Tesla’s Gigafactory completion in China may change current...

Tesla’s Gigafactory completion in China may change current Lithium sentiment to positive...

Elon Musk Set Up His Shanghai Gigafactory in Record Time

Sometime in late 2019, the first Chinese-made Tesla Model 3 destined for customers will roll off an assembly line at Tesla Inc.’s new Shanghai Gigafactory. When that happens, it’ll be a rare case in which Elon Musk, the company’s famously scattered chief executive officer, has managed to hit one of his famously ambitious deadlines.

Musk spent much of the past year in crisis mode, battling, among other things, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (over his apparent failure to comply with a settlement regarding his Twitter use) and a British cave diver (who Musk falsely accused of pedophilia in 2018). Things have been much smoother in Shanghai, where in October, the State Grid Corp. of China opened the first transmission line to bring power to the Gigafactory. The government-run Xinhua News Agency reported that it had taken Tesla just 168 working days, about six months, to go from permits to hooking up the electricity to the brand new plant. “This is quite fast, even by Chinese standards,” says Ivan Su, an analyst at Morningstar Inc. Musk has predicted that his company will be producing at least 1,000 cars a week in Shanghai by the end of the year, a volume the company’s original factory in California spent months trying to hit. On Oct. 23, Tesla said it had begun producing "full vehicles on a trail basis.”