Image: Riz Akhtar
Tesla has announced that it’s built and shipped the 1-millionth car from the company’s Shanghai Gigafactory.
The latest industry data compiled by carloop shows that Australian roads have received over 107,000 of the 1 million EVs Tesla’s Shanghai factory has now built.
More importantly, as of September 2024, the Shanghai factory has built nearly 50% of all EVs in the Australian electric passenger fleet which is a huge achievement.
The company announced the latest milestone on its Tesla Asia X page with a caption: “Exported the 1 millionth car from Giga Shanghai⚡️ Thanks to all Tesla owners and supporters! ❤️”.
A photo of a roll-on-roll-off (RORO) ship used to transport its EVs from the port in Shanghai with 84 Tesla vehicles highlighting “1 Million” cars next to it.
This is a major achievement by Tesla after the factory seeing multiple upgrades to get its production to this level.
It comes after the factory was originally built in 2019 in record time, in just 168 days from initial construction permits to completion.
Less than 3 years after that, in August 2022, the factory built its 1-millionth car, a red Tesla Model 3.
The Shanghai factory was also Tesla’s first purpose-built EV factory as Fremont was a converted plant that previously produced ICE vehicles.
This allowed Tesla to scale manufacturing while reducing quality control issues it had experienced with vehicles built in Fremont.
Locally in Australia, Tesla started delivering vehicles in 2011 with the Roadster followed by the Model S, Model X and Model 3. These were all delivered from Tesla’s Fremont factory in California.
At the end of 2020, Tesla switched its Australian supply plant from Fremont to Shanghai and since then the company has delivered over 107,000 vehicles to local ports.
This includes a combination of Model 3 sedans until August 2022 when Model Y deliveries begin coming into Australia.
In 2023, Tesla Model Y took over the Model 3 in terms of the best-selling EV in the country with 28,769 sales.
This year, Model Y still leads the EV charts with 15,199 sales so far as Model 3 sales trail at 12,902 as of the end of August.
With the Tesla Shanghai factory now forming a key part of Tesla’s global export strategy and continuing to build high-quality EVs for markets like Australia, NZ, Europe, Canada and others, future export milestones from Shanghai will also be closely watched.
Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.
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