

Kudos for mentioning Xiaomi, they recently showed off their newest car factory, and it’s insanely highly automated, with workers basically only doing quality control!
China is probably the new masters of mass production, which I suppose is natural considering they have a home market of 1.4 billion people, they can invest in mass production for China only, and have a scale that is 4 times the scale of USA!
No country has ever had such a massive home market before China, and I think it’s a huge advantage for China regarding mass production.


Here “Good enough” matches the quality of most car brands and AFAIK surpasses Tesla.
To get quality like BMW or Mercedes, is probably only a matter of the automation being more expensive, there is no reason to think for instance Xiaomi couldn’t make higher quality automated assembly on more expensive cars.
Tesla assembly sucks, I have often heard reviewers complain about noises you wouldn’t find in way cheaper European cars.