Tesla plans to expand capacity at its car plant in Shanghai, allowing it to increase the number of employees at the site by about a third and boost production in the world’s largest electric car market. according to the profile of a company.
The US carmaker will spend around Rmb1.2 billion (£140 million) to increase capacity at the facility, bringing the maximum number of workers at the plant from 15,000 to 19,000.
Records in China do not say how many more vehicles the factory will produce.
Its Shanghai site, which began production at the end of 2019, can now produce about 450,000 cars a year, just short of the number of cars Tesla sold globally last year.
The expansion comes after Tesla forced to apologize to consumers in China earlier this year after its response to complaints sparked protests against the company and drew outrage from state media.
CEO Elon Musk has set an ambitious goal of producing 20 million vehicles a year by the end of the decade, an achievement that, if successful, would make Tesla twice as large as Volkswagen or Toyota, the two major manufacturers. in the industry today.
Tesla is on track to produce nearly 1 million vehicles this year, despite most of its rivals cutting production because of a global chip shortage.
In its third-quarter results last month, Tesla said revenue rose 57% to $13.8 billion year-over-year, while posting a record quarterly profit of $1.6 billion.
While Musk hasn’t laid out the network of factories he plans to build to help Tesla meet its 2030 goal, the business is building several locations simultaneously.
Tesla is currently building a manufacturing facility in Germany, as well as a facility in Texas, and it has been reported that the company is also exploring a second manufacturing site in China.
Last month, Musk told Tesla investors that the Shanghai site produced more cars than its flagship facility in Fremont, California.
Their Chinese site manufactures the Model 3, sells it domestically and exports to Europe, and the Model Y.
The electric-car maker relies on a domestic production base and uses cheaper batteries to help boost sales in China, but entering the market has not been without difficulties.
In June, the group was forced to recall almost every car sold in China because of a bug in the software that controls the vehicle.
Their cars have also been banned from some government sites over concerns about the cameras used in their lane-keeping systems. Last month, Tesla opened a data center in Shanghai to help allay concerns about locally collected driving and camera data.
Additional reporting by Wang Xueqiao in Shanghai
