Tesla’s numbers in China are out today, and the automaker has managed to maintain its impressive output with over 54,000 electric vehicles last month.
China is the world’s largest car market and also the world’s largest electric vehicle market by volume. As the world’s EV leader, it is also an important market for Tesla.
That’s even more true now that Gigafactory Shanghai has become Tesla’s primary export hub, exceeding the Fremont factory in overall production capacity.
In September, Tesla had a record 56,000 electric vehicles coming out of China. Tesla’s ability to maintain and even increase this type of output in Q4 is going to be critical for the automaker’s last quarter of the year.
Today, the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) released October numbers and confirmed that Tesla sold 54,391 China-made vehicles last month. 40,666 of these vehicles were exported outside of the country.
While these numbers are slightly down month-to-month, they are still considered strong results for the first month of the quarter when Tesla builds batches of vehicles for export. On a year-on-year basis, Tesla’s output in China is up 348%.
Tesla is going to move production at Gigafactory Shanghai to vehicles for domestic deliveries in November and December.
Those numbers are going to give a better indication on the health of demand for Tesla vehicles in China.
As we previously reported, Tesla recently launched a new financial product in China that enabled customers to buy vehicles on flexible payments with zero down payment.
The automaker quickly changed the option to require a 10% down payment because it was reportedly “too popular” and the company received a “large number of orders”.
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