Tesla officially restarted production at its Shanghai plant on Tuesday after a three-week shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic resurgence.
The United States electric-car maker has got about 8,000 staff back to work so far, after local authorities released a guideline on Saturday for enterprises to start orderly resumption of work.
“We have full confidence in China’s economy,” said Tao Lin, vice president of Tesla. “From the process of the current production resumption, we have seen China’s ability to cope with challenges and we believe that normality will soon return.”
Tao said that several government departments have worked almost round the clock to help enterprises resume work and production as quickly as possible.
The battery and motor workshops were the first to resume production as early as Tuesday morning, while a number of assembly lines are now running efficiently.
Song Gang, senior director of manufacturing at Tesla Gigafactory Shanghai, said they will gradually ramp up production capacity in the next three or four days to achieve single-shift full production in general.
The company is also giving priority to COVID-19 prevention and control, saying it has worked out anti-pandemic plans in strict accordance with authorities’ guidelines.
It will have all factory employees take an antigen test and a nucleic acid test each day, and will carry out strict disinfection procedures in production and office areas.
Before then, Tesla noted that it has previously launched self-service pick-up sites in many areas in order to respond to unexpected events such as pandemic outbreaks, shortening the traditional delivery process from approximately two hours to as short as 20 minutes.
SAIC Motor, meanwhile, is also on its way to resuming production. Its first vehicle rolled off the line at its Lingang plant under the stress test for resumption of work and production.
The stress test was launched on Monday to comprehensively comb through links to check for potential difficulties and impediments in resuming production.
The SAIC Lingang plant plans to first adopt a single-shift work system, and if the supply chain is shown to remain stable, it hopes to gradually ramp up capacity back to pre-pandemic level as soon as possible, a person in charge said.
Many other enterprises in Shanghai are also making active preparations for resumption of work and production in coming weeks.
ABB Group, for example, has applied to be among the next batch of companies to resume production.