The Leaning Factories 274
At a rate of 25 per week, Tesla assembled the Roadster
in a garage behind the showroom in Menlo Park, San
Francisco, and in the Lotus factory in England. But the
new Model S would need a large factory. Tesla didn’t want
to move to Detroit, even though they would have found
many empty factories in the area, and they didn’t want to
move the production to another country.^210 “I think we are
seeing a bit of resurgence in US manufacturing and we’ll
see more of it because things are getting not that cheap in
China,” Elon said. “I would never build in China, out of
intellectual property concerns. It’s asking for trouble there.
And I’d have to travel to China all the time.”^190
Another option Tesla thought about was to build a new
factory in New Mexico. But the then state Governor of
California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, opposed the idea. “I
wasn’t about to let the company that makes the world’s
sexiest and best high-performance electric car go to another
state, so we left no stone unturned,” he said.^337
Tesla dreamed about how they one day would build
cars in NUMMI. “That would be awesome,” Elon said.
“Maybe at some point we have an opportunity to acquire
NUMMI, but that isn’t available right now, and we can’t
afford it really, unless they give it to us.”^350
One day, the NUMMI plant managers received an
unexpected call from the president of Toyota, Akio Toyoda,
who gave Elon a secret permission to visit the factory. To
prevent media attention from spoiling the deal, Toyoda
wanted to keep it quiet, so Elon visited the factory incog-