Tesla extends production halt at Shanghai plant following city lockdown
Tesla extended its production halt at a Shanghai plant for at least one more day, as the city was posed under a two-stage lockdown from earlier this week.
The lockdown – which ends tomorrow for the eastern part of the city – initially allowed Tesla to resume production on Friday.
But according to the latest internal notice, operations will restart on 2 April, as the electric vehicle giant was yet to secure permits for its trucks to deliver the vehicles in the western parts of the city.
To combat a surge in Covid cases, Chinese authorities curbed the movement of goods and people, as they banned unapproved vehicles from streets and told citizens to stay home.
Warehouse were shut down too, while key airports and ports remained open, causing transport costs to increase, Morning Wire reported.
Logistics giant Maersk said that Shanghai’s decision would damage the already weakened supply chain.
“Trucking service in and out (of) Shanghai will be severely impacted by 30 per cent due to a full lockdown on Shanghai’s Pudong and Puxi areas in turn until 5 April,” Maersk said in an advisory on Tuesday.
“Consequently, there will be longer delivery time and a possible rise in transport costs such as detour fee and highway fee.”
Commenting on the situation, KPMG’s head of automotive Richard Peberdy said: “Whilst some car makers are able to continue to produce vehicles within the impacted areas due to staff able to live onsite, others have paused production and there are also questions marks about the scale of impact on the likes of warehouses, ports and other parts of the logistics chain.”