3 keys about Tesla’s successful Giga Shanghai ramp
The factory that the company has built in China is key to understanding Tesla’s production ramp of the last two years and its success.
When Elon Musk announced in 2012 that his company would build 500,000 cars by 2020, nobody believed him. Ramping up production in the automobile sector is extremely hard and no other new venture could do it in the last decades. Predicting this output for a new company that would have to deal with a completely new drivetrain technology was insane and I don’t blame analysts for thinking that it couldn’t be done.
But, when, in January 2021, the company announced that they sold 499,550 vehicles and produced almost 510,000, most media was just amazed at how they could do it. Just one year after, in 2021, this figure almost doubled to more than 936,000 units.
To explain this huge success, we have to talk about Gigafactory 3, Shanghai.
Location and construction works
Since the beginning of the Model 3 ramp, it was clear that Tesla was going to build a new facility in order to increase its output. Fremont was not a completely new factory and some of the company’s ideas about how this type of building should be couldn’t be…
