Tesla’s European gigafactory will be built in Berlin(techcrunch.com) |
Tesla’s European gigafactory will be built in Berlin(techcrunch.com) |
It was originally intended to replace both Schönefeld and Berlin Tegel Airport and become the single commercial airport serving Berlin and the surrounding State of Brandenburg, an area with a combined 6 million inhabitants. However, it is now planned that it will not replace any, with Schönefeld Airport currently being expanded due to rising passenger numbers, and Tegel which will remain open after a referendum.
After almost 15 years of planning, construction began in 2006. Originally planned to open in October 2011, the airport has encountered a series of delays and cost overruns.
Since German reunification, air traffic in Berlin has grown greatly. In 1991, the combined passenger volume of the city's airports was at 7.9 million per year. By 2014, this number had risen to 28 million. When Berlin Brandenburg opens, it will have a capacity of 27 million passengers per year.
Summarized: when/if BER will open, if it will manage to handle immediately its max capacity (best-case scenario), it won't have enough capacity => the other airports will still be needed (until BER is expanded) :|
There are a lot of Berliners who love Tegel and don't want it to close even when BBI is eventually open (whenever that may be). TXL is truly a fantastic airport, and would become even better when not overcrowded.
B, C and D are as crappy as you'd expect hosting sleazyjet, ryanair, germanwings etc etc, although it's 80% business flights in the mornings and seasoned air travelers tend to make security and so on less bothersome than if you arrive at the same time as 150 hungover brits trying to get back to gatwick.. ;)
- Airport BER (still not open)
- Cargolifter airship factory (now used as a waterpark)
- Lausitzring (was supposed to host the F1, now hugely unprofitable)
- Semiconductor factory in Frankfurt/Oder (abandoned, only the building got finished)
I am not aware of one single project that materialized as planned. The odds are against Elon on this one...
Millions of more people use Tegel than use those apartments, and if they aren’t “screwed over” living near the airport today, they wouldn’t be if it stayed open.
I was at the Tempelhof and people told me that it's privatly owned and the onwer wasn't happy with the current usage.
Being outside of the city center it won't contribute too much to gentrification and probably it will help Brandenburg getting more people to live there, pay taxes, buy property, shop, etc.
So far reactions have been neutral to good, which by Berlin standards is an amazing result.
I kind of wonder if the decision of bringing the factory to Berlin wasn't based on the amount of software engineering talent that is available, more than the more traditional engineers.
In any case, I'm happy about Tesla coming to Germany, interesting times!
Brandenburg as a state is an interesting. Crucially, it's not the state of Berlin (Berlin is s city state within the German federation). That means access to lots of grants/subsidies and also that they are somewhat shielded from the chaotic governance in Berlin.
Is that a more literal translation of Bundesrepublik Deutschland?
In English, Germany is normally referred to as Federal Republic of Germany?
Aside from that, Brandenburg is rich grounds for the other staff a factory needs. You can combine cheaper EU-labor with mid-range jobs very well in Germany.
The only thing Tesla could face which it wont like are unions and workers rights because Germans sure won't put up with 100 hour work weeks or similar business practices.
Like the Gigafactory 2 in Buffalo did for New York state?:
But according to SolarCity’s financial statements, state officials “quietly issued a series of 10 amendments” to Tesla, allowing the high-tech jobs to become regular positions and requiring just 500 hires within two years -- down from 900. Tesla told Vanity Fair it was still responsible for creating 5,000 jobs, but the timing for the additional jobs has been extended to 10 years after the factory’s completion.
SolarCity was the center of the Buffalo Billion corruption probe by federal prosecutors, which last year led to high-profile bribery convictions of several people, including Louis Ciminelli, whose firm won the solar plant construction deal.
https://www.syracuse.com/state/2019/08/elon-musk-is-full-of-...
They only, and rightfully, get pissed when mega corps like google/amazon come in the city center, buy a 40 storey building and starts paying everyone 100% more than the average for the same position.
From comments on here people have been saying the developers are seen as the poor cousins to traditional Engineers.
Siemens is big in Niedersachsen (e.g. Braunschweig) so it's more about East/West divide.
So when a big (and presumably well-paying) company is going to create lots of jobs in the country, whether this is in an eastern or a western state is indeed a very important question.
EDIT: Please note though, that it's somewhat controversial how relevant the divide really is these days. Some will tell you it's 90% in peoples heads, others will tell you that there's still a long way to go before we can really call the german reunification complete.
I think they can just get it for (relatively) cheap there and that would be the main reason.
But the statistic I assume you are referencing is a few years old, and Berlin has been the fastest growing state in Germany for quite a while now, a development that is still increasing. The numbers for 2019 aren't out yet, but I assume that at this point, Berlin is exactly average in per capita terms for Germany.
Why Berlin has been an outlier for capitols is quite obvious: It has only been Germanys capitol for a bit less than 30 years, and before that was divided.
If I had to speculate, Tesla is concerned about finding people willing to relocate, and Berlin is a rather attractive destination even for people not speaking German.
I think what you meant is that Berlin has a net inflow of tax money.
I could imagine that the factory staff would often live closer to the site, in Brandenburg, not in Berlin which has housing problems and is accumulating more of them through rent regulation.
This will produce pressure on Europe to ease for instance the AI regulations and basically removed Customs tax from many other countries because Tesla can send the cars from three different locations.
I just don't understand why Tesla is slow in expanding to other countries. Here in Israel we don't have Teslas and it's an extremely innovative place with very good conditions for an EV as Israel stretches 424 km (263 mi) from north to south. like two or three charging locations and you're done.
1. Brexit hasn't happened yet. I.e. UK has not been able to introduce policies that would make it a lot more competitive and friendly for business than the EU/Germany, make it friendlier for international talent, which is one of the opportunities created by Brexit.
2. We do not know what would have happened had Parliament and civil service been more positive and cooperative on Brexit. It could be a self-fulfilling prophecy - remainers in Parliament inadvertently creating greater uncertainty, which in turn drives business away as the leavers are unable to realistically guarantee a more competitive / friendlier for business Britain in the future.
Are you arguing that there is no scenario under which Brexit could make Britain a more attractive place for business than the EU or Germany?
They kept out Google after massive protests. Not sure this is the same thing though.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/24/google-ab...
p.s. I'm based in Berlin. Have no horse in the race except that the Google office would have been right down the street of where I work.
Doesn't sound right to me. Why is that the first~third thing you're mentioning? It's almost like we scorn the concept of more people working in an area towards a positive goal (renewable transport). Yikes.
I actually start to feel sorry for politicians for a change when they have people who want mathematical impossibilities.
– Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.
– Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.
– Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.
– Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don’t want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla.
– Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the “chain of command”. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.
– A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.
– In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a “company rule” is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.
If there is something you think should be done to make Tesla execute better or allow you to look forward to coming to work more (same thing in the long term), please send a note to [redacted]
[1] https://medium.com/@StartupJourney/elon-musks-6-productivity...
"If the schedule is long it's wrong, if it's tight it's right. The best part is no part, the best process is no process."
All the hacking away of parts and processes pays off with speed.
Of course that applies to many other places in Brandenburg with similar distance to Berlin, but the airport means that transportation to and from the city has been (or will be) built out for higher capacity.
Also it has to be close enough to the city to make commuting from the population center reasonable, no?
Also in Bavaria, once you leave Munich (BMW), Augsburg or Ingoldstadt (Audi), there is quite a steep drop-off in density. The traditional high-density industrial regions of Germany are rather in the west and south-west.
[1]: https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/Standardar...
https://www.syracuse.com/state/2019/08/elon-musk-is-full-of-...
Yesterday USA Today published an article about the disaster the Nevada factory has been for the State, and HN didn't care:
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/1...
Today, Elon mentions a new factory one day will be built in Germany, and HN loves it. This company is bullet proof.
And Teslas are not designed to milk the consumer for repairs over the years; they are designed to convince consumers that electric cars are a better choice.
The Model 3 is designed to last 1 million miles. So sure, it will be fascinating to see how they do... but that's like 25 or more years from now.
Not true if you live in an area where the roads are salted in the winter. Then they don't last any longer than on an ICE car unless you reduce or turn off regenerative braking. I had to have two replaced at the last service because of rust for just that reason and the car is only four years old (Model S).
Tesla's advice was to reduce regen in the winter so that the brakes get used a bit more. A colleague also suggests doing an emergency stop once a year in the summer on a dry road to scour the brakes, not tried it, no idea if it would really be effective.
Reported site is Grünheide, some 40 km drive from Brandenburger Tor, and a bit shorter distance from the under-construction BER airport.
https://www.berlin.de/en/news/5972608-5559700-elon-musk-tesl...
What makes me curious is that this village is actually within a nature protection area, Naturschutzgebiet Löcknitztal. I could imagine that building such a symbol of international market economy there might attract anti-capitalist demonstrators and involve protesting and riots. But perhaps I'm wrong.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gr%C3%BCnheide,+Saksa/@52....
I also find it somewhat interesting that in the political composition of this village of 8000 residents, the Social Democrats and Linke (Left) have 3 seats, and two seats are held by CDU, AfD, and.... Freiwillige Feuerwehr.
Yes, the voluntary fire brigade is apparently popular enough to feature in local politics. I think this is a somewhat sympathetic phenomenon in German local politics.
It's a bit of a shame that there's no Google Street View in much of Germany.
I see Tesla & Berlin playing out well.
Bunch of tech nomads hide out in Berlin and I'm sure the city is keen to steal market share from more traditional German car powerhouse cities.
More than the industry average in the state of California? If so, care to site your source?
You might have missed this very recent news:
> International car company Tesla published an ad seeking an operations manager in Israel, thus confirming that it plans to launch significant operations here. [1]
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/tesla-to-launch...
They don't have the capacity. Last quarter, they made as many M3s they have the capacity to make, and sold all of them. Opening new markets just means underserving the current ones more. They will start operations in new countries as they increase capacity and start saturating sales in their current ones.
We were told, repeatedly, that Tesla would be producing 10,000 Model 3s per week in 2019, with a single factory. Suddenly, now, they don't have the capacity at ~6,000 per week and need multiple factories on zero year-over-year growth?
I live in the Baltic's and a friend of a freind has a Model X which was involved in a minor accident (other drivers fault) last year. To get it repaired without affecting the warranty it had to be sent to Tesla, which meant it had to be taken to Finland (700km) or Germany (1000km).
Shop has to: - have access to service manuals using Pass Thru - this is requirement on the car producer. - document all repairs - do the repairs in a way the producer documented them
I’m not sure if size has much to do with it. Tesla is in remote countries like New Zealand (1/2 the population of Israel) and Iceland (about 1/20th the population of Israel), as well as neighbouring Jordan (similar size to Israel).
Even getting parts to certified shops anywhere right now is particularly challenging, its is one of the reasons I think they aren't profitable yet--they have to pay for a loaner car.
They've made a ton of progress and can now mass produce S/X/3 with reasonable turn around, but with the recent production hell ramp up with 3, they had to direct all resources to those desposit holders and that meant slowing down part manufacturing for non deliverable sales.
The factory in Fremont is HUGE but near there is a body shop where you'll see a ton of S/X/3 waiting for parts to be shipped out. I honestly thought it was an auxiliary parking lot when I saw it.
What part of he Baltics? With Rimac putting its footprint down you'd think that area would be have more of a Market for EVs.
Tesla is expanding as fast as they can. After huge struggles they finally got their Fremont plant working right. Then they immediately set to work building a plant in China, and got done remarkably fast.
Now they are going to build a plant in Europe. Probably next will come India, and then maybe Latin America or the Middle East, and there I suppose Israel would be the best location.
Why, comma, you say that as if building a car outside of Germany and selling it inside of Germany would face some sort of unfair obstacles, rather than being a straightforward and painless process as it ought.
As a tesla fan and owner, I hope you get your superchargers. I've heard rumors that they've just started seriously producing the supercharger v3 hardware at the Buffalo, NY factory (Gigafactory 2), so maybe as that ramps up you'll be good.
Consider tweeting @elonmusk and asking. I did that for slow parts delivery and had the issue resolved in two days.
The issue is with Tesla, they still didn't make the move on us I guess. At least I have my Tesla shares though.
"so that no one would stifle the company's path towards autonomous EV's."
Who is "stifling"? And many companies work on autonomous cars.
"This will produce pressure on Europe to ease for instance the AI regulations"
What AI regulations in Europe? And what is Europe? The EU?
"and basically removed Customs tax"
This is not how custom taxes work. The EU is one of the biggest free trade zone in the world. If Mercosul joins, it is the biggest.
"I just don't understand why Tesla is slow in expanding to other countries. Here in Israel we don't have Teslas and it's an extremely innovative place"
Because Tesla is burning through cash like a motherfucker. And Israel is a tiny place. This is also why, to my knowledge, nobody build cars in Israel. I mean, why not Dubai?
Wait, isn't this is exactly how custom taxes work? Say the EU charges a 10% tax on all imported passenger cars (it does, and 25% on pickups and other trucks). Now, if Tesla sells cars to the EU that were made in the USA, wouldn't it trigger that import tax?
Now, say Tesla builds a factory inside the EU and makes cars there (as it plans to do). When sold in the EU, those cars wouldn't be charged an import tax because they're not being imported.
Right? What am I missing?
No one yet, but it means the company is less beholden to a single regulatory environment. This is generally a good thing.
> What AI regulations in Europe?
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/the-european-strategy-of-r...
https://www.ft.com/content/4fd088a4-021b-11e9-bf0f-53b8511af...
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300149/eu-artificial-int...
https://www.loc.gov/law/help/artificial-intelligence/europe-...
Also, most of the self-driving car regulation is state-level until the DOT pushes something through or Congress passes something, so for now, there are fifty different regulatory environments to pick from here.
> Mercosul join
If a whole other continent joins, it will be the biggest? The whole point is that Europe has geographical and (some) cultural continuity. Mercosul is South American. Why would it join the EU, especially considering that it would be out-numbered by its former colonial masters?
> Israel is a tiny place
No one said build there, people mentioned selling. Apparently, they're also sold in neighboring Jordan. I really can't understand why they wouldn't sell in Israel; it's a richer nation and a better market.
The customs tax is in regards to countries/jurisdictions other than the ones with the Tesla factories. For instance a country like Israel might have a 20% tariff from Europe but 0% from China due to different bilateral deals so Tesla will send cars from there.
Israel is different than Dubai because literally a third of the population are in the tech space. Israel’s main export is tech and the tech ecosystem will build on-top of Tesla (Waze for example was founded here and there are many auto security startups for instance).
It’s not going to be written down on paper but there’s plenty of evidence to support it through their history of actions. And Germany has the largest influence on the EU economy wise having the largest GDP by far.
Completely dropping customs tax because a foreign company factory opened there is a bit much though.
There are many, many SV companies with large offices in parts of the world with very strong workers rights. I work in one of these. There is no problem, other then I'm not expected to work weekends and be on-call at unreasonable hours. If this is required I would need to be compensated for it.
Secondly; perhaps I am reading into this, but I get the sense you are implying that "less work" will be done due to these protections. You may be surprised to find out that German factories are actually quite efficient ;) , and that treating workers well gets them to work more, not less. Having a healthcare system that means you can bring your children to A&E at the weekend and not get caught for $1000s means you can come to work on Monday with a clear head.
Having protection from "right to work" means you can voice an opposing opinion without fear.
Having a paid holiday means you can come back to work refreshed with a clear mind, and not "burn out" as fast.
Having maternity, and paternity leave, means happier parents (like, in a abstract way, not like in a oh I haven't slept in 8 months I'm soooo happy way). Let's call it out here. Giving children a good start in life sets them up for success.
On a global team you can quite clearly see the results of the different work environments, and the various impacts each environment has. From a tech point of view, I see this most critically in the ability to voice controversial opinions, or push back against your manager for example.
I assume you mean "at-will employment"?
Right-to-work laws, in the US, are laws saying that employees cannot be forced to join a union as a prerequisite to employment.
At-will employment laws, again in the US, are laws saying that employees can be terminated for any or no reason, except for a list of specific reasons like race, sex, age, religion, and probably a few others. Unless there's some kind of employment contract, which the majority of jobs in the US don't have.
An American Manger in BT NI manged to cause some major problems by not being sensitive to the special employment laws in Northern Ireland.
Also IMARSAT had a spectacular car crash of a court case in the UK when some one blindly imported US style HR
"Look he made it work in Germany with their "strict" workers rights. It can't be so bad"
Also going to Germany, right in the face of the traditional car industry is a great show off too.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/13/tesla-cit...
German labor institutions are strategically oriented towards collaboration (much like in the US), they are extremely centralized and anti-democratic and if you're in the workers' council and you're a member of the supervisory board, socio-economically you belong to the upper class. This facilitates the same corporate conspiracies as everywhere else.
Furthermore, East-Germany's labor market as a whole is much more like Eastern European labor markets. It is super-exploited. However, it is right in Western Europe where you've got access to decent infrastructure and massive subsidies.
How does that happen‽
Even if there had been a consensus on almost-rip-and-replace immediately, it's not clear that could have been done as quickly, given the amount of preparation needed.
(As an example of the kind of changes, during the building process they decided to re-assign arrivals and departures to different floors of the building. Which in an airport has fairly fundamental consequences due to security zones etc...)
This sentence is never true.
It's not true in software it's even less so in construction.
The issues would have been there even if the construction was done perfectly, you always fix such massive infrastructure for their whole lifetime (it's not simply a building!)
This time they fucked up and the airport didn't pass the safety checks necessary to open it, but there is constant fixing and changing and upgrading and scaling in an airport facility.
Tearing down it and rebuilding it it's never an option and never a good idea, unless the structure is severely damaged or contaminated (e.g. asbestos)
Corrupt State/Corporate entities who'd rather have money in their private bank than complete given task for public good.
Berlin is a massive clusterfuck of corruption.
When I read "embarrassingly poor planning" and similar phrases in articles about it, I have to think of someone who "clumsily" spills coffee on the dress of Marilyn Monroe, for lack of a better image, and then "embarrassingly" ends up with his head planted on her chest, because he "stumbled" while "hastily trying to make up for the mistake with a handkerchief". Sure, that's one way to put it. But beyond all the plausible deniability, someone is benefitting, one way or another.
(Tesla fans: relax.)
Might even be an investment opportunity: Swoop in and buy the whole mess once the German government decides it has thrown enough money into their bottomless pit.
Musk: "We chose Berlin as the location because it has the only CO2-free airport in the world"
So to summarize:
Tesla:
- builds factory in a practically greenfield area
- employs middle-class workers
Google:
- buys old building in the middle of the "hip" leftist city district
- employs high-wage workers which will drive gentrification
So I think this will be received at least with mixed voices, but mostly positively.
Google probably could have moved their office location ~2 km and have been fine. But they really wanted to sit right in the hornet nest.
1) Berlin is suffering from pollution, especially the diesel. For city dwellers the switch to electric car can't happen fast enough, and German auto makers have been absolutely dragging their heels. Tesla has become a symbol, a fuck-you to BMW, Mercedes, VW and their gas guzzling, diesel pushing ways. It's unbelievable how out of touch the german automakers have been.
2) The factory means some working-class jobs. The left won't see anything wrong with that. It's the coming gentrification that caused the upset against Google.
3) Factory is just outside Berlin, technically in Brandenburg. Near the (forever in construction) BER airport means less concerns about noise, etc.
They didn’t protest against the new Spandau Siemens campus either. Siemens being in the arms industry, while Googlers openly protested against any military-related research during the same year. It’s just that no nobody wants to live in Spandau.
The area around BER is even further away, and the close-by Adlershof is pretty much Berlins center for STEM research (many suppliers are there too). Could be a good move.
But I'm very happy about people standing up for their neighborhood and actually protesting. Having a Google office with >400 decidedly well-compensated people move in would very much change the neighborhood and not for the better.
People fighting for their own local interests is what makes Berlin great, and it is _so_ refreshing after having lived in North America where no-one protests anything and letting corporate interests dominate yours is the norm.
i don't understand this. so berlin would rather have poor citizens? how is that better for the city? and how would >400 "well-compensated" people affect the city in anything but a positive manner? has there been any sort of study as to how better wages affect a city?
This was a „Google for Startups Campus“ project. Co-working spaces and startup events and so on. Money and potential funding for the Berlin startup scene.
I’m rather worried how some vocal and partly violent people, seemingly without a lot of understanding of what they are campaigning against and how the tech world works managed to stop this project.
I'll join the protests myself.
Wasn’t the Allied War effort in WW2 “Anti-Fa”? Or am I missing something?
Perhaps this could be added to the reminders list for the next Remembrance Day?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-World_War_II_anti-fascism
On top of that Brandenburg government will definitely sprinkle some tax breaks.
Germany is a very stable robust economy that might be their #1 'export source' - there's a lot of related knowledge - and in a 'cramped Europe' - the Berlin area is wide open.
FYI Berlin has 'wide avenue streets' which are totally unlike most other European places, sometimes it feels like Los Angeles and not Europe.
It might have been possible to go to Czech/Poland but there are just a large number of 'little things' that can go wrong over there, issues best left to those who know and operate the market well.
Compound this with the probable politics of the game and it makes sense.
In a way it's the most obvious choice.
There are ways yo try to "hack it" like subsidies or having personal relations with someone high up but I don't know how cost effective and long term they really are.
So if people want long term improvement, they should vote for a strong legal system instead of "I personally brought this factory here".
That is about as good as it gets.
They probably got the land cheap and commitment to build at another record breaking pace.
I mean we used to build factories on the river for that reason. Made a royal mess, but easy to ship things in and out.
Edit: typos
https://riskandinsurance.com/5-takeaways-from-teslas-safety-...
The article you linked looked like an opinion piece and provided zero data points or official documents.
Lastly, Cal-OSHA has much stricter rules than other states. Tesla is pretty much the only auto manufacturer in the state of California currently.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Motor_vehicle_assembl...
New Zealand is an English speaking country so perhaps it's easier for them, and to sell cars in Iceland you don't need to do anything more than ship cars you're selling in the EU over and pay import tolls & registration fees.
Since Tesla doesn't sell through dealers, they also usually open a sales centre / Tesla store (which often also acts as a service centre).
In Tesla's case, they also invest in building superchargers in the countries they operate in. All of this adds up to a fairly significant capital investment before they start selling vehicles in a new country.
I was told about a support call with a US university a few years ago and the director fired the sys admin in the middle of the conference call. It was in the EMEA time zone (like 4am central). Everyone heard about it because that sort of thing just wouldn't be done here.
The guy had done nothing wrong, he had been up all night trying to fix the problem, and the director came on the call and lost it.
I always think in that environment so much of your energy must be spent on ass coverage and politics over working.
I don't object to its existence, only location.
Yes. The biggest free trade zone. Read the news from time to time. The EU-Mercosul FTA is supposed to be signed but may not due to Austria and partly also to France.
It may be the biggest already: https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/2177749/eu-...
Nobody's talking about joining the EU, but rather a free trade area. Regarding cars, the free trade area makes sense as many EU carmakers (Fiat, Renault, etc) are active in South America.
> Then they don't last any longer than on an ICE car unless you reduce or turn off regenerative braking.
This makes no sense. Reducing or turning off regen would make brake pad wear worse, not better. As an owner I assume you know your stuff so typo maybe?
If the rust is too extensive then the car will fail its periodic test. All cars in Norway must be tested every two years (first test when the car is four years old) and the condition of the brake disks is one of the check points.
I agree that the pads will last much longer with regen but the pads are relatively cheap compared to the disks.
In the end, I'm not sure if it makes such a big difference, other incentives, land prices and availability of talent probably outweighs this.
I've never heard anyone complaining that their car is too safe.
How many people have been killed in autopilot-related accidents in Europe vs the US?
>"Also the EU makes money from the auto companies in their jurisdiction and they don’t want a U.S auto company competing with them."
Carmakers can make cars in the EU and pay taxes. Or they can import them from the US and pay tariffs.
Exactly as EU carmakers are treated in the US...
No one said that Europe is doing something that the U.S wouldn't do in return. Just stating the facts as they are.
You seem to be overstating the issue, Tesla has already adapted their software to the new rules, and they seem to be related to EU safety standards:
https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/17/tesla-updates-autopilot-...
I believe that Ford might have something to say about that. They've been in Europe since... 1967.
Or GM since 1986 (now Opel and Vauxhall).
Or the existing Fiat-Chrysler.
- Zalando
- HERE Technologies
- N26
- Delivery Hero
- Soundcloud
- VW/Mercedes/Porsche backend startups (Proshare, Coup, Porsche Digital Lab)
And many smaller ones. From my circle, most Senior engineers earn in the 70-100k range total compensation. Since Berlin is still quite affordable, that allows a good standard of living.
For example, US GDP is $21 trillion, US GO is $37 trillion.
[0] https://qz.com/753244/berlin-is-the-only-capital-city-in-eur...
Likewise, cities have their place in a countries economy, even if it's not to directly produce goods and driving up the GDP per capita.
In even simpler words: Remove Berlin from Germany and the GDP of the rest of the country would also go down.
Politically, east-west is obviously dominant.
Mozilla and HPI (Oracle JVM research) doing cutting edge work.
Ableton and Native Instruments as world leaders in niche but influential software.
Car2Go and Coup with major financial backing from Mercedes and Bosch.
Tons of small seed-stage companies funded by the great smaller VCs here. ECB central bank policy pushes a lot of money into startup investment.
They are actually perfect example of the German mentality in investing in startups - fairly secure plays which they can understand.
As far as early stage investments companies go, it's not as nice as you make it sound. Have a look at any list of startups and apart from infarm (which is great and I've worked there) and maybe n26, most are ecommerce platform plays and some fintech (of which most are too late to the game). A lot of the people in my network wanting to do something different had to go elsewhere
I feel like in recent years the startup scene in Berlin has gone rather off rails, with obviously flawed projects getting funding. The truth of the startup scene is that >99% of projects are pretty bad, and never deserved to leave the brainstorming phase in the first place.
/s
There isn't a single cause to that but these companies are definitely part of it. If no one could rent these flats they wouldn't be that pricey... There is a lot of affordable housing too, I'm in the process of looking for a flat and a good 30% of them requires a Wohnberechtigungsschein
1. Extremely easy and friendly immigration policies for world’s top talent - better than in the US
2. Legal ability to easily hire and fire people
3. Legal ability to run a business out of your garage
4. Lower taxes - income, corporate, capital gains - than in the US
5. Free trade, even if unilateral, as the US is involved in tariffs and trade wars
All of this combined, given that the UK is English speaking, could lead to the UK overtaking Silicon Valley in terms of startups. Most of the world’s top talent would, all else being equal, prefer to live around Cambridge than in Palo Alto.
2. Workers rights.
3. I've no idea why you think people don't run businesses from their homes already.
4. Depends on the government of the time, and why do you think racing to the bottom on public funding is a good thing?
5. We already have free trade. Try getting in tariff battles with no strength outside the EU.
Tbh all those points seem dubious at best.
I can believe there might be positive aspects for business, but pretty much all of them involve a deterioration in workers and other rights (human, animal) and standards. And generally speaking, while agility and flexibility are likely to follow from becoming newly small and skinny, I don't see how that helps when in the trading ring with very big, very strong heavyweights.
> Now they are going to build a plant in Europe. Probably next will come India, and then maybe Latin America or the Middle East, and there I suppose Israel would be the best location.
However, the cargo terminal has been in operation since 2013 [1].
[1] https://www.berlin-airport.de/en/business-partners/airlines-...
Well, at this point that seems more likely than that airport ever finishing.
{joke}
> Another new innovation revealed in the patents is a “Multi-Directional Unibody Casting Machine for a Vehicle Frame and Associated Methods.” Musk himself let this cat out of the bag earlier on by revealing the new casting machine will be capable of casting almost the entire body of a Tesla EV in one piece.
> This startling innovation will virtually eliminate the need for a tremendous number of welds across an EV body.
They also reduced the total length of wiring from 1.5km to 100m in the Y.
Germany's most successful former startup is Zalando - they sell clothes online. Notably its success isn't selling the company to a stronger US rival who could have as well crushed it, but saved time and maybe money by buying instead.
German/French car companies, with long and historic ties on many levels to say, Poland, can fathom the risk of going there, especially with a long term view.
Volskwagen can plan decades ahead in some facets.
It takes 'a whole team' i.e. government (local, Fed, EU), probably financing/banking on both sides, political buy-in etc..
But for a new US company to go to Czech ... is asking for trouble.
The difference between E/W Europe is definitely centred around competitive advantage and long-established industries - but I'd argue more than anything it's 'good governance' at every level, private and public. And it's the same all over the 'developing' world.
Source: I'm Romanian, I've been to Germany repeatedly.
It is entirely about labor law ("Watching a SV company suddenly have to deal with German workers' rights"), not about whether the bread roll should be called "Weckle" or "Schrippe".
Also, Jordan next to us has Teslas and we have lower temperatures so it's not the climate.
Appears that Reno gets colder for several months and hotter for about 2 months
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/1...
> Lane Dillon, an engineering student, lost the tip of his finger in a workplace accident at the Tesla Gigafactory that was never reported to OSHA.
I cut the tip of my finger off with a chefs knife last year, luckily just took off about 1-2mm. The man in the story looks to have lost a bit more than that - but still has a fingernail on his right index finger. I’m not sure where the official line is drawn between cut and amputation when talking about fingertips. Once you’re cutting through fingernail though I would say it’s around there.
The fork lifts are automated. The wages are an average of 4x minimum wage, they hire at-risk college dropouts and train then to become techs while paying their tuition at community college, and they even housed a homeless employee at a local hotel while he worked there. All from the same article.
Property assessments are up 80% but TFA claims there’s no new tax revenue to cover the cost of services which a factory that large requires.
It’s a typical hit-job piece against an incredible factory which employs 7,000 in an extremely safe environment which is unfortunately not a utopia, but involves on average 1 emergency call per day for anything from fighting, DUI, chest pains, pregnancy related, and yes, occasionally workplace injury.
The issue is that these guys are moving very heavy shelves by hand, instead of using forklifts.
I would assume that moving heavy equipment around is a pretty standard case in a car factory. It probably shouldn't be lifted by human muscle, which is prone to failure and coordination issues.
Do you have any reason to think there’s a pattern there? Or are you just using that language for effect?
Tesla needs to fix their reporting problem before we can even have hope at measuring the incidence rate at their factory.
The location Tesla picked is just outside of Berlin in the state of Brandenburg.
that's why some things in germany are somewhat broken. some states want their autonomy, but this autonomy makes some things stupid, like our school politics (which are done by our states) and/or our public transport companies can be operated by states which sometimes just can't work (db is not)
germany actually has the same problem as the eu. states want to be as autonomous as possible, no matter the risks. and changes to this are seen as really bad, because people do not like "einheitsbrei".
Without engineers among line workforce, there will be nobody to spot and correct tiny manufacturing defects and mistakes in the design that would otherwise be quietly "duct taped" and forgotten.
For my 10 years in OEM manufacturing, I haven't seen a single design that the factory people didn't send back to the client without a long "to fix" list. And those designs were coming from rather serious clients, with serious in house engineering.
Maybe like Italy we need reserved seats in the House of Lords for Engineering and STEM peers.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/13/tesla-cit...
There are many good reasons that have already been cited why Germany makes sense, additionally when you're building cars for a whole continent, for shipping reasons it makes sense to build a factory in the middle of it rather than an island on the side.
I'm not going to pretend I'm in any way able to make a reasonable comparison, but companies like Ford and Nissan appear to have had no intention to move their UK manufacturing to Germany.
Tesla certainly considered it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/13/tesla-cit...
Like, why do you care?
Second, Twitter has massive impact, and Elon Musk is an ass of a role model.
And I think an argument could be made that being more competitive on all those points would be easier outside the EU.
I suspect you would disagree with Paul's essay/the goals he outlined, and that's fine. My point is that if you did agree with his essay, you might see that Brexit could also open opportunities.
I wouldn't dispute there are potential benefits to Brexit, I'm saying there are no obvious winning arguments, and clear counters to all of yours.
Also by purely framing it in terms of business, you are in danger of making two errors:
1. Assuming all business has the same needs, and all business owners have the same perspective.
2. Much more importantly, business is just one factor of the national life affected by the split, and - as pointed out -has a natural tension with other issues like rights and standards that you haven't addressed.
Compared to most other nations it's easy to bootstrap an electric driving infrastructure in Israel, because you don't have to do a continental wide rollout.
The whole battery swap thing was a bet against batteries and charging technology getting better.
> In 2014 it was revealed that Alfredo di Mauro, the chief planner for the airport’s fire protection system, was not a qualified engineer but an engineering draftsman. He admitted this, saying everyone thought he was a proper engineer and ‘he didn’t contradict them.’
> His mistakes have cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fix.
As a tangent, not to belittle the corruption around BER, and with more tongue in cheek than snark: I wonder how many people responsible for things on this list https://hn.algolia.com/?q=breach (insofar the cause was negligence) have "software engineer" in their job title or description? If you ctrl+F "engineer" in those articles and discussions, you'll see it thrown about quite casually. If architecture was like software, buildings would regularly just collapse, and sudden death would just be an accepted risk risk of going into a building or walking past one. Some people would complain about that, but we would consider them idealists and their demands incompatible with progress and prosperity.
That's not all. Signs of poor planning and poor execution seem to be everywhere. Pipes for a central water cooling system for IT and other electronics were supposedly embedded directly into concrete walls instead of into shafts and the system was known to have too little capacity before the building was supposed to open. One escalator turned out to be too short when delivered. Instead of fixing the escalator, they extended it by adding regular stairs to the end. The contents of cable shafts in the building is completely unknown. Nobody knows anymore. New cables are thrown in randomly to suit current needs. Some shafts seem to have already filled up completely because of that.
The management of the construction site has also been a complete disaster. I don't recall how many tech leads had to go because of allegations of corruption, for example.
These are just the worst issues that I remeber. The smoke ventilation was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
>The smoke ventilation system was originally designed to rely on fans to blow the smoke downwards in the ventilation shafts. As far as I know, nobody had tried to build a system like this before. Rumor has it that ventilation pipes even imploded during a test.
Well I do know of places where this has been done. It's not as failsafe as having a duct which relies on the stack effect but you have additional fans and redundant power supplies etc to make sure the system does not fail. Also the fans suck air through the system to the smoke extract outlet point as you want the pressure inside the duct to be lower than inside the building otherwise you risk blowing smoke into other parts of the building. Ducts imploding sounds like a problem with smoke dampers not activating correctly. Confusion about which dampers should be operating would be caused by a big last minute change to the layout of the spaces inside the building, which brings me back to wondering if it was because they introduced a lot more shopping area where there was none before because this is a classic last minute change in airport design that has caused problems with other airports. Big changes to space utilisation are going to cause delays and budget overruns once you have got passed the concept sketch stage.
> One escalator turned out to be too short when delivered. Instead of fixing the escalator, they extended it by adding regular stairs to the end.
Would be a major and obvious crowd safety problem and a contravention of regulations in many countries, I am assuming this would also be the case in a well regulated country like Germany. Which is why I find it hard to believe that this would be installed, rather than sent back to the factory and extended.
It's a question of managing expectations, every building is a prototype and loads of things go wrong all the time. I have heard of all the problems you describe happening on other projects for both public and private sector clients, they were just fixed and everything carried on. What you are describing has details that don't sound technically correct, so it seems like there is someone out there running a smear campaign to deflect blame from whoever made the big change to the brief, which makes me curious to know what the truth is.
For government clients airports are adverts for cities and a symbol of municipal pride so they like something that is spectacular, but private sector clients want a shopping mall with passengers winding through intestine like corridors full of shops on their way to the airplanes parked outside. Changing from one model to the other halfway through is not going to be a smooth process.
A major brief change or an unclear starting brief is what causes building (and software) projects to go late and over budget, not lots of little things like what you are describing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Suárez_Madrid–Barajas_A...
There is good and bad to gentrification. You don't hear stories of the people who bought their house for 50k in 1980 who then sold it in 2010 for 1.3MM. Or the people thankful they don't have to walk around in fear of gangs for themselves or their children.
TO me the biggest problem is the State. In SF, among many many other things, it's their zoning policies that caused the housing crisis. But they run education and media. So people blame the most revolutionary green company, or others bring wealth to the area, instead of the State.
It's probably a net positive overall though, especially if the money these people are paid (and spend locally) is coming from other parts of the world/country.
Location is everything.
If there is not enough housing and you keep adding jobs then those jobs will be lost. It's better to "lose" a city than an entire country like USA did.
That should be "Inside of Europe" because the barriers to selling cars in the EU are just about the same as selling Nevada cars in California.
For US->Europe tariffs for cars are around 10% I believe.
The fee to register a car for use on public road varies. It's very high in Denmark (120% of the value or something) but the place of manufacture doesn't affect that. Second hand imported cars still need to pay it.
* Exception is the duty paid on alcohol and cigarettes, depending how you define it.
I don’t think the domestic market size is primary. They built a factory in Nevada.
Oslo is roughly 454 km² and it has over 400 charging stations. Oslo has a lot of electric cars because of incentives and the relative ease of finding somewhere to charge your car. Tel Aviv's centre is 52km² and its metropolitan area is 1,519 km², so it alone is going to need quite a few charging stations.
Like Hawaii, which just passed 10,000 electric cars and has more solar power than the power company can absorb during the day.
Since Google openly collects data on it's users, I suspect that fact does not sit well with that same populous.
Not sure how they can be GDPR compliant, maybe it's only in the US where all cars are tracked in real-time?
Not entirely. I can choose not to use Gmail or similar services.
I can opt out of Google ads+tracking only because I'm technically adept enough. I can't (realistically) opt out of reCaptcha.
Furthermore the comment seemed in reference to the origins of fascist political ideology in Europe and their relation to what happened when data mining was weaponized against a population.
But I think their main concern was gentrification not fascism.
We do have Teslas all over the place.
If you do a quick job search, those places have the most jobs in Auto and also the highest wages.
https://www.thelocal.de/20150924/what-the-vw-scandal-means-f...
Germany is the home of Mercedes, BMW, and VW (which owns Porsche and Audi and is one of the largest car manufacturers in the world). Their economy is very dependent on the auto industry. They are also home to many automotive suppliers including bosch and kuka. They are also one of the largest markets in Europe.
So yeh it's all these reasons: logistics, infrastructure, talent. Plus they need German's to think of Tesla as a local brand. Imagine if Tesla is gutting market share from these other companies and they were in another country. It would engender resentment.
Plus Berlin is a cool city :-)
Thing is with Brexit, you have 50% wanting to leave, 50% wanting to stay and a proportional represented result being playout out by a first past the post system, yielding all sorts of chaotic stagnation. Which all gets blamed upon the initial proportional vote.
Hence if any business is asked about the UK, the whole uncertainty and chaos will come up in the subject. Just that people love to presume that was the single reason and without that things would be different. I don't see any reason or indication from Elon or Tesla to of picked the UK, even without the current climate of chaos and limbo finger pointing politics.
What do you feel about non-resident Chinese nationals investing in real-estate in your city & driving up prices? I noticed HN tends to be ok with gentrification if it's done by well-paid geeks, but not when the same group gets priced-out.
All while jacking up prices of apartments/food/services for everyone.
Where is the positive net effect for people here? The city&state will earn more tax revenue, but for the neighborhood there's nothing positive that's going to happen.
not everything is about money
I take "poor citizens" but cultural fecund Berlin anytime over "rich" USA cities with homeless people living on the streets while FAANG workers spend half of their huge salary on mediocre apartments
> and how would >400 "well-compensated" people affect the city in anything but a positive manner?
a city is not only (I would say not at all) the offices of big corporations.
Berlin is also many other things like Köpi or Blu's graffiti in Kreuzberg that he removed few years ago because gentrifiers saw them as a way to keep the place "cool" and raise prices [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/19/why-we...
/me swoons
It might be that the administration is different (e.g. the large vehicle importer usually pays it, but you pay it yourself if you're buying some exotic Lotus direct from Britain).
Denmark has high taxes for registering a vehicle for public use to pay for road construction or maintenance and to discourage car use (or rather, to make the people using the roads pay their way).
The EU has import taxes on vehicles to protect its own vehicle industry, to both maintain that industry and the jobs within it.
For the US it usually means some successful SV FAANG type software company.
For Germany it's usually some successful hardware engineering company (Siemens, Bosch, Mercedes, Arri, Infineon, Continental etc.). Those companies can afford to pay the equivalent of FAANG wages in Germany albeit at a smaller scale.
Southern Germany has more experience and talent in the latter while Berlin has more software startups and web devs, similar to the former.
There is also a steady supply of students from that branch of tech - AFAIK AutoNOMOS Lab still exists and there are multiple universities in town that over computer science focused on embedded systems.
1. I'm not a well-paid geek.
2. What you are describing isn't gentrification.
First off, the number of building permits did actually increase more twofold (by number of apartments) between 2012 and 2018 (the first rent control law took effect in 2015)[1].
Secondly, the rent control law doesn't apply to newly constructed buildings. So suggesting it would somehow decrease incentive to build new apartments is ludicrous. In fact the opposite is true. If you want to have higher rents, you need to construct new buildings.
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/sPgCyTn.png - screenshot because direct links don't work on that page. Source: https://www.statistik-berlin-brandenburg.de
To no one's surprise
In any case a 10% fluctuation can hardly be called "basically cut in half", as you put it. I am reading "10%" as "basically unchanged".
As it stands your argument is not even supported by the sources you are citing yourself.
Edit:
Ahah! When just comparing the single month of September we can find a decrease of about 50% though, according to the article (couldn't find a source for the number though, see below). So at least we have a number like that if we make the window so small that the data we have is beyond useful.
A 50% fluctuation on a monthly basis is perfectly normal though. For instance there was a +120% change in April 2018 / April 2019 (1517 vs 3345)[1] in total permits on a per-apartment basis. You can find plenty of such fluctuations though when just looking at months.
The data is pretty much completely useless on a month-by-month basis and can easily be skewed by a few large projects.
Also I can't figure out where that article is pulling its numbers from, because it quotes "more than 1700 permits for apartments last year in September", while the official statistics[1] just have 1301 when counting any kind of permit. For completeness, here is the press release referred to by the article, which also doesn't contain any number like that: https://www.statistik-berlin-brandenburg.de/pms/2019/19-11-0...
[1]: https://www.statistik-berlin-brandenburg.de/publikationen/St...
But of course by "opt out" you mean to remain a user of a service but not the parts you don't like. Whether you are entitled to do this or not is still up for debate.
Ah, I was waiting for somebody to make this argument, which I find somewhat disingenuous given how widespread reCaptcha's use is.
With sites I don't care about leaving them is exactly what I do - but there are sites I pay a lot of money to use, and can't really avoid using for business reasons, yet they still subject me to reCaptcha.
The path I've taken instead is to address this with the site owners. Most weren't really aware of how overreaching reCaptcha feels to some, and I've had good discussions. Of course nobody changed their site based on my complaint, but I like to think I raised awareness.
> But of course by "opt out" you mean to remain a user of a service but not the parts you don't like.
Specifically, a part of user verification. I'm still not sure why they feel they need to verify my humanity - they've got my credit card details and everything.
> Whether you are entitled to do this or not is still up for debate.
Let me ask the opposite question: is the owner of a website entitled to sell my privacy for their own (debatable) convenience?
Tbh reCaptcha irks me more than ads.
Well yeah, they are, you're accepting that by using the recaptcha widget. Don't use it and then nobody will sell your data.
With Tesla, I'm directly buying their product or not, and they do have competitors that I could choose from (not particularly great ones yet, I'll admit, but they do exist today and they're going to get there eventually).
With Google's ad tech and captcha, my data is being siphoned off to them by third parties. I'm looking at totally unrelated service X, and suddenly I'm faced with Google. The burden of boycott becomes much higher than in the Tesla case, which makes it reasonable to state that opt-out is "not [practically] possible".
The situations would be comparable if upon encountering a Google captcha I could choose to solve somebody else's captcha to access the same service.
they are not "third-party". If a site uses google's products (like analytics or recaptcha), then you could reasonably consider them partner sites to google.
Indeed, google is difficult to boycott - no one is diputing it. However, google obviously isn't very offensive to a large number of people, because there are very dedicated groups who dedicate time and energy into boycotting companies like nestle (which is _very_ difficult to boycott). May be a lot of laymen just don't think that their data is worth protecting (whether they are right or not remains to be seen).
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