Tesla's Roadster: a feat, and a warning

The Roadster's unveiling comes as Western politicians, from Washington to Brussels to Berlin, are treating cheap Chinese exports as a problem of overproduction and erecting trade barriers, such as the EU-China quota-and-tariff deal on hybrid cars. Semafor argues this diagnosis misses a deliberate strategy spelled out in China's five-year industrial plans, which aim at national power rather than profit. That reading is reinforced by Peking University's Lu Feng, who warns that curbing "overproduction" would be "tying our own hands," and by Brookings' Kyle Chan, who calls the outlook "industrial maximalism." Against that backdrop, Tesla's own history cuts both ways: its Shanghai gigafactory, built in 2019, and the local supply chains it developed were a catalyst for the entire Chinese EV industry, and Musk himself warned in 2024 that without trade barriers China would "pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world." The Roadster, in this telling, is less a counterattack than a retreat into a niche, while China's capacity to supply 100% of global EV demand and its robot output set the terms for everyone else.