What’s next for Tesla? Sell entirely to China?
It has been a weird few weeks for Tesla CEO, Elon Musk. After selling the majority of his shares in Tesla and nearly going broke to keep Twitter afloat, now the American electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer is considering importing EVs made in China to the United States. What’s next for Tesla? Launching Elon himself to Mars?
It would appear that Tesla is doing this as a result of the company’s increasing costs at their Shanghai plant and reduced demand for their cars in China. It is also rumored that the American EV maker has also been studying if parts made by their China-based suppliers could conform to North American regulations.
If they comply, Tesla could ship their Model Y and Model 3 EVs into North America as early as next year. What’s more, if this were to happen, it could also present an opportunity to export Tesla vehicles to Canada as well. However, Musk did tweet out “False” to this statement so perhaps it is nothing more than rumours.
Moreover, an upgrade earlier this year made Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory the most productive manufacturing hub for the company with the capacity to produce 1.1 million EVs every year. Currently this factory produces Model 3 and model Y vehicles to export to markets like Europe, Australia and South East Asia.
On top of that, data from brokerage CMBI suggests that this factory has been producing Tesla EVs at a steady pace but recently demand has dwindled while production capacity has stayed the same. This coupled with lower material costs in China and rising car prices in the US make exporting more cost competitive.
Additionally, if this plan comes to fruition then new Tesla buyers in the U.S may be facing more complications as United States President, Joe Biden recently signed a law that would provide EV buyers with incentives (Much like tax incentives here in Malaysia) which would vary on whether or not the car was imported.
Worse still, Tesla is widely viewed as one of the few car companies to benefit in a major way from President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), an incentive plan that offers rebates up to USD7,500 on EV purchases to reduce the number of people buying cars from non American brands.
This would mean that (again much like the situation in Malaysia right now) the political scene, particularly how the public views Tesla as a whole, could become very messy very quickly and lead to unwanted turmoil. Either way, things are already not looking good for Tesla and they only seem to be going further downhill from here.
We got all this from Reuters and their full article is linked here. Thank you Reuters for the information.
