countries is that a Internet message app should be viewed as a postal service.
Which include police scanning, drug forfeiture, customs and toll, and end to end being under national claim.

The tl:dr of this case is that by making a P2P message app, making it mainstream, you end up in a situation where you could upset some rather lumbering and slow organizations.
Its also easier to take on high profile targets, than to deal with the culture that causes a lot of the scandals to take hold in society.

Why yes, the Tesla Model Y was the most sold car in 2023, and the Model 3 was the 10th most sold. The model 3 was the 4th best selling Sedan in the world in 2023.
What I will agree on is that the SUV plague is overall hurting global sales, as is making BEVs anemic when slapping 300HP on them don't increase fuel usage.

The problem is that they where not flying a Cessna or some other small aircraft. They where flying a `HUGE 737.
And just like with trains: Once you fucked up, you might have to sit there for several minutes and watch as the fuckup is slowly creeping on to you, as you are past the failure point.

The sooner GIMP dies, the better. GIMP is so feature complete, that once you touch it and realize its barely able to do real work... you sour to it.
The overall quality and development is completely different from Blender, as is its goal or timeline.

At 1/3 yield, electrolyze for Hydrogen has parity with Diesel at about 150-200 €/MWh. This is about twice what a Europe in energy crisis pays per wattage.
Now mind you, that is not why Toyota or a lot of Japanese companies care: They care because they know they are one fun happy global ship war away from being completely barred from using Petrochemicals at any scale.

This create a interesting paradox: Technically one of the Japanese companies could foot the R&D bill to make this technology competitive on the potential edge it has, but the core interest is just to keep a patent pool and production going so Japan don't have to deal with the worst consequences of WW3.
The end result is that we each decade gets some vehicle/production based of Hydrogen, which go and die in the news cycle because its just there as auxiliary potential technology.