Tesla's Shanghai factory expansion completed; annual output to double

Tesla has successfully completed the upgradation of the production lines at its Shanghai factory and now will be testing them until November 30 as it doubles the plant's annual output to one million vehicles. As per a document filed to the Shanghai government’s environmental information disclosures platform, this upgrade took about nine months.

Over time, Tesla aims to expand the output of its Shanghai factory to lift the Model Y output to about 14,000 SUVs a week from about 11,000 pre-pandemic, while Model 3 sedan production will rise to 7,700 units from 5,500.

In 2021, Tesla shipped 484,130 cars from its Shanghai factory, accounting for about 52% of its global deliveries. It went to extraordinary lengths to keep the factory running during Shanghai’s Covid lockdown, putting thousands of workers in a so-called closed-loop system, whereby they slept in designated facilities to maintain partial production. The Shanghai facility was Tesla’s first overseas production base.

In a separate development, Tesla rolled out its 10,000th Model Y electric crossover from its Giga Texas plant. The automaker entered into the production of the Tesla Model Y at the facility in April 2022. This comes as a step toward Tesla's strategy to ramp up production of its cars to more than 250,000 units annually. The automaker shared a photo from the celebration of the milestone and wrote "10,000 Model Ys built at Giga Texas to date" on Twitter.

In August this year, Tesla revealed that Giga Texas has been producing more than 1,000 units of the Model Y every week. Since then, it has not been revealed further about the current production volume. But, it has cleared that Giga Texas has a manufacturing capacity that is higher than 250,000 units annually. Considering the installed manufacturing capacity, Tesla is probably producing more than 5,000 units every week or so.