Tesla and China: Auto Electrifying Idyll

Updated 10/29/2019 – 11/11/2019 & 11/12/2019

Tesla unveils ‘Made in China’ cars

By Jessica Hartogs, Editor at LinkedIn News

Updated 4 years ago based on the date of 9/25/2023

In a milestone for Tesla, the electric car company has revealed its first made-in-China cars. The select Model 3 vehicles were assembled in Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory and come with the brand’s name written in Chinese characters. China is the world’s largest auto market, and the Shanghai plant “is a crucial test of [Elon] Musk’s bid to keep his carmaker profitable as he bets on Chinese demand for electric vehicles,” says Bloomberg. While Tesla works with local authorities to get appropriate certification, the plant will produce a small number of vehicles, which start at about $50,000.

---

Mark Davenport• 3rd+Senior Manufacturing Engineer at Tesla 2d • Edited

#Gigafactory #Tesla 

Tesla ramps installation of Model Y production equipment in Giga Shanghai

Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, Electric Vehicle News

• #Tesla #teslamotors #chinaTesla ramps installation of Model Y production equipment in Giga Shanghaiteslarati.com •

Arunotei: Interesting translation from Chinese in the video – looks like the videographer use Google Translate for this. “Era of Ningde” is literal translation of the name of Chinese battery company CATL. Essentially the name of the video says, that Tesla will use CATL batteries for Made in China cars.

Maria Eugenia Martinez Enriquez out of network3rd+Sr. Manager at Tesla, Technical Program Management, NPI Powertrain 2y

And very soon we will be building three gigafactories in three different continents simultaneously ! Can’t stop us 👊🏻

---

“The Tesla China team has done an amazing job, I’m astounded how good the job is, […] I think it’s a good story for the world, to say, look how much progress you can make in China… I’ve never seen anything so fast that before/” Musk declared at an AI conference in Shanghai in August 2019.

The Model Y is also ahead of schedule, the company said. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology included Tesla on a list of approved automobile manufacturers (link in Chinese) it published Oct. 17, 2019. The trial production comes as China plans to resume taxing imported American cars at 40% starting from Dec. 15, 2019 in response to the 10% tariff the US put on $300 billion of imported Chinese goods in September 2019. ” End of Quote

China is the world’s largest auto market, and the Shanghai plant “is a crucial test of [Elon] Musk’s bid to keep his car maker profitable as he bets on Chinese demand for electric vehicles,” says Bloomberg. While Tesla works with local authorities to get appropriate certification, the plant will produce a small number of vehicles, which start at about $50,000. Source

Elon Love Story in Shanghai and You Are Not Alone

Electrifying Exchange of Love and Hospitality

Tesla Best Asian Buy

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said Thursday that it has added Tesla to the government list of approved automakers: delivering Tesla a certificate to start production in China. In January 2019, Tesla broke ground on this factory in Shanghai as its first overseas car manufacturing site.

The Gigafactory, China’s first fully foreign-owned auto plant, also reflects Beijing’s broader shift towards opening up its automotive market. Shanghai authorities offered Tesla’s help to speed up construction, including the discard of Tesla models from a 10 percent car purchase tax on Aug. 30, 2019.

Tesla t is now the first entirely foreign company to operate a plant in China. The Tesla Gigafactory 3 (Chinese: 特斯拉 上海 超级工厂 ) will produce battery cells along with Tesla Model 3 and Tesla Model Y cars. By the end of 2019, Tesla plans to produce at least 1,000 Model 3 per week, to boost sales in the world’s largest auto market and avoid increases in import duties on American cars.

Key Points on the Strategic Move of Tesla to China Production

CEO Elon Musk had previously called the Chinese market “critical” for his business; manufacturing in the world’s largest market for electric cars would help reduce transport and tariff costs. On October 02, 2018, a press release stated that Tesla operates at a 55 percent to 60 percent cost disadvantage compared with its Chinese peers.

Already in 2016, Elon Musk declared that Tesla is targeting the objective to manufacture cars in China.

The latest development of the Chinese Tesla plant comes after the Shanghai government stated in December 2018 on a social network account that Tesla could start manufacturing in the second half of 2019 while Tesla Company began to solicit bids for the construction of its gigafactory 3. that estimated to be $ 2 billion project.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said he hopes American carmaker Tesla can help drive the country’s continued opening up, and even offered its controversial chief executive Elon Musk Chinese permanent residency, according to the government’s website.

The pair met on Wednesday at Zhongnanhai – the former imperial garden in Beijing that is now home to the headquarters of the Communist Party and the government – two days after Tesla broke ground at its Gigafactory 3 project in Shanghai, its first production base outside the United States.

Tesla “broke ground” with its first factory outside of the U.S., in Shanghai. The electric car maker announced the Gigafactory 3 project earlier and bought the land outside of Shanghai for $140 million in October 2018. This Shanghai-based plant covering 200 acres will be Tesla’s first overseas plant and will produce 3 and Y models for the Chinese market it is expected to “produce approximately 3,000 Model 3 vehicles per week,” ramping production to 500,000 a year. It is also estimated that once the factory is fully operational, an annual capacity of 250,000 cars could be produced too.

Li congratulated Musk on the start of construction at the multibillion-dollar facility, which came just three months after America’s bestselling electric carmaker secured the land at an industrial zone in Lingang.

Local production is seen as a necessary move for Tesla, not only to minimize the impact of the ongoing US-China trade war but to help it fend off competition from domestic EV startups such as Nio, Byton, and XPeng. “Affordable cars must be made on the same continent as customers,” Musk recently tweeted.

http://cherkaouijournal.com/said-el-mansour-cherkaoui-and-china/

Once completed the Shanghai Gigafactory will be the first car plant in China to be wholly owned by a foreign company, since Beijing relaxed its restrictions on compulsory joint venture partnerships in some sectors last year.

“We hope you can get a firm foothold and expand the market,” Li said, adding that Tesla could be a “participant in China’s opening up and a promoter of stable China-US relations”.

Musk’s high-level meeting was not his first in China. In July, he met Vice-President Wang Qishan at Zhongnanhai and said on Twitter at the time that they discussed “history, philosophy and luck”.

His meeting with Li coincided with the end of the latest round of trade talks between Chinese and US officials in Beijing.

Tesla’s implementation in China benefited from the will of the Chinese Government to “revamp” its international image and “smooth” its trade relations with the United States it is reaching a high level of confrontation and retaliatory level of interactions.

The other aspect that facilitates Tesla’s acceptance in China is the determination of China to encourage electric and clean vehicles to limit the ravages of air pollution spreading in the Chinese metropolitan areas while also encouraging innovation in the technology of production of new vehicles.

For these reasons “Beijing announced in April regulations on foreign investment raising the ceiling for foreign investment in the electric industry which allowed also Tesla to form such financial leasing company in Shanghai without Chinese participation.

More on China, read the other analyses on China by Said El Mansour Cherkaoui at the following link:

Said El Mansour Cherkaoui and China – Oakland Chronicle

新年快乐 – Xīnnián Kuàilè  Invited by the Chinese Government to facilitate the international expansion

All these changes facilitated for Tesla to register in May 2018 a company in Shanghai for the manufacture and sale of electric cars which was followed by the signature of an agreement with the Shanghai government to build a Gigafactory. The succession of these events happened following the arrival of Musk to Shanghai in July 2018, just after the entry into force of the first round of tariffs between the United States and China.

Tesla to produce cheaper versions of Model 3 electric cars in Shanghai

“Shanghai Giga will produce affordable versions of 3/Y for greater China,” tweeted Musk. “All Model S/X & higher cost versions of Model 3/Y will still be built in US for [the worldwide] market, [including] China.”

Musk said he was impressed by the speed and efficiency of China’s development, and that it was hard to imagine that a car factory could be completed and opened in such a short time.

He said he would strive to make the new Shanghai factory one of the most advanced in the world while creating products to suit the needs of the Chinese market. On Monday he said production of the Tesla Model 3 was expected to start before the end of the year.

Shares in Chinese suppliers to Tesla, including Tianjin Motor Dies and VT Industrial Technology, rallied following Musk’s tweets.Source: Reuters

Global Electric Car Drive: Batteries Outsourced and Cars Locally Produced

Elon Musk‏ @elonmusk 2 Nov 2018: Tesla will manufacture all battery modules & packs at China Giga, as we do today in California & Nevada. Cell production will be sourced locally, most likely from several companies (incl Pana), in order to meet demand in a timely manner.

China, where half of electric cars are currently being sold, requires car manufacturers to use locally-built batteries and is calling the shots in the industry with two-thirds of the world’s production capacity of lithium-ion cells for batteries.

Only Asian firms appear in the top 10 of the industry: China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) accounted for 23 percent of global production last year, edging out Japan’s Panasonic at 22 percent.

China’s BYD followed at 13 percent and is the only car manufacturer to have prospered in making batteries.

South Korea’s LG Chem came in at 10 percent while Samsung SDI had 5.5 percent, according to the US-based Center for Automotive Research (CAR).

Europe accounts for only one percent of global production.

The United States also remains marginal on a global scale despite the Gigafactory that Tesla developed with Panasonic.

– China controls raw materials –

Another key factor in China’s supremacy: control over the raw materials needed to manufacture the batteries: lithium and cobalt.

According to Bloomberg, the Chinese firms Ganfeng and Tianqi control 17 and 12 percent respectively of the world production of lithium thanks to their investments in mines in Australia and South America.

Tianqi bought a 24 percent stake in Chilean miner SQM for $4.1 billion in December. Together with the US firm Albemarle it also controls the huge Greenbushes mine in Australia.

Meanwhile, Chinese firms control at least half of the cobalt extracted in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 70 percent of global output comes from, according to estimates cited by Bloomberg.

China Molybdenum bought a major site from the US firm Freeport-McMoran for $2.65 billion in 2016. China also has 80 percent of the world’s capacity to produce refined cobalt using chemical processes.

This is not a basic skill (“We are a car manufacturer, not chemically,” said Marianne Battalion, Renault E’s project manager last year), but second, whether the production was outsourced to Koreans or Chinese, many unemployed do motor factories instead.

Mercedes has taken the first step towards the solution: to manufacture the battery pack and control the technology around it, but to allocate the production of cells to those who can do it cheaply.

To this end, Daimler started construction of a second battery production plant in Kamens, near Dresden, in eastern Saxony. He added that the plant would enter service in mid-2018 and would cost Daimler an additional 500 million euros. Meanwhile, cellular production is moving from Asia to Eastern Europe.

For example, LG Chem is building a plant with more than 100,000 batteries in Wroclaw, Poland, while Samsung has built a battery site in Goed, Hungary, which is expected to start in early 2018 with a capacity of 50,000 cars per year. The media announced in May that SK Innovation, a South Korean supplier to Daimler, was to build a plant in Eastern Europe.

Elon Musk‏ @elonmusk 2 Nov 2018: To clarify further, the long-term goal for Tesla mass market products is local production for local markets (at least at the continent level). This is critical to make pricing as affordable as possible.

Next Localization @ Nanjing Road Gigafactory in Shanghai

• On the first week of December 2018, Tesla Motors Inc. have set up a $ 30 million financial leasing company based in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, along with its Chief legal representative, Zhu Xiaotong.
• Elon Musk’s electric car company said in January it is planning to start deliveries of the vehicle in China in March.
• In early January 2019, Tesla announced that Model 3 is officially open for selection and booking in mainland China. Tesla announced Friday during an event in Beijing that it’s beginning delivery of the Model 3 in China, ahead of schedule at least a week earlier than expected.
• State-funded Chinese news site The Paper also reported that a ship carrying more than 1,600 Model 3 vehicles had arrived in Shanghai
  Waigaoqiao Terminal.
• According to Shanghai Customs, this is the first large-scale Model 3 model in Shanghai. Model 3 is Tesla’s first “popular” model for the public.

The official website information for Chinese buyers shows that the long-life all-wheel drive version starts at 490,000 yuan, and the Performance high-performance all-wheel drive version starts at 560,000 yuan. The two Chinese standard cruising range is 590 km and 595 km respectively.

In addition, Tesla launched a long-life rear-wheel drive version with a price of 433,000 yuan for the Chinese market, and its Chinese standard cruising range will be no less than 600 kilometers. This model is the lowest-priced model in the Chinese market so far. In addition, during the Spring Festival this year, Tesla announced that the Model 3 model will be free to upgrade the enhanced AutoPilot auto-assisted driving function for a limited time, equivalent to a discount of 46,300 yuan to the owner.

Source: State-funded Chinese news site The Paper

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Feb. 19, 2019, Tesla’s 2018 annual report shows that the company’s revenues from China fell 13 percent in 2018 to $1.8 billion US dollars, down 15.4% year-on-year. In 2017, its sales in China was 2.027 billion US dollars.

Current Global Trends of Electric Cars

Global e-vehicle sales reach 2.1 million in 2018, China biggest growth driver while Tesla announces job cuts

In 2018, China has been the biggest growth driver in electric mobility, according to the study. Sales of e-vehicles in China, including commercial vehicles, increased by 62 percent to a record of 1.26 million.

The passenger car sector in China even grew by 82 percent to 1.05 million vehicles, increasing the market share of electric vehicles from 2.7 to 4.5 percent.

In the United States, the second biggest market after China, total sales of e-vehicles in 2018 increased by 86 percent to 361,000.

In Norway, Europe’s biggest single market for electric vehicles, new registrations went up by 18 percent to 73,000 units. With 49.1 percent in 2018, almost every second car in Norway is powered electrically, “maintaining its exceptional position in the market share of e-vehicles”, the study noted.

In Germany, the number of new registrations only increased moderately to around 68,000 electric cars, an increase of 24 percent. The market share increased from 1.6 percent to 2.0 percent. “Germany only under-performs in international comparison,” CAM announced.

In the other European countries, the United Kingdom grew by 24 percent to 60,000 electric vehicles, while France recorded a total of 46,000 new passenger cars. – Click here to read the related article – 1/18/19 

The King Electric Car Cracking the Roads: Tesla 3

Model 3 vehicle to be at $45.000 or to be at $35,000 the Electrifying Question for Tesla

Tesla chief Elon Musk says the electric car maker will cut staff by 7% —approximately 3,150 jobs — in order to sell its Model 3 vehicle “at $35,000 and still be a viable company.” Tesla, which reported an unexpected profit in the third quarter of last year, slashed 9% of its workers in June as part of a cost-cutting effort. It has so far been unable to deliver on its “long-promised” price of $35,000 for the standard Model 3 — versus the $44,000 it currently sells at, transforming the car manufacturer from a “niche luxury player” to an affordable option for most buyers.

Tesla offering lower-cost Model 3

Tesla is now offering a “lower cost, mid-range” Model 3, company CEO Elon Musk announced Thursday on Twitter. The car’s sticker price is $45,000, which is higher than the $35,000 model the company once promised. Musk said the new model’s price is closer to $31,000 when tax rebates and savings are taken into account, however. The car has an estimated range of 260 miles and can be delivered in six to 10 weeks with the mid-range battery.

Musk Electrifying Next Job

Tesla Motors Inc. in the News

February 27, 2020 MOROCCO AND WORLD AFFAIRS – NETWORK OF PUBLIC MEDIA Updated: Feb. 27. 2020

oaklandchronicle.wordpress.com/2020/02/27/teslamotorsincinnews/

Tesla announces rare profit – 10/24/2018

Tesla has flouted Wall Street expectations and zoomed to a surprising third-quarter profit. The automaker logged $312 million in profit on $6.8 billion in revenue — up markedly from analysts’ estimates of roughly $6.3 billion — after production of its Model 3 improved substantially over the summer. The result provided breathing room for controversy-plagued chief executive Elon Musk, whose struggles to meet demand for the Model 3 have led to questions about the company’s long term viability. Tesla’s stock, down 14% for the year prior to the announcement, quickly soared by 10% after results were released.

---

In August, Musk shared a photo of a Tesla Model S in the same Hawthorne tunnel. (Questions were recently raised about whether the second tunnel proposed by Musk would be wide enough to accommodate the all-electric vehicle.)

In December 2018, as Chinese tariffs on American cars rose from 15% to 40%, Tesla raised prices by about $ 20,000. In October, the company said in its third-quarter earnings report that it had decided to accelerate its manufacturing project’s schedule in China “in order to significantly increase the affordability of Model 3”, adding that Tesla”intended to import parts of the Model 3′ production in China in 2019. “

Tesla made its latest price adjustment this week, placing its Model 3 at a starting price of $ 72,000 in China, about $ 11,500 less than in November when Tesla started taking orders for the model in China. The price slump came after China agreed to lower duties on US-imported cars to 15 percent for three months, as the United States and China try to resolve their differences before March.

Next year is crucial for electric car manufacturers in China, as the country replaces its monetary subsidies with a cap-and-trade system for the electric vehicle sector. Under this system, all automakers in China, including Tesla if it starts producing next year, will have to meet the Electric Vehicle production quotas, which will increase each year.

Tesla Model 3 is getting attention in Japan, Australia, and South Korea.

http://oaklandchronicle.wordpress.com/said-el-mansour-cherkaoui-profile/

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/news/tesla-unveils-made-in-china-cars-4743012/