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Tesla secures permit for Gigafactory Shanghai

With all the talk of Gigafactory Berlin, its sibling Gigfactory in Shanghai may have gotten a little jealous for attention.

Tesla Inc. won permission to start mass production at its China factory, clearing one of the last hurdles to begin selling locally built cars in the world’s largest electric-vehicle market.

Bloomberg

Permits secured baby 😎

The clearance was disclosed by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on its website Wednesday. Tesla unveiled its first vehicles assembled at the Shanghai facility earlier this month, made as part of trial operations.

Bloomberg

“Hey! Pay attention to me!”

Seriously though, what are the chances the minister of information technology got a call from a top communist party of China official telling him to get those permits out within the news cycle?

Tesla’s first Chinese cars. I guess they only have the blue paint so far? Source: Bloomberg

China’s first plant wholly owned by a foreign carmaker — and Tesla’s first outside the U.S. — is a crucial test of Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk’s bid to prove his carmaker can sustain profitability as he bets on Chinese EV demand.

Bloomberg

This is the key thing that few people understand about Gigafactory Shanghai. No other foreign car maker is allowed to have a car factory in China. They have to do a joint venture with a local partner.

So they don’t want to send the same vehicle IP, don’t end up with all the profits, etc. A US carmaker having its own Chinese factory is uncharted territory. It’s going to be big.

In addition to a manufacturing permit, carmakers in China need to have their products approved for sale. Authorities have yet to disclose such a clearance for Tesla’s China-built-models.

Bloomberg

One down, one more to go…

Read the full story at Bloomberg

UPDATE: It looks like they have black paint too

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