Tesla China Engineers Go To Fremont Factory To Help Boost Production

Around 200 engineers and production staff from Tesla Shanghai will be coming to California, the first as early as this month.

By: Andrei Nedelea

Nov 2, 2022 at 12:30pm ET

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Tesla will bring some 200 engineers and production staff from its recently upgraded factory in Shanghai, China to its Fremont plant in California (which recently built EV number 2-million). Thanks to improvements made to the Shanghai plant, Tesla China has managed to cut delivery times to between one and four weeks, from as much as 22 weeks earlier in 2022.

If you order a Model Y in the United States, though, you may have to wait until next Spring to take delivery. Staff from China will start arriving in California this month and will stay for as long as three months, according to Automotive News, which quotes unnamed sources from within the company.

The Texas-based automaker delivered 343,830 vehicles around the world in the third quarter of 2022, an increase of 35 percent over Q2 when it sold 254,695 vehicles. Most of this was down production rate increase in China, which wasn’t just attributed to the factory upgrade, but also to Tesla China resolving supply chain issues and lifting pandemic restrictions in the second half of the year.

Gallery: Tesla Giga Shanghai (Tesla Gigafactory 3)

Unless Tesla is able to speed up deliveries in the US, it may miss its self-imposed goal of selling 50 percent more cars in 2022 than it did in 2021. That means it would have to sell 1.4-million cars until the end of the year, which currently doesn’t seem likely given that Nikkei Asia reported at the start of October that at that point Tesla had sold just over 908,000 vehicles.

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Will Chinese staff be able to help enough so that Tesla would be able to deliver almost half-a-million cars until December 31? Well, given that Elon Musk said that transport and logistics were the main obstacles – there just aren’t enough vehicles to move its new cars around, according to Musk; this doesn't seem like a problem Tesla could solve on its own.

According to a Reuters report, Tesla is also reportedly planning to keep its Shanghai factory (pictured in the gallery above) going at close to maximum capacity (93 percent) all the way through to the end of the year, presumably to try to make up for problems elsewhere. The Chinese plant was reportedly able to increase its weekly output from 17,000 vehicles per week to around 22,000 units produced thanks to the aforementioned upgrade.