Tesla Shanghai factory delivered 75,000+ vehicles in April

Tesla’s Shanghai factory delivered 75,842 vehicles in April, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA).

The American company’s factory in Shanghai delivered 710,000 vehicles in 2022, which is an increase of 48 percent versus 2021, Beta reports citing the Xinhua agency.

By early May, the company had installed more than 1,600 charging stations, over 10,000 chargers, and over 700 destination charging stations in mainland China.

Founded in 2019, the Tesla factory in Shanghai is the car manufacturer’s first gigafactory outside the US.

The American automaker announced last month that it would build a new mega-factory in Shanghai dedicated to producing the company’s Megapack energy storage product. The new factory should start operating in the third quarter of this year and start production in the second quarter of 2024.

According to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, China is the world’s largest market for producing and selling new energy vehicles (NEVs). CPCA data showed that NEV retail sales jumped 22.4 percent year-on-year during the first quarter to 1.31 million units.

Around one million robots are employed in the global auto industry

The use of robots in the auto industry is nothing new, on the contrary. They work in a large number of factories in the world, and there are about a million of them. Robots in the auto industry make up a third of the total number installed in all other sectors, according to data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR).

The automotive industry has used industrial robots for over half a century since General Motors first adopted UNIMATE in the early 1960s. During this period, the number of robots used in the automation sector has grown tremendously.

Technology has also improved, with lower-cost, more flexible collaborative systems complementing and replacing bulky and inflexible traditional robots, the Universal Robots portal writes.