What will make domestic manufacturing competitive?
Build demand first
Local demand is the route to domestic production growth, with the EV market offering more potential than energy storage.
I'll tell you the way to have the biggest impact on the domestic battery manufacturing industry is by having high demand. If you get high demand here locally, that domestic manufacturing will follow very quickly.
The EV market is much, many times bigger than you'll ever get in the ESS market. So the, and we think, I mean, I think the upside here is tremendous on the EV market side.
Secure the supply chain
Domestic manufacturing depends on bringing supply chains to the West and making sourcing resilient.
I think the biggest challenge is the supply chain. How are we going to bring this supply chain over to the West? It just is clearly still dominated by the Chinese.
I think it also de risks us from supply disruptions, being vertically, vertically integrated and having our own source of materials. I'd say it's more from a resilience standpoint, ensuring supply.
Integrate teams and production
Keeping engineering, production and related functions together can help connect development with manufacturing.
Even Tesla today, where they've got their production in Texas and they've got R and D in one location, pilot in another location, prototype, we've got everything in one location, which really gives us an advantage because you can imagine putting engineers together.
The first platform team was the LH and it was cross functional engineering, purchasing, manufacturing, finance, product planning, design, all working together on the same team and got that one launched.