In a busy factory, machinists move sheets of aluminum roll in the back door to be molded, stamped, twisted and notched into high-tech electric cars that sell for more than USD 60,000 each.
Down the road in another plant, crews slice solar cells, place them under glass sheets and create panels that ship by the boxful to Europe. Elsewhere in this town, industrial workshops and laboratories buzz with workers building everything from robots to microprocessors.
Welcome to Fremont, California, a nondescript suburb of 217,000 tucked in the high-tech region between San Francisco and Silicon Valley where something unique is happening: manufacturing.
From Tesla Motors, making cutting-edge cars, to Solaria, making solar panels, manufacturers are drawn to Fremont by incentives including a five-year waiver on business taxes, an expedited regulatory process, proximity to Silicon Valley firms and a skilled labor force.
Those were key factors for Sanjiv Malhotra, president of Fremont-based fuel cell maker Oorja Protonics, which looked at several US cities before choosing the California city in 2006.
This year he's ramping up his factory and doubling his crew to 35 workers, who are paid between USD 14 and USD 18 an hour. All work is done onsite.
"One time, we tried outsourcing components to China, and that came back to bite us," he said. "It was going to save us lots of money, but the quality was so poor it ended up costing us deeply."
Parminder Dhaliwal moved to Fremont from a village near Ludhiana, India, three years ago. He works as a manufacturing engineer at Sonic Manufacturing, where about 350 workers assemble printed circuit boards, earning about USD 15 an hour.
He said their location draws business, because many of their customers, Silicon Valley innovators, want to pop in regularly to see how their orders are being built.
The manufacturing industry, along with an Afghan refugee resettlement program, has made Fremont one of California's most culturally diverse cities, with 50 per cent of its residents from Asia, and 14 per cent Hispanic.
"People come here from all over for these jobs," Dhaliwal said. "Fremont is that melting pot people speak of. I felt very comfortable going into this community. Everything is open to me. It really does feel like the land of opportunity here."
Today the city boasts more than 110 manufacturing businesses, including 30 working in clean technologies.
