Written by Cláudio Afonso | info@claudio-afonso.com | LinkedIn | Twitter
Elon Musk was interviewed at the FT Future of the Car event where was questioned about the relevance of China in the total production of Tesla. Musk sees China being responsible for 25% to 30% of Tesla’s market and compares the “super talented hard-working” people in China with the generality of workers in the US.
Peter Campbell: How important is the (Chinese) market for you? Do you think China contributes most of your growth in the future?
“China is obviously a very significant market [for Tesla] … it is probably 25% to 30% of our market long term. The rest of the world is probably three quarters of it,” Musk started to say.
“We’re not expecting to open any additional plants in China in the near future. We will be expanding our Shanghai factory but our focus of production will be on the two new factories that we’re recently completed (Berlin and Austin, Texas)”, he added.
“I think there will be some very strong [EV] companies coming out of China. There are just a lot of super talented hard-working people in China that are strongly believing in manufacturing. They won’t just be burning the midnight oil, they’ll be burning the 3AM oil. They won’t even leave the factory type-of-thing, whereas, in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all.”
When asked about Tesla potentially making 20 million vehicles by 2030, Tesla‘s CEO answered: “It’s an aspiration, not a promise. I think we got a good chance of getting there”, “There are some raw material restraints that we see coming in Lithium production in about 3 years. I do not see a fundamental scaling constraints,” Musk concluded.
Written by Cláudio Afonso | info@claudio-afonso.com | LinkedIn | Twitter