Tesla secures site for Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai
Tesla has found the spot to construct the Gigafactory 3 on Chinese soil. A 860,000 sqm plot of land in Shanghai has been secured according to a post the company made on Chinese social media and previous rumours had suggested as much. Still, the deal must be considered groundbreaking in every sense.
Tesla had signed the deal to build their first facility outside the States with Shanghai back in July. Not only will this double their production capacity and free the Tesla electric cars from 40 percent import tariffs. The deal also made the EV maker the first foreign carmaker allowed to produce in China without a local joint venture partner. A change in law had made this possibly and a projected investment of 2 or even 5 billion dollars had added weight to the city’s decision certainly.
To date, no further details on the land deal have been disclosed yet. However, Reuters quotes the Shanghai Bureau of Planning and Land Resources that said a plot of land of 864,885 square meters had been sold at auction at a price of 973 million yuan ($140.51M).
In an official statement, Robin Ren, Tesla’s VP of global sales, said: “Securing this site in Shanghai, Tesla’s first Gigafactory outside of the United States, is an important milestone for what will be our next advanced, sustainably developed manufacturing site”.
Tesla targets an annual capacity of 500,000 electric vehicles at the Gigafactory 3. Construction is to begin in the near future once all approvals and permits are in. Tesla reckons it will then take about two years until the start of production with about 250,000 EVs a year, and then another two to three years before the electric vehicle factory will be fully ramped up.
Different from the Gigafactory 1 in Nevada which only produces batteries, all future Gigafactories will combine both battery and electric car production at one site.
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