Tesla Scores a Sweet Deal and Manufacturing Day Debuts: 25 in 2025

In 2010, Toyota President and CEO Akio Toyoda had heard the buzz about upstart electric-vehicle maker Tesla, which had started manufacturing its stylish Roadster vehicles one at a time in a garage behind its showroom in California, and decided to see things for himself. Toyoda flew from Japan with a team of Toyota engineers to Palo Alto to meet CEO Elon Musk and take one of the new models for a test drive. Toyoda, a “master driver” who had raced cars, put the Tesla through its paces on the surrounding mountain roads and gave it a big thumbs up. He also offered Musk the mothballed plant in Fremont, California for $42 million. GM abandoned the plant during its government-sponsored bankruptcy, and in 2009, Toyota decided not to operate the NUMMI plant without its former partner.

Considering the 5.5 million-square-foot turnkey plant was valued at $1.3 billion, it was a real boon for Musk, and instrumental in getting Tesla into the business of mass-producing EVs, while early competitors idled. NUMMI came equipped with a plastics molding factory, two paint shops, assembly lines and its own power plant.

Toyota also invested $50 million in Tesla and provided $15 million in additional factory equipment for the plant. That phenomenal boost from Toyota, combined with Musk’s business plan to produce luxury vehicles to raise enough money to make lower-cost mass market EVS, distinguished Tesla from the pack.—Laura Putre

Remember the “shale gale”? That’s what some experts called the rapid rise of shale gas production starting in the early 2010s. Thanks in no small part to the shale revolution, the United States became a net exporter of natural gas in 2017 for the first time since the late 1950s, and a net energy exporter in 2019. Multiple factors contributed to increased shale gas exploration, including Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when natural gas prices spiked in response to significant disruptions to pipelines, offshore platforms and processing facilities.

But it was improved (and controversial) production technologies, known as hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) and horizontal drilling, that reduced the cost of extracting shale gas from impermeable shale and made it an economical energy source to mine. While plentiful and affordable natural gas was a boon to all manufacturers, it particularly aided gas-intensive industries, especially those that use natural gas as a feedstock—the chemical industry and fertilizer manufacturing, for instance. Numerous reports have tied the shale gas boom to increased manufacturing capital investment and overall U.S. manufacturing growth.—Jill Jusko 

Roughly a decade after entering the WTO, China marked a landmark manufacturing achievement: Its manufacturing output surpassed that of its previous chief rival, the United States. China’s manufacturing production in 2010 was $2.37 trillion to the United States’ $2.36 trillion. The disparity has only grown in the past 15 years. China produced $4.661 trillion in 2024 to the United States’ $2.9 trillion the same year.

Fast forward another decade and a half, the dollar value of China manufacturing output is more than 1.6 times United States’. According to the World Bank, China produced $4.66 trillion in 2024 to the United States’ $2.9 trillion the same year.—Ryan Secard

The birth of the Industry 4.0 concept actually begins in 2011 at the trade show Hannover Messe in Germany, where technology manufacturer Bosch introduced the concept of “Industrie 4.0,” integrating information and communication systems across the manufacturing plant.

The German government took notice of the presentation and in 2012 incorporated industry 4.0 into its “High-Tech Strategy 2012” plan. GE later that year also released a whitepaper arguing that the “industrial internet” could be worth trillions of dollars.

The following year, a working group led by Bosch and former executives from German software company SAP presented an 85-page paper of Industry 4.0 recommendations to the German government. This is sometimes marked as the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution.

While Industry 4.0 methodologies still aren’t ubiquitous across manufacturing, the precepts are now well-proven and the value of networked plants generally accepted. Thanks to the number of vendors that focus on specific aspects of Industry 4.0 technologies, versus offering overwhelming software stacks and hardware packages, it is more possible than ever for manufacturers of all sizes to join the revolution.—Dennis Scimeca

Manufacturing Day was created in 2012 by the Fabricators and Manufacturers’ Association (FMA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to show the public what modern manufacturing looks like and address the skilled-worker gap. That first Manufacturing Day took place in the Midwest and featured about 240 events. The initiative grew rapidly, reaching over 3,000 events across the nation in 2019. As the perception of modern manufacturing began to change, more workforce partnerships were created to fill the trades gap and advance industry in the U.S.

Now well-known across the industry as a day to invite school groups into the plant to see new technology and show students the possibility of a manufacturing career, Manufacturing Day has helped raise youth awareness of well-paid, meaningful jobs that don’t require a college degree. It also brought manufacturers together in different communities to collaborate on tours and solutions to workforce shortages, paving the way for more collective action in the future—Anna Smith