The Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai is the first such facility to be built in China and is wholly owned by a foreign manufacturer. It is also the first Tesla factory outside of the United States. There, since 2019, Tesla manufactures both the Model 3 as Model Y with the intention of satisfying the demand of the local market, although it has also used this factory to cover the demand of other world markets such as Europe. But one thing is to manufacture these cars in China and another that your pieces come from there. The vice president of Tesla in China has revealed How Chinese are the electric cars that are manufactured there.
One of the keys to the proper functioning of an automobile manufacturing plant is that the suppliers of the parts and components are close to the installation, to simplify logistics and storage tasks. That is no exception in the case of the Shanghai Gigafactory, and Elon Musk has always been very clear about it. From day one Tesla has sought to make the Shanghai supply chain as local as possible, which is probably one of the reasons why the Chinese government has supported this project with such interest.
The Shanghai Gigafactory began construction on January 7, 2019. A year later, in December 2019, it delivered its first Model 3. Since then, in the last two years, Tesla has grown in China at the same rate as those called there. new energy vehicles. Taking advantage of the fact that the Shanghai plant has celebrated in style the production of one million electric cars in just over two and a half years, the vice president of Tesla in ChinaGrace Taohas offered some interesting facts about its supply chain.
The team of workers of all levels of the Tesla plant in Shanghai is in a 99.9% Chinese and the supply chain is already 95% located there. These same numbers were published by Elon Musk’s account on the local Chinese Weibo network on August 13, when the millionth vehicle left the plant’s production lines.
The rapid development of Tesla and other major Chinese electric car manufacturers such as NIO, XPeng Motors and Li Auto, it has sparked a sea change in China’s electric vehicle industry that is advancing at an unprecedented pace buoyed by a multibillion-dollar market. In August last year, Xinhua quoted Yuan Guohua, chairman of the Lingang Group, as announcing that by the end of 2021, around 90% of parts for Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory would be supplied by local suppliers.
The Shanghai Gigafactory currently has an annual production capacity of more than 750,000 vehicles, making it Tesla’s largest factory worldwide, according to the company’s second-quarter economic report released on July 20. Tesla upgraded its production lines between late July and early August and, according to some local information, it has managed to increase the annual production capacity to 1.1 – 1.2 million units.
Also, with this update, Tesla has managed to reduce the delivery times of Model 3 and Model Y in China in such a way that they have gone from a range of 8 to 24 weeks to 4 to 8 weeks. China is the largest market for electric vehicles in the world and therefore the most important for Tesla. Any production problem in Shanghai would significantly affect deliveries in China and the markets to which Tesla exports from there, such as Europe.
