Tesla has just resumed work and is about to stop production, but this time to expand production capacity.
Text | Dou Yajuan
Edit | Wang Hailu
According to an internal information, Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory will be on holiday on July 1-4, because in order to cooperate with the factory's production transformation, the whole plant has lost power. In addition, "Late Auto" learned that the vehicle production workshop of the Model 3 in tesla factories will be suspended from July 18, and workers will take more than 15 days off. The Model Y's production hall will also be revamped in July to increase production capacity.
Tesla Gigafactory, located in the Lingang New Area of Shanghai, will start production of Model 3 in October 2019 and Model Y in late 2020. According to the Association, the Shanghai plant produced 144,000 vehicles in 2020 and a total of 480,000 vehicles in 2021, accounting for 51.7% of Tesla's global production last year.
In November last year, tesla will "optimize" the production line in the second phase of the Shanghai Super Factory (Phase I) and transform the production line in the workshops of stamping, body, painting and final assembly to increase production. The way to transform is to increase the working hours, the number of employees, and increase the frequency of material turnover. Tesla insiders said Tesla will elongate the wire body, increase workstations and so on.
At present, Tesla's Shanghai factory produces 900 Model 3s and more than 1600 Model Ys per day. After the expansion, it is expected to produce about 1,200 Model 3 and more than 2,000 Model Ys per day.
In other words, the monthly production capacity of Tesla's Shanghai plant will be increased to 96,000 vehicles, with an annual production capacity of more than 1.1 million.
According to the public document, Tesla's investment in the transformation of the production line is as high as 1.2 billion yuan, and 4,000 employees will be added after the expansion, and the total number of employees will reach 19,000.
However, a number of Tesla insiders said that at present, Tesla's official recruitment channels have stopped recruiting ordinary workers, and a number of candidates for the electronic control and battery departments have received emails with suspension of entry, citing business adjustments.
"Late Auto" confirmed this news with Tesla officially, and the other party did not comment.
Tesla has reduced production by more than 70,000 vehicles due to the epidemic
Affected by the epidemic, Tesla stopped production for 22 days from March 28 to April 18.
According to the first financial report, on April 18, after the government issued a list of enterprises that resumed work, Tesla sent a shuttle to connect employees to the factory point-to-point. The first batch of about 8,000 workers to resume work was closed in the Tesla factory for more than a month.
"Late Auto" learned that there is no dormitory in the Tesla factory, but there are accommodation and toiletries for workers. A Tesla employee said that in the past two months of closed life, there have been many places of residence. He was first arranged to sleep in a conference room at the factory, and later moved to a hotel where Tesla lived outside the factory. There are also workers who have been sleeping in camp beds in factories.
During the closed-loop production period, workers work six days a week, each working day can receive a subsidy of 400 yuan, a rest day can receive a subsidy of 100 yuan, and workers who do not arrive at the factory receive basic wages.
Under normal conditions, the Shanghai Tesla factory produces three shifts, each shift is 12 hours, doing 4 off 2. During the closed production period, Tesla changed to single-shift production. Three or four days after workers returned to work, production capacity climbed to full capacity for single-shift production. In mid-to-late May, the second batch of workers entered the factory, and Tesla switched to two shifts of production until June 11, when the factory was unsealed.
According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Tesla's Shanghai plant produced about 26,000 vehicles in the first month of resuming production (April 19 to May 19). Wu Xiaohua, deputy secretary of the Party Working Committee of the Hailingang New Area, said at a press conference that as of May 17, the capacity utilization rate of Tesla's Shanghai Lingang plant had recovered to 45%, slightly lower than SAIC's 50%.
"Delay Auto" learned that the current production capacity of Tesla's Shanghai factory has basically returned to full production.
In April and May this year, Tesla produced 44,000 vehicles, compared with an average of about 60,000 vehicles produced per month in the first quarter, which is equivalent to a two-month production reduction of more than 70,000 vehicles.
Tesla adopts a sales model of production-to-order production, and insufficient capacity has led to a longer pick-up cycle. According to Tesla's sales staff, it is now necessary to wait 4-5 months to order the Tesla Model 3, and the standard endurance version of the Model Y needs to wait 2.5-3.5 months, high performance 4-5 months, and long battery life of 5-6 months.
Production in 2022 will hit 1.5 million units
The Shanghai plant is currently Tesla's largest factory in the world, producing a total of 480,000 units in 2021, of which 160,000 are exported to more than 10 countries in Europe and Asia.
In January, Musk said on the fiscal year 2021 earnings call that tesla vehicle deliveries would easily grow by more than 50% year-on-year by 2022.
Tesla currently has a total of four factories around the world. The California plant, which started operations in 2012, produces all Tesla models on sale, with a planned production capacity of about 600,000 units; Shanghai is Tesla's second factory, producing the Model 3 and Model Y, not only to meet the local market, but also to export to the outside world. Plants in Berlin, Germany, and Texas, USA, started production in March and April this year to produce Model Y, with a planned annual production capacity of 500,000 units.
Under the epidemic, Tesla's factories in various places have been affected, of which the Shanghai factory has been relatively small. In an interview with Tesla Owners Silicon Valley in May, Tesla CEO Musk said the Texas and Berlin factories were suffering billions of dollars in losses due to shortages of batteries and battery-making equipment.
The California plant was shut down on March 23, and it wasn't until May 7 that the California government said it would allow manufacturers in the state to resume operations from March 8. However, the health department of Alameda County, where the factory is located, issued a statement on the same day saying that Tesla did not meet the standards for resuming work and could not resume work.
Musk restarted production at the California plant on May 11 and tweeted that he would file a lawsuit against Alameda County while moving his headquarters out of California.
In the context of the impact of the epidemic and supply chain on factories in the United States and Germany, the position of the Shanghai factory is even more important. In the first quarter of this year, Tesla delivered 182,200 units in China, accounting for 58.8% of global deliveries.
On a first-quarter earnings call, Musk said that while second-quarter results are expected to be slightly worse, it is estimated that 1.5 million vehicles could still be produced this year.