Recently, Reuters news said that Tesla China confirmed the plan to build a second factory in Shanghai, which is ready to increase the annual production capacity of 450,000 vehicles, including model 3 and Model Y, to become the "world's largest automobile export hub".
Reuters said they saw a thank-you note from Tesla to the Shanghai government. The letter revealed that the company will build a new plant on land near the same area, which is poised to add annual production capacity of 450,000 vehicles, including the Model 3 and Model Y, to become "the world's largest auto export hub."
For a time, the statement that "Tesla will set up a second factory in Shanghai" was on the hot search, but on May 5, some media said that the accurate information obtained from Tesla's internal relevant people was "expansion, not the second factory."
This news was already displayed on a land transfer announcement on the official website of the Shanghai Land Exchange Market in early March: the plot covers a total area of 461,142.40 square meters, located in the Lingang Heavy Equipment Industrial Zone of the Free Trade Zone, and the type of access industry is new energy vehicle manufacturing. It is foreseeable that the plot will most likely be used for the expansion of the Tesla factory.
The above-mentioned insiders revealed that Jiangxi, Hubei and other provinces had eagerly thrown olive branches to Tesla and invited Tesla to build factories in the local area, but in the end they were all rejected by Tesla.
The insider also pointed out: "If there are no accidents in the Berlin factory, it will take on the export responsibility of Model Y in Europe, but they cannot be expected to accept all the production pressure overnight." At that time, the focus of the Shanghai plant will still be the global production and export of the Model 3, and of course, a small number of Y models in Asia. As for the landing of new models in Shanghai, it is also planned. ”
However, the current production capacity of the Berlin factory is still in the difficult climbing stage, and recently due to a leak in the paint workshop of the Berlin factory, the environmental protection organization Green Alliance asked to revoke the operating license of Tesla's Berlin Gigafactory.
Therefore, it is expected that the Berlin factory will still be difficult to shoulder the heavy responsibility in the short term, and the Shanghai factory is still the core of Tesla's production capacity in the European market and even the global market, so capacity expansion is the trend of the times.
According to the data, in 2021, Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory delivered a total of 484,130 vehicles, of which more than 160,000 vehicles were delivered in overseas markets to meet the needs of more than ten countries such as Europe and Asia.
Although the official correction of the second factory statement, whether it is expansion or second plant, it means that the Shanghai factory will usher in a substantial increase in production capacity; media reports say that after the completion of the expansion project, the total production capacity of Tesla's Shanghai factory will be increased to 1 million vehicles per year.
At present, with the assistance of Shanghai, Pudong New Area, and Lingang, Tesla has officially resumed work and production, and the ramp-up of production capacity is also steadily advancing.
Tesla expressed its gratitude to Lingang officials in the above-mentioned letter, describing how a company operated by Lingang Group arranged for buses to transport 6,000 Tesla workers and their suppliers to the factory and carry out the disinfection work needed for the company to enter "closed-loop" production. Tesla said in the letter that they fought for three consecutive days, working day and night to ensure that our company's workers could return to the factory.
At present, Shanghai's anti-epidemic has achieved obvious results, and the number of new confirmed cases has dropped from thousands of cases per day to hundreds of cases per day, and it is believed that Tesla's production capacity will be restored to the pre-epidemic level in the near future.