After recently upgrading the production lines at Giga Shanghai, Tesla China is reportedly sending some of the employees involved in their project to California to help with increasing output at the Fremont factory.
According to sources that spoke with Bloomberg, Tesla China is sending approximately 200 engineers and production staff to Fremont. Many of those employees are automation and control engineers, who during their time in the US they will assist their counterparts with boosting production of the Model S, Model 3, Model X, and Model Y.
The employees are expected to arrive in California as soon as November, and will be staying in California for at least three months, explained the sources.
The team at Tesla China has been on a roll ever since upgrading the factory’s production lines over the summer. Those upgrades increased the factory’s capacity from about 750,000 cars annually to well over 1 million.
That increased capacity translated into almost immediate results, with Tesla producing a record number of cars in the months following the upgrades.
In August the factory set a new production record with 76,605 cars rolling out of the factory. That record was broken one month later in September when 82,088 new cars were built at Giga Shanghai.
With the increased capacity has also come decreased wait times for customers. Soon after the upgrades were completed estimated delivery wait times dropped to as little as one week for all variants of the Model 3 and Model Y.
Tesla’s Fremont factory has been operating at above capacity for a while now, as the automaker has outgrown the space they took over in 2010. Earlier this year during a visit to the factory, analyst Trip Chowdhry said the factory was running at 10% to 20% above capacity.
In the most recent quarterly shareholder deck, Tesla said Fremont had an annual capacity of 650,000 vehicles, split between the Model 3/Y (550,000) and the Model S/X (100,000).
That was an increase from earlier in the year when Tesla noted Fremont’s capacity was 600,000 vehicles (500,000 Model 3/Y, 100,000 Model S/X).
