Apple Supplier Foxconn Agrees to Buy Ohio Car Factory for $230 Million

If current software indicates how stable this car will be, will it be called “buggy”?

Didn't Foxconn grift Michigan out of a pile of cash promising to make flat screen TV's and leave town in the dark of night like a monorail salesman from "The Simpsons"?

Wasn't that Wisconsin ('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_in_Wisconsin')?

Foxconn is in for a huge awakening. Northern Ohio hasn't built anything outside of a labor union since about 1735, right? Okay, I'm being facetious, but only a little.

Because the Lordstown workers are all members of the UAW local? They don't call that part of the country "the rust belt" just because they salt the roads when it snows!

I don't think Foxconn knows what a union is. Just wait until the first one comes off the line with a wrinkle in the paint or an improperly connected air bag. If the union has any urge to strike (and they often do), that car will get sold as is, right along with any that may be proven to have exploding batteries or wheels with faulty bearings, boots, or bolts.

Nobody will fix it because the union will have rules against that. Yeah, I said it; deal with it.

I know how this goes. My family and I owned and drove GM cars for decades. We kept the faith far far longer than General Motors had the right to expect. Some of us even worked for a local.

We were not in the UAW, but it's all the same; the worst performers learn how to game the system and avoid doing real work, while the people with a conscience are berated and even penalized for doing the right thing. Pick up a piece of paper so that my co-workers won't slip and fall on the greasy plant floor? No, you can't do that, there's somebody who's job is to do ONLY that thing all day. Pick up paper. Okay, but where is he? Oh, he's smoking pot in the locker room.

Finally, I had had enough of breakdowns and expensive, poorly made parts from the RenCen (GM's headquarters in downtown Detroit).

So I made my own flight plan and got out of the unions, moved away from the rust belt, and s sold off my last lemon General Motors product. I haven't driven anything from GM or Chrysler since. Everybody else (and I do mean everybody) was making a better, more reliable vehicle. Even Subaru and VW! And after a bailout (instead of a bankruptcy, which would have been the right thing to do), GM still wasn't making good products, so I haven't been back.

No, I don't lay ALL of this at the feet of the unions. But it's a big piece of it. A huge piece of it even, and Foxconn probably has no idea what they're getting themselves into.

But I could be wrong, and maybe Foxconn will bring the bigger hammer. In that case, then maybe the unions will be in for a huge awakening and we'll see some real change in quality coming from the automotive industry.

Either way, this should be fun to watch, so I plan to pop some popcorn for this show. The unfortunate side-effect of course, is that anything Foxconn makes or assembles, whether for Apple or anybody else, will probably just become even more expensive. We'll have to see how this all susses out.

Very sad to see that plant mostly sitting idle when I drive by occasionally for work... glad it was bought by a company that hopefully will make use of all that property.

Didn't Foxconn grift Michigan out of a pile of cash promising to make flat screen TV's and leave town in the dark of night like a monorail salesman from "The Simpsons"?

Side note. The days of cheap manufacturing in China are coming to a close. Energy supply issues. You know when it hits CNN and CNBC it was happening in China 6 months ago, so maybe the US will be a more viable place to complete assembly, IDK.

If current software indicates how stable this car will be, will it be called “buggy”?

If you focus on the few glitches in any release, things look dire; sure. But 99.999% of the software works perfectly.
The VW I bought has little bugs and glitches in the software, but while I'd like them fixed, they are basically 1st world problem issues. Like the drive selector in the dash might show "D" when I've moved to Economy setup and it should say "E". Drives as it should, just a display glitch.
Very few people are experiencing any sort of "it doesn't work at all" bugs in any of Apple's software releases. The last one I can recall was when an iOS update disabled cellular on Asian iPhones, and that update was pulled and patched pretty quickly.

Didn't Foxconn grift Michigan out of a pile of cash promising to make flat screen TV's and leave town in the dark of night like a monorail salesman from "The Simpsons"?

Side note. The days of cheap manufacturing in China are coming to a close. Energy supply issues. You know when it hits CNN and CNBC it was happening in China 6 months ago, so maybe the US will be a more viable place to complete assembly, IDK.

The reason that so much manufacturing happens in China isn't nearly driven as much by labor costs as people think. It's really two other things:
a) labor skills: in the US we've all but abandoned the skilled trades such as tool and die creation. China embraces those skills. An Apple exec once said there's basically a handful of people in the US with those skills but in China you can fill multiple sports stadiums with people possessing those skill sets.
b)Labor pool: You'll read articles about Foxconn needing 30,000 employees to ramp up production for new products or during holiday, and they can fill that demand in a few days. That simply cannot happen in the US. Foxconn would need to open many locations across the country to sate their need for labor and that would dramatically reduce their efficiencies.