Tesla Inc is extending the production pause at its Shanghai plant to Thursday after the city was placed into a phased lockdown to curb a surge in COVID-19 cases, people familiar with the matter said.
The suspension of production at the Gigafactory near China’s main financial center, originally scheduled for one day, has now been extended to four days and is expected to resume on April 1, said the people, who asked not to be identified.
Shanghai is locking down half of the city in turns to conduct a mass testing blitz to combat a COVID-19 outbreak that has turned it into China’s largest virus hotspot. Areas east of the Huangpu River, where the Tesla plant is located, were locked down starting yesterday for four days.
Photo: Reuters
Many Tesla workers are affected, although they might be able to return to work when the lockdown shifts to the other side of the city.
“Tesla always insists on fulfilling the main-body responsibility of pandemic prevention and control, strictly implementing all related requirements, and arranging work according to the government’s policy at any time,” a company spokesperson said.
The first “gigafactory” outside of the US produced half of the electric automaker’s vehicles last year and had to suspend production for two days earlier this month.
The company said at the time that it was making its “best effort” to ensure production could continue at the plant, while “actively cooperating with the government’s order for COVID-19 tests and relevant pandemic prevention measures.”
The Shanghai factory is crucial for Tesla, given that China is the company’s second-largest market and the plant builds vehicles for export to Europe and elsewhere in Asia.
The China Passenger Car Association earlier this month reported that Tesla delivered 56,515 cars from the factory last month alone — 23,200 for the domestic market and 33,315 for export.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk famously resisted California health regulators’ efforts to keep a US factory closed during the early days of the pandemic. After about seven weeks of shutdown, he reopened the Fremont plant — his only US vehicle-production site at the time — on May 11, 2020, flouting county officials’ orders and daring authorities to arrest him.
Musk ultimately cited the dispute as one of the reasons he moved Tesla’s headquarters from Palo Alto, California, to Austin, Texas, late last year.
Tesla has factories on three continents. Musk last week delivered the first German-made Model Y vehicles from a new factory outside Berlin. Tesla has a fourth auto factory scheduled to open in Austin in a few weeks.
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