Tesla Inc. is sending engineers and production staff from its recently upgraded Shanghai factory to help with an expansion of its plant in Fremont, California, according to people familiar with the plans, a move that could help the US facility ramp up production.
(Bloomberg) — Tesla Inc. is sending engineers and production staff from its recently upgraded Shanghai factory to help with an expansion of its plant in Fremont, California, according to people familiar with the plans, a move that could help the US facility ramp up production.
Elon Musk’s electric carmaker will dispatch on-site staff, in particular automation and control engineers, to help ramp up production at Fremont, where Tesla’s Model S, X, 3 and Y vehicles are produced, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. About 200 people will head to Fremont, on assignments that will last at least three months, one of the people said. The first workers are setting off as soon as this month, the person added.
A representative for Tesla in China declined to comment.
Tesla delivered a record 83,135 cars in China in September after increasing capacity at its Shanghai factory. The upgrade of the Chinese plant, Tesla’s first outside of the US, took about five weeks, including machinery maintenance and improvements overseen by automation and control engineers. That helped double the factory’s annual capacity to around 1 million vehicles, Bloomberg News has reported. Fremont can produce about 650,000 cars a year.
The uptick in production has trimmed the wait time for a Tesla in China to between one to four weeks, from a peak of as long as 22 weeks earlier this year, according to the automaker’s website. Last week it cut prices across its lineup to attract buyers in the face of tougher competition from local manufacturers like BYD Co., which is also expanding globally.
By comparison, customers ordering a Model Y sports utility vehicle in the US may have to wait until as late as April 2023 for delivery, Tesla’s website shows. In its third-quarter deliveries report, the company noted increased logistics and supply chain challenges.
Tesla delivered 343,830 cars worldwide last quarter, and has a target of 50% average annual growth. It has recently opened factories in Texas and Germany.
“As our production volumes continue to grow, it is becoming increasingly challenging to secure vehicle transportation capacity and at a reasonable cost during these peak logistics weeks,” the automaker said last month. Tesla has for years delivered big batches of vehicles toward the end of each quarter, a practice Musk has tried to move away from by localizing production in all major regions globally.
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