Not only is Tesla on the verge of opening two brand-new electric car factories in the near future – one in Texas and another in Germany – but it's also continuously improving and expanding its existing properties. Tesla's latest reported investment to expand its Gigafactory in China comes just a few months after a similar investment.
In November 2021, Tesla announced a $200 million investment to expand Giga Shanghai and hire 4,000 new employees. According to Electrek, based on a new Tesla filing revealed by Reuters, the automaker has planned another expansion to its EV plant in China. As you may know, it wasn't long ago that the automaker made it official that the factory in China is now its primary export hub.
The information published by Reuters reads as follows via Electrek:
"Tesla Inc plans to expand parts production at its Shanghai factory to meet growing demand for exports, according to a document it filed with the city government. The automaker will add production workshops, increase the number of workers and lengthen the time equipment is operational, the document."
While Tesla certainly got off to a rocky start in China thanks to loads of adversity, it seems to have leveled out, and the factory is overproducing. However, even while Giga Shanghai is cranking out cars well beyond Tesla's earlier guidance, it still can't keep up with the growing demand for its EVs across the globe.
Electrek says Tesla's newly announced investment will work to expand production at the China-based export hub to a capacity of 1 million vehicles per year. The factory has already proven that it can exceed the production capacity of Tesla's Fremont factory, and it pulled off an epic feat in Q4 2021, producing around 178,000 vehicles. In addition, in 2021, Tesla's revenue in China increased by 100% for the second year in a row.
Tesla guided for some 500,000 vehicles to come out of Giga Shanghai in 2021. The automaker ended up delivering a total of over 936,000 EVs in 2021, with about one out of every five vehicles for the year coming out of Giga Shanghai in the fourth quarter alone. In January 2022, the Tesla China factory saw a year-over-year delivery increase of nearly 300 percent.
Amid plenty of skepticism, Tesla built the Shanghai factory in record time, and, according to Electrek, it's now the largest and most productive EV plant in the world. The factory's annualized production capacity at the end of 2021 came in at over 800,000 vehicles, though recent production and delivery information suggests that number continues to rise.
