Tom Zhu, Headvert of Tesla Greater China, Appears on Investor Day

At Tesla’s Investor Day held on March 1, the electrical automobile producer shared a sequence of enterprise plans for future developments in R&D and manufacturing. Tom Zhu, the worldwide vice chairman of Tesla and head of Greater China, defined Tesla’s gigafactory state of affairs.

The success of Tesla China below Zhu’s management garnered Elon Musk’s appreciation. Since late final yr, information of Zhu’s rising obligations inside Tesla circulated extensively. Zhu’s necessary duties inside Tesla included overseeing the Shanghai Gigafactory in addition to Tesla’s gross sales in North America and Europe. Additionally, Zhu led manufacturing at Tesla’s new gigafactory in Austin.

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Zhu’s look on the Investor Day occasion additional confirmed him as a key determine in Tesla manufacturing.

Zhu’s purview consists of Tesla’s world manufacturing and supply. “I joined Tesla in 2014 and was responsible for Tesla’s business in Greater Tesla and Asia Pacific. Today, on behalf of all gigafactories, I will talk about how we can build more cars faster,” mentioned Zhu, carrying a black T-shirt with the define of Tesla gigafactory.

“Tesla is improving its production chain, in which batteries for electric vehicles are of key importance. We are looking for opportunities to increase production capacity, which is currently two million vehicles per year. Just this morning at the factory in Texas, Tesla made its four millionth car. The milestone from three million vehicles to four million vehicles was accomplished in less than seven months,” Zhu mentioned in his speech.

In 2019, Tesla spent 9 and a half months constructing a gigafactory in Shanghai and began manufacturing and supply three months later. “We have done a lot of simplification and deletion. There were a lot of redundancies in the production process buffer zones before, and we have removed them. If others can’t do a task well, we will consider bringing it in-house. We have made a lot of improvements,” Zhu defined.

Under Zhu’s management, the Shanghai Gigafactory has turn into the pillar of Tesla’s world manufacturing. More than half of the 936,000 Tesla electrical automobiles produced in 2021 got here from the Shanghai Gigafactory. In August 2022, Musk famous that Tesla had remodeled three million electrical automobiles in whole, of which a million have been from the Shanghai Gigafactory. In November of that yr, the Shanghai Gigafactory set a month-to-month manufacturing file of 100,000 automobiles.

Zhu talked about that Tesla is searching for to construct extra gigafactories world wide. He harassed that Tesla can construct factories in a short time by way of many optimizations, corresponding to constructing the manufacturing unit group. He additionally famous {that a} new day by day manufacturing file was set on the Fremont manufacturing unit.

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