Tesla’s Shanghai factory adds back second shift, restoring manufacturing capacity to level before citywide lockdown: sources
- The Giga Shanghai has been running with two shifts a day since late last week, according to people familiar with the situation
- Tesla has lost about 50,000 vehicles in production due to reduced shifts at Giga Shanghai between March 28 and April 18 amid lockdowns
Tesla has put two shifts back into operation at its factory in Shanghai, restoring manufacturing capacity to the level before local authorities imposed a citywide lockdown on April 1 to combat an outbreak of Covid-19.
The Gigafactory 3, also known as Giga Shanghai, is once again able to assemble about 2,600 electric vehicles a day, according to two industry officials with knowledge of the plant’s status who declined to be named as they are not authorised to talk with the media.
This follows weeks of single shift “closed loop” operations at the factory, whereby workers had to sleep on site to avoid contact with outsiders and be tested daily for possible Covid-19 infection.
The Giga Shanghai has been running with two shifts a day since late last week, according to the people familiar, after the US carmaker secured support from local authorities, the necessary components from its vendors and arranged enough space to quarantine workers before they returned to the factory.
Before it resumed a two-shift operation at the Shanghai factory, Tesla isolated many workers in disused factories and an old military camp to ensure they were free of Covid-19, Bloomberg reported last week.
David Zhang, a researcher at the North China University of Technology, said that while a single shift operation at the Giga Shanghai could churn out up to 1,400 vehicles per day, an additional shift can boost daily output to between 2,600 to 2,800 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles every 24 hours.
