I'd be surprised if stern didn't order parts and sub-assemblies from china. They just put it all together in the USA, they don't actually make every part in the USA.

My best friend has lived in Guangzhou for 5 or 6 years teaching English, his apartment is paid for, and he makes good wages. Not amazing by Canadian standards, but he lives well in china and can afford to travel the Far East and come home regularly. China is not the same country as it was 20 years ago, sure their are the occasional horror storied, but things are getting better. They're able to produce quality products as well as any other nation.

(Just think how many people died building Hoover dam, those building practices would never fly anymore, and those poor conditions paved the way for the better laws of today.) china isn't as bad as the average American thinks.

I believe most of the debate in this thread is caused by poor education.

The biggest problem with self driving cars gets to the crux of this debate. When an autonomous car sees an obstacle on the road it has no idea if the obstacle is a brick that should be swerved around or is it Big Mac container that you can just smash through. Humans have critical thinking abilities that computers just don't "get" yet. With machine learning algorithms the computers are getting better at figuring out the world around them and soon will be able to become as skilled as humans in A LOT of jobs. I foresee a future where all cars will be electric and autonomous, gas stations will be few and far between. New jobs will be created, ones that we haven't even thought of yet. Currently kids can leave high school with careers in YouTube or online gaming. I don't understand it, but there's definitely a market for it with the younger generations. Remember, evolution is inevitable your ability to change is not. The world is changing around us at an ever increasing rate and we must keep up.

Move production to china? Hell, in twenty years we might be debating moving production to Africa or some other area of the world that is beginning to prosper in this new Information Age.

Hahahaha. Do you understand that traction control and stability control IS A.I. Whenever the traction control kicks in; it is your car saving you from doing something wrong. It's not a very intelligent system, but it can already control the car in an emergency situation better then you can....and you trust it to work properly.

I'm just sayin.

Manual gas driven

This won't be a problem with fully autonomous vehicles. You'll buy a car with a full warranty package and the car will drive it's self to the garage while you're at work. Scheduled maintenance will happen automatically at your convenience

I heard that the Tesla model S has 18 moving parts, although it's probably a pretty loose definition of "moving parts" (is a steering rack one part? Suspension? Window motor?) but there's no doubt the entire car has less moving parts then an internal combustion engine. Also the regeneration from breaking would reduce wear and tear on the break pads. I believe that it's done with magnetic induction and could virtually stop the car without a lot of mechanical force