jsheradin

The authorities allege that he was doing it to obtain vaccine batch numbers needed for making fraud proof-of-vaccination documents.

Although I'm sure the headline is true, at least with my industry it's a little misleading. All we did over the past few years was cut in Mexico as middle men.

There's no cost effective domestic source of a particular raw material so it's traditionally been purchased from China and turned into a product in the US. With various tariffs and labor costs it's now cheaper to purchase the same raw material from China, turn it into components in Mexico (thus a Mexican product), and then do final assembly in the US. On paper we're importing things from Mexico but the majority of the money still ends up in the same place.

I'm curious if that's the case for other industries.

The LLV is all chunky aluminum panels, chunky switches, overbuilt engine, beefy drivetrain (especially when it only needs to handle 90hp), etc. They're far from efficient or well packaged but they're basically indestructible and if something does break it's a piece of cake to swap it out.

The Canoo is pretty much the opposite. It makes way better use of materials and packaging but as a result it's not overbuilt to the same degree. It's almost certainly designed around being a passenger car which only need to survive ~100k miles before things are allowed to start falling apart. With everything being so tightly integrated you can't be as granular in replacing components. Whole assemblies/modules will need to be replaced in one expensive swoop.

I'm really curious what the longevity of these things will be. There's fewer moving parts and regenerative braking to help with the mechanical side of things but electrochemically there's way more going on. I hope they work out but even if they don't Canoo should get some really good real world test info they can use to learn and improve.