Tesla Motors eyes Asian production

Tesla Motors hopes to expand into Asian markets, Ingram writes, a move that would include new model launches, new factories, and hopes for new demand. 

|
Petar Kujundzic/Reuters
A man gestures as he walks past a billboard-sized photo of the Tesla Motors Model S car, outside Tesla's boarded-up first China flagship showroom at an office-shopping complex in Beijing.

Tesla Motors has made no secret of its plans to move into the Asian market, and the company now says manufacturing plants in both Europe and Asia are on the cards. It's part of a large expansion planned for the electric car startup over the next few years, including new model launches, new factories and expectations of continually increasing demand.

According to Bloomberg, CEO Elon Musk says the arrival of a new, smaller model--potentially called the Model E, as a trademark filed last week suggested--will require the building of new plants. Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] expects demand for the Model S sedan alone to hit 21,000 units this year, and that number could double in 2014.

The new plants are best located close to its customers. The current Fremont plant is ideally located for U.S. sales, but less so for European and Asian markets. Tesla already assembles some Model S components in its recently-opened facility in Tilberg, Netherlands, from where it's conducting its European operations.

“We’ll try to locate those close to where people are, close to where the customers are, to minimize the logistics costs of getting the car to them,” Musk told Bloomberg

Tesla's next vehicle, the Model X electric crossover, will be built in Fremont alongside the Model S. Production is expected to start late next year. There's no solid timeline for the "gen 3 sedan" yet, but at the recent shareholder meeting in Mountain View, California, Musk revealed the model should appear sometime in late 2016. That gives the company several years to set up facilities abroad, by which time the Model S and Model X should be clocking up comfortable sales numbers.

Musk hasn't yet confirmed whether Tesla will open another plant in the U.S., also rumored.

"That’s where it gets really tricky," said Musk. "What I can say is we do want to ultimately bring this plant [the Model S' plant in California] to its original production capacity of half a million vehicles a year."

Whatever the plans, the next few years will be busy ones for Tesla.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Tesla Motors eyes Asian production
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2013/0823/Tesla-Motors-eyes-Asian-production
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe