Beijing Report Confirms New Tesla Design Center
Over in China, it seems that Tesla’s 2020 announcement for an R&D and a design center has just been confirmed by the Chinese government.
Reportedly, Beijing municipal government published a work report in January 2022, which listed key upcoming projects for the city. In addition to a Xiaomi Corp car plant, and a Toyota Motors fuel cell research facility, a Tesla design center was listed.
Tesla had already confirmed the new R&D center would be located right next to its Shanghai Gigafactory, and the assumption had been that the previously nebulous Design center would be somewhere nearby; but the report confirms not only that the new facility is real, it will be built in the Chinese capital.
Unsurprisingly, this mirrors the planning we’re seeing in North America; the company opting to gather as many facilities together as possible to improve efficiency. And it’s not a shock, as Tesla has been enthusiastically building an engineering team there, even working on the Tesla Bot at the Shanghai facility. Hell, back in 2020, the company posted job openings and some basic renders of chinese-specific vehicles that Tesla said they’d attempt to integrate local art into.
Back in Jan, @elonmusk talked abt creating a 🇨🇳 design center to design EVs for the global market. Now @Teslacn is openly asking designers & even nonpros to design a “China-style” EV & submit their works for job review. Tesla is expanding its footprints in the biggest auto market pic.twitter.com/hWQ06XVa5M
— Ray4Tesla⚡️🚘☀️🔋 (@ray4tesla) June 15, 2020
So with this confirmation from Beijing, and the designs the company had for Chinese-specific models back in 2020, it’s safe to say the new design studio will be up and spitting out new vehicle designs quickly.