How Tesla Planted the Seeds for Its Own Potential Downfall (2024)

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katrin bennhold

From “The New York Times,” I’m Katrin Bennhold. This is “The Daily.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Today, the story of how China gave Tesla a lifeline that saved the company — and how that lifeline has now given China the tools to beat Tesla at its own game. My colleague, Mara Hvistendahl, explains.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It’s Tuesday, April 9.

So, Mara, you’ve spent the past four months investigating Elon Musk and his ties to China through his company, Tesla. Tell us why.

mara hvistendahl

Well, a lot of American companies are heavily invested in China, but Tesla’s kind of special. As my colleagues and I started talking to sources, we realized that many people felt that China played a crucial role in rescuing the company at a critical moment when it was on the brink of failure and that China helps account for Tesla’s success, for making it the most valuable car company in the world today, and for making Elon Musk ultra rich.

katrin bennhold

That’s super intriguing. So maybe take us back to the beginning. When does the story start?

mara hvistendahl

So the story starts in the mid 2010s. Tesla had been this company that had all this hype around it. But —

archived recording 1

A lot of people were shocked by Tesla’s earnings report. Not only did they make a lot less money than expected, they’re also making a lot less cars.

mara hvistendahl

Tesla was struggling.

archived recording 1

The delivery of the Model 3 has been delayed yet again.

archived recording 2

Tesla engineers are saying 40 percent of the parts made at the Fremont factory need reworking.

mara hvistendahl

At the time, they made their cars in Fremont, California, and they were facing production delays.

archived recording 3

Tesla is confirming that Cal/OSHA is investigating the company over concerns over workplace safety.

mara hvistendahl

Elon Musk has instituted a kind of famously grueling work culture at the factory, and that did not go over well with California labor law.

archived recording 4

The federal government now has four active investigations involving Tesla.

mara hvistendahl

They were clashing with regulators.

archived recording 5

The National Transportation Safety Board will investigate a second crash involving Tesla’s autopilot system.

archived recording 6

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk — friends are really concerned about him. That’s what Musk told “The New York Times.”

mara hvistendahl

And by 2018, he was having all of these crises.

archived recording 6

According to “The Times,” Musk choked up multiple times and struggled to maintain his composure during an hour-long interview about turmoil at his electric car company, Tesla.

mara hvistendahl

So all of this kind of converged to put immense pressure on him to do something.

katrin bennhold

And where does China come in?

mara hvistendahl

Well, setting up a factory in China, in a way, would solve some of these problems for Musk. Labor costs were lower. Workers couldn’t unionize there. China provided access to this steady supply of cheaper parts. So Elon Musk was set on going to China. But first, Tesla and Musk wanted to change a key policy in China.

katrin bennhold

Hmm, what kind of policy?

mara hvistendahl

So they wanted China to adopt a policy that was aimed at lowering car emissions. And the idea was that it would be modeled after a similar policy in California that had benefited Tesla there.

katrin bennhold

OK, so explain what that policy actually did. And how did it benefit Tesla?

mara hvistendahl

So California had this system called the Zero-Emission Vehicle program. And that was designed to encourage companies to make cleaner cars, including electric vehicles. And they did that by setting pollution targets. So companies that made a lot of clean cars got credits. And then companies that failed to meet those targets, that produced too many gas-guzzling cars, would have to buy credits from the cleaner companies.

katrin bennhold

So California is trying to incentivize companies to make cleaner cars by forcing the traditional carmakers to pay cleaner car makers, which basically means dirtier car makers are effectively subsidizing cleaner cars.

mara hvistendahl

Yes, that’s right. And Tesla, as a company that came along just making EVs, profited immensely from this system. And in its early years, when Tesla was really struggling to stay afloat, the money that it earned from selling credits in California to polluting car companies were absolutely crucial, so much so that the company structured a lot of its lobbying efforts around this system, around preserving these credits. And we talked to a former regulator who said as much.

katrin bennhold

How much money are we talking about here?

mara hvistendahl

So from 2008, when Tesla unveiled its first car, up until the end of last year, Tesla made almost $4 billion by selling credits in California.

katrin bennhold

Wow. So Musk basically wants China to recreate this California-style program, which was incredibly lucrative for Tesla, there. And they’re basically holding that up as a condition to their building a factory in China.

mara hvistendahl

Right. And at this point in the story, an interesting alliance emerges. Because it wasn’t just Tesla that wanted this emissions program in China. It was also environmentalists from California who had seen the success of the program up close in their own state.

If you go back to that period, to the early 2010s, I was living in China at the time in Beijing and Shanghai. And it was incredibly polluted. We called it airpocalypse at times. I had my first child in China at that point. And as soon as it was safe to put a baby mask on her, we put a little baby mask on her. There were days where people just would try to avoid going outside because it was so polluted. And some of the pollution was actually wafting across the Pacific Ocean to California.

katrin bennhold

Wow, so California is experiencing that Chinese air pollution firsthand and, in a way, has a direct stake in lowering it.

mara hvistendahl

That’s right. So Governor Jerry Brown, for example — this became kind of his signature issue, was working with China to clean up the environment, in part by exporting this emission scheme. It was also an era of a lot more US-China cooperation. China was seen as absolutely crucial to combating climate change.

So you had all these groups working to get this California emissions scheme exported to China — and the governor’s office and environmental groups and Tesla. And it worked. In 2017, China did adopt a system that was modeled after California’s.

katrin bennhold

It’s pretty incredible. So California basically exports its emissions-trading system to China, which I imagine at the time was a big win for Californian environmentalists. But it was also a big win for Tesla.

mara hvistendahl

It was definitely a big win for Tesla. And we know that in just a few years Tesla, made almost $1 billion from the emissions-trading program he helped lobby for in China.

So Elon Musk goes on, builds a factory in China. And he does so in Shanghai, where he builds a close relationship with the top official in the city, who actually is now the number-two official in all of China, Li Qiang.

katrin bennhold

Wow.

mara hvistendahl

So according to Chinese state media, Elon Musk actually proposed building the factory in two years, which would be fast. And Li came back and proposed that they do it in one year, which — things go up really quickly in China. But even for China, this is incredibly fast. And they broke ground on the factory in January 2019. And by the end of the year, cars were rolling off the line. So then in January 2020, Musk was able to get up on stage in Shanghai and unveil the first Chinese-made Teslas.

archived recording (elon musk)

Really want to thank the Tesla team and the government officials that have been really helpful in making this happen.

mara hvistendahl

Next to him on stage is Tesla’s top lobbyist who helped push through some of these changes.

archived recording 7

Thank you. Yeah, everybody can tell Elon’s super, super happy today.

[SPEAKING CHINESE]

mara hvistendahl

And she says —

archived recording 7

Music, please.

mara hvistendahl

Cue the music. [UPBEAT MUSIC]

And he actually broke into dance. He was so happy, a kind of awkward dance.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

katrin bennhold

And what is the factory like?

mara hvistendahl

The Shanghai factory is huge. 20,000 people work there. Tesla’s factories around the world tend to be pretty large, but the Shanghai workers work more shifts. And when Tesla set up in China, Chinese banks ended up offering Tesla $1.5 billion in low-interest loans. They got a preferential tax rate in Shanghai.

This deal was so generous that one auto industry official we talked to said that a government minister had actually lamented that they were giving Tesla too much. And it is an incredibly productive factory. It’s now the flagship export factory for Tesla.

katrin bennhold

So it opens in late 2019. And that’s, of course, the time when the pandemic hits.

mara hvistendahl

Yes. I mean, you might think that this is really poor timing for Elon Musk. But it didn’t quite turn out that way. In fact, Tesla’s factory in Shanghai was closed for only around two weeks, whereas the factory in Fremont was closed for around two months.

katrin bennhold

That’s a big difference.

mara hvistendahl

Yes, and it really, really mattered to Elon Musk. If you can think back to 2020, you might recall that he was railing against California politicians for closing his factory. In China, the factory stayed open. Workers were working around the clock. And Elon Musk said on a podcast —

archived recording (elon musk)

China rocks, in my opinion.

mara hvistendahl

— China rocks.

archived recording (elon musk)

There’s a lot of smart, hardworking people. And they’re not entitled. They’re not complacent, whereas I see —

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

archived recording 8

We’ve seen a lot of momentum and enthusiasm for electric vehicles, stocks, and Tesla certainly leading the charge.

mara hvistendahl

Tesla’s stock price kept going up.

archived recording 9

Tesla has become just the fifth company to reach a trillion-dollar valuation. The massive valuation happened after Tesla’s stock price hit an all-time high of more than $1,000.

mara hvistendahl

So this company that had just a few years earlier been on the brink of failure, looking to China for a lifeline, was suddenly riding high. And —

archived recording 10

Tesla is now the most valuable car company in the world. It’s worth more than General Motors, Ford, Fiat, Chrysler.

mara hvistendahl

By the summer, it had become the most valuable car company in the world.

archived recording 11

Guess what? Elon Musk is now the world’s richest man.

archived recording 12

“Forbes” says he’s worth more than $255 billion.

mara hvistendahl

And Elon Musk’s wealth is tied up in Tesla stock. And in the following year, he became the wealthiest man in the world.

katrin bennhold

So you have this emission trading system, which we discussed and which, in part, thanks to Tesla, is now established in China. It’s bringing in money to Tesla. And now this Shanghai factory is continuing to produce cars for Tesla in the middle of the pandemic. So China really paid off for Tesla. But what was in it for China?

mara hvistendahl

Well, China wasn’t doing this for charity.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

What Chinese leaders really wanted was to turn their fledgling electric vehicle industry into a global powerhouse. And they figured that Tesla was the ticket to get there. And that’s precisely what happened.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ll be right back.

katrin bennhold

So, Mara, you’ve just told us the story of how Elon Musk used China to turn Tesla into the biggest car maker in the world and himself — at one point — into the richest man in the world. Now I want to understand the other side of this story. How did China use Tesla?

mara hvistendahl

Well, Tesla basically became a catfish for China’s EV industry.

katrin bennhold

A catfish, what do you mean by that?

mara hvistendahl

It’s a term from the business world. And, essentially, it means a super aggressive fish that makes the other fish in the pond swim faster. And by bringing in this super competitive, aggressive foreign company into China, which at that point had these fledgling EV companies, Chinese leaders hoped to spur the upstart Chinese EV makers to up their game.

katrin bennhold

So you’re saying that at this point, China actually already had a number of smaller EV companies, which many people in the West may not even be aware of, these smaller fish in the pond that you were referring to.

mara hvistendahl

Yes, there were a lot of them. They were often locally based. Like, one would be strong in one city, and one would be strong in another city. And Chinese leaders saw that they needed to become more competitive in order to thrive.

And China had tried for decades to build up this traditional car industry by bringing in foreign companies to set up joint ventures. They had really had their sights set on building a strong car industry, and it didn’t really work. I mean, how many traditional Chinese car company brands can you name?

katrin bennhold

Exactly none.

mara hvistendahl

Yeah, right. So going back to the aughts and the 2010s, they had this advantage that many Chinese hadn’t yet been hooked on gas-guzzling cars. There were still many people who were buying their first car ever. So officials had all these levers they could pull to try to encourage or try to push people’s behavior in a certain direction.

And their idea was to try to ensure that when people went to buy their first car, it would be an EV — and not just an EV but, hopefully, a Chinese EV. So they did things like — at the time, just a license plate for your car could cost an exorbitant amount of money and be difficult to get. And so they made license plates for electric vehicles free. So there were all these preferential policies that were unveiled to nudge people toward buying EVs.

katrin bennhold

So that’s fascinating. So China is incentivizing consumers to buy EV cars and incentivizing also the whole industry to get its act together by chucking this big American company in the mix and hoping that it will increase competitiveness. What I’m particularly struck by, Mara, in what you said is the concept of leapfrogging over the conventional combustion engine phase, which took us decades to live through. We’re still living in it, in many ways, in the West.

But listening to you, it sounds a little bit like China wasn’t really thinking about this transition to EVs as an environmental policy. It sounds like they were doing this more from an industrial-policy perspective.

mara hvistendahl

Right. The environment and the horrible era at the time was a factor, but it was a pretty minor factor, according to people who were privy to the policy discussions. The more significant factor was industrial policy and an interest in building up a competitive sphere.

katrin bennhold

So China now wants to become a leader in the global EV sector, and it wants to use Tesla to get there. What does that actually look like?

mara hvistendahl

Well, you need sophisticated suppliers to make the component parts of electric vehicles. And just by being in China, Tesla helped spur the development of several suppliers. Like, for example, the battery is a crucial piece of any EV.

And Tesla, with a fair amount of encouragement — and also various levers from the Chinese government — became a customer of a battery maker called CATL, a homegrown Chinese battery maker. And they have become very close to Tesla and have even set up a factory near Teslas in Shanghai. And today, with Tesla’s business — and, of course, with the business of some other companies — CATL is the biggest battery maker in the world.

katrin bennhold

Wow.

mara hvistendahl

But beyond just stimulating the growth of suppliers, Tesla also made these other fish in the pond swim faster. And the biggest Chinese EV company to come out of that period is one called BYD. It’s short for Build Your Dreams.

archived recording 13

We are BYD. You’ve probably never heard of us.

archived recording 14

From battery maker to the biggest electric vehicle or EV manufacturer in China.

archived recording 15

They’ve got a lot of models. They’ve got a lot of discounts. They’ve got a lot of market growth.

archived recording 16

China’s biggest EV maker just overtook Tesla in terms of worldwide sales.

archived recording 17

BYD 10, Chinese automobile redefined.

mara hvistendahl

I’ve actually started seeing that brand on the streets here in Europe recently, especially in Germany, where my brother actually used to lease a Tesla and now leases a BYD.

katrin bennhold

Does he like it?

mara hvistendahl

He does. Although he did, to be fair, say that he misses the luxury of the Tesla, but it just became too expensive, really.

katrin bennhold

The price point is a huge reason that BYD is increasingly giving Tesla a run for its money. Years ago, back in 2011 —

archived recording 18

Although there’s competitors now ramping up. And, as you’re familiar with, BYD, which is also —

mara hvistendahl

— Elon Musk actually mocked their cars.

archived recording 18

— electric vehicles, here he is trying to compete. Why do you laugh?

mara hvistendahl

He asked an interviewer —

archived recording (elon musk)

Have you seen their car?

archived recording 18

I have seen their car, yes.

mara hvistendahl

— have you seen their cars? Sort of suggesting, like, they’re no competition for us.

archived recording 19

You don’t see them at all as a competitor?

archived recording (elon musk)

No.

archived recording 19

Why is that? I mean, they offer a lower price point.

archived recording (elon musk)

I don’t think they have a great product. I think their focus is — and rightly should be — on making sure they don’t die in China.

mara hvistendahl

But they have been steadily improving. They’ve been in the EV space for a while, but they really started improving a few years ago, once Tesla came on the scene. That was due to a number of factors, not entirely because of Tesla. But Tesla played a role in helping train up talent in China. One former Tesla employee who worked at the company as they were getting set up in China told me that most of the employees who were at the company at the time now work for Chinese competitors.

katrin bennhold

Wow.

mara hvistendahl

So they have really played this important role in the EV ecosystem.

katrin bennhold

And you mentioned the price advantage. So just for comparison, what does an average BYD sell for compared to a more affordable Tesla car?

mara hvistendahl

So BYD has an ultra-cheap model called the Seagull that sells for around $10,000 now in China, whereas Tesla Model 3s and Model Ys in China sell for more than twice that.

katrin bennhold

Wow. How’s BYD able to sell EVs at these much lower prices?

mara hvistendahl

Well, the Seagull is really just a simpler car. It has less range than a Tesla. It lacks some safety measures. But BYD has this other crucial advantage, which is that they’re vertically integrated. Like, they control many aspects of the supply chain, up and down the supply chain. When you look at the battery level, they make batteries. But they even own the mines where lithium is mined for the batteries.

katrin bennhold

Wow.

mara hvistendahl

And they recently launched a fleet of ships. So they actually operate the boats that are sending their cars to Europe or other parts of the world.

katrin bennhold

So BYD is basically cutting out the middleman on all these aspects of the supply chain, and that’s how they can undercut other car makers on price.

mara hvistendahl

Yeah. They’ve cut out the middleman, and they’ve cut out the shipping company and almost everything else.

katrin bennhold

So how is BYD doing now as a company compared to Tesla?

mara hvistendahl

In terms of market cap, they’re still much smaller than Tesla. But, crucially, they overtook Tesla in sales in the last quarter of last year.

katrin bennhold

Wow.

mara hvistendahl

Yeah, that was a huge milestone. Tesla still dominates in the European market, which is a very important market for EVs. But BYD is starting to export there. And Europe traditionally is kind of automotive powerhouse, and the companies and government officials there are very, very concerned. I interviewed the French finance minister, and he told me that China has a five - to seven-year head start on Europe when it comes to EVs.

katrin bennhold

Wow. And what has Elon Musk said about this incredible rise of BYD in recent years? Do you think he anticipated that Tesla’s entry into the Chinese market could end up building up its own competition?

mara hvistendahl

Well, I can’t get inside his head, and he did not respond to our questions. But —

archived recording (elon musk)

The Chinese car companies are the most competitive car companies in the world.

mara hvistendahl

— he has certainly changed his tune. So, remember, he was joking about BYD some years ago.

katrin bennhold

Yes.

mara hvistendahl

Yeah, he’s not joking anymore.

katrin bennhold

Right.

archived recording (elon musk)

I think they will have significant success.

mara hvistendahl

He had dismissed Chinese EV makers. He now appears increasingly concerned about these new competitors —

archived recording (elon musk)

Frankly, I think if there are not trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world.

mara hvistendahl

— to the point that on an earnings call in January, he all but endorsed the use of trade barriers against them.

archived recording (elon musk)

They’re extremely good.

katrin bennhold

I think it’s so interesting, in a way — of course, with perfect hindsight — the kind of maybe complacency or naivete with which he may not have anticipated this turn of events. And in some ways, he’s not alone, right? It speaks to something larger. Like, China, for a long time, was seen as kind of the sweatshop or the manufacturer of the world — or perhaps as an export market for a lot of these Western companies. It certainly wasn’t putting out its own big brand names. It was making stuff for the brand names.

But recently, they have quite a lot of their own brand names. Everybody talks about TikTok. There’s Huawei. There’s WeChat, Lenovo. And now there is BYD. So China is becoming a leader in technology in certain areas. And I think that shift in some ways has happened. And a lot of Western companies — perhaps like Tesla — were kind of late to waking up to that.

mara hvistendahl

Right. Tesla is looking fragile now. Their stock price dropped 30 percent in the first quarter of this year. And to a large degree, that is because of the threat of companies like BYD from China and the perception that Tesla’s position as number one in the market is no longer guaranteed.

katrin bennhold

So, Mara, all this raises a much bigger question for me, which is, who is going to own the future of EVs? And based on everything you’ve said so far, it seems like China owns the future of EVs. Is that right?

mara hvistendahl

Well, possibly, but the jury is still out. Tesla is still far bigger for now. But there is this increasing fear that China owns the future of EVs. If you look at the US, there are already 25 percent tariffs on EVs from China. There’s talk of increasing them. The Commerce Department recently launched an investigation into data collection by electric vehicles from China.

So all of these factors are creating uncertainty around what could happen. And the European Union may also add new tariffs against Chinese-made cars. And China is an economic rival and a security rival and, in many ways, our main adversary. So this whole issue is intertwined with national security. And Tesla is really in the middle of it.

katrin bennhold

Right. So the sort of new Cold War that people are talking about between the US and China is, in a sense, the backdrop to this story. But on one level, what we’ve been talking about, it’s really a corporate story, an economic story that has this geopolitical backdrop. But it’s also very much an environmental story. So, regardless of how Elon Musk and Tesla fare in the end, is BYD’s rise and its ability to create high-quality and — perhaps more importantly — affordable EVs ultimately a good thing for the world?

mara hvistendahl

If I think back on those years I spent living in Shanghai and Beijing when it was extremely polluted and there were days when you couldn’t go outside — I don’t think anyone wants to go back to that.

So it’s clear that EVs are the future and that they’re crucial to the green energy transition that we have to make. How exactly we get there is still unclear. But what is true is that China did just make that transition easier.

katrin bennhold

Mara, thank you so much.

mara hvistendahl

Thank you, Katrin.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

archived recording 20

Oh my god!

[CROWD CHEERING]

katrin bennhold

Millions of people across North America were waiting for their turn to experience a rare event on Monday. From Mexico —

archived recording 21

Cuatro, tres, dos, uno.

[CROWD CHEERING]

katrin bennhold

— to Texas.

archived recording 22

Awesome, just awesome.

archived recording 23

We can see the corona really well. Oh, you can see —

katrin bennhold

Illinois.

[BACKGROUND CHATTER]

archived recording 24

Oh, and we are falling into darkness right now. What an incredible sensation. And you are hearing and seeing the crowd of 15,000 gathered here in south Illinois.

katrin bennhold

Including “Daily” producers in New York.

archived recording 25

It’s like the sky is almost —

archived recording 26

Wow.

archived recording 25

— like a deep blue under the clouds.

archived recording 26

Oh my god.

archived recording 27

Wait, look. It’s just —

archived recording 25

Oh my god. The sun is disappearing. And it’s gone. Oh. Whoa.

archived recording 27

Wow.

katrin bennhold

All the way up to Canada.

archived recording 28

Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. That’s what I’m talking about.

[CROWD CHEERING]

katrin bennhold

The moon glided in front of the sun and obscured it entirely in a total solar eclipse, momentarily plunging the day into darkness.

archived recording 29

It’s super exciting. It’s so amazing to see science in action like this.

[CROWD CHEERING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

katrin bennhold

Today’s episode was produced by Rikki Novetsky and Mooj Zadie with help from Rachelle Bonja. It was edited by Lisa Chow with help from Alexandra Leigh Young, fact checked by Susan Lee, contains original music by Marion Lozano, Diane Wong, Elisheba Ittoop, and Sophia Lanman and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m catching Katrin Bennhold. See you tomorrow.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

How Tesla Planted the Seeds for Its Own Potential Downfall (2024)

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