Tesla announces start of made-in-China Model 3 deliveries on Monday

Tesla announced that it will start deliveries of its new made-in-China Model 3 vehicles on Monday after weeks of waiting for official sale approval.

Today, Tesla has started contacting the media in China to inform them that they are going to hold a delivery event on Monday (December 30) for the first 15 made-in-China Model 3 customers, which are going to be Tesla employees.

Many more deliveries are expected to follow since Tesla has been steadily producing and shipping made-in-China Model 3 vehicles out of Gigafactory 3 for weeks now.

In October, Tesla confirmed that it has produced full vehicles at Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai as part of its trial production.

A few weeks later, the automaker obtained its manufacturing license for the new factory in China, but it was still awaiting official sales approval of the made-in-China version of the Model 3.

Earlier this month, we reported that the made-in-China Model 3 was added to the Chinese government’s list of approved vehicles for new energy vehicle subsidies.

Today, the new version of the Model 3 made in Tesla’s Shanghai factory has officially been added to the list of electric vehicles exempt from sale tax and it apparently was the last needed official approval for Tesla to start sales.

Electrek’s Take

It’s a great achievement for the company. They are going to start deliveries of vehicles built in a factory that didn’t exist less than a year ago.

But while that timeline is fast, it’s going to give Tesla less than 2 full days to deliver cars in China before the end of the year.

As we previously reported, Tesla is trying to sell almost all cars in inventory before the end of the quarter.

We have seen Tesla ship hundreds of cars out of Gigafactory 3 already.

If they are already at delivery centers, Tesla could deliver a lot of them in just 2 days, but I’d be surprised if it adds up to more than a thousand delivery or 1% of the milestone of 100,000 cars in a single quarter.