The first facility of its kind outside the United States.
American EV carmaker Tesla is making moves forwards again, after having been temporarily entangled with the US Securities & Exchange Commission over Elon Musk’s uncontrollable tweeting. It’s announced that it has purchased from the government of Shanghai a plot of land totalling some 860,000 square metres to establish the first-ever Gigafactory outside the US. The announcement was made on the QQ social media platform that’s prevalent in China.
Earlier reports carried a price tag of about US$2-billion to set up an operational Gigafactory in China, a number that the US company will have to raise on the stock market. The plot of land itself set Tesla back some US$199-million (or 973-million Yuan, to be exact), leaving US$1.8-billion of the estimated budget to get the Shanghai Gigafactory up and running.
Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory should be online in a couple of years time, with a suggested annual production capacity of about 500,000 cars. However that number won’t be hit the moment the doors open, as Tesla has clarified that after opening the factory, they will need “two to three years before the factory is fully ramped up.”
The Shanghai Gigafactory will allow Tesla to serve the Chinese market, the world’s fastest-growing EV market, without having to deal with the 40% import tariff that’s presently applied to US-imported vehicles. It will also allow Tesla to serve customers on this end of the world more efficiently, as we’ve little doubt that China-built Teslas won’t be exported within the greater Australasian region.
