Tesla Gigafactory Shanghai expansion is back in full swing

Construction work at Tesla Gigafactory Shanghai appears to be back in full swing as new buildings come up super quickly to produce Model Y in less than a year.

As we reported earlier this week, Tao Lin, vice president of Tesla China, is saying that Tesla will ramp up Model 3 production by more than 30% within the next month and start Model Y production at the site in Q1 2021.

In order to achieve that, Tesla needs to complete ‘phase 2’ of its expansion plan at Gigafactory Shanghai.

It is seeing the already giant factory roughly double in size to accommodate more local part production and eventually Model Y production.

The automaker built a giant factory in Shanghai and started production at the facility within a year, but it was only the beginning.

Gigafactory Shanghai currently produces Model 3 vehicles, but it is still building only just over 30% of the parts locally and still relies heavily on other production facilities.

The automaker has been expected to expand the factory in order to vertically integrate the production to achieve a greater percentage of locally produced parts in the made-in-China Model 3.

In a new drone video of the factory filmed yesterday, we can see that construction work is now back in full swing at the site:

https://youtu.be/lZ-9MtaC8vY

Last time we had a look at the factory just a few weeks ago, the new buildings still only had steel structures.

Now Tesla has started the roofing stage and we can see a lot of construction activity at the site:

We also got a look at the staging area for new cars in the video. It looked quite busy with about 500 Model 3 vehicles waiting to be shipped:

Many of those cars could be new Long Range RWD Model 3 vehicles.

As we reported earlier today, Tesla started deliveries of new Model 3 Long Range RWD made-in-China car – expanding its portfolio of vehicles produced at Gigafactory Shanghai.