By Michael Elkins
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) enthusiast and investor, Sawyer Merritt released drone footage Friday showing nearly 9,000 vehicles ready to ship from Shanghai’s Southport Terminal, in China.
If Sawyer’s estimations are correct, the batch represents a new record for the company, and solid evidence that production at the Gigafactory is increasing.
According to China’s CPCA data released last week, Tesla China saw a 64% decrease in delivered vehicles from June to July. A drop that has been attributed to a three-month shutdown at Tesla’s GigaShanghai aiming to upgrade the production for the upcoming months.
In July, the GigaFactory was shut down from the first day of the month until the 4th while Model Y line was shut down from July 1-18, and the Model 3 line was shut down from July 18 until this past Monday, August 8.
Tesla announced on its 2Q earnings call that the company expects to achieve “50% average annual growth in vehicle deliveries”
“We plan to grow our manufacturing capacity as quickly as possible.” The company said. “Over a multi-year horizon, we expect to achieve 50% average annual growth in vehicle deliveries. The rate of growth will depend on our equipment capacity, factory uptime, operational efficiency and the capacity and stability of the supply chain”.