Tesla’s Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai has received its first “comprehensive acceptance certificate,” a necessary permit from the government to begin operations, China’s Global Times reported. Both bureaucracy and construction are moving at record speed – the certificate was approved within 3 days, and a mere 7 months after construction began, Tesla is already installing production equipment.

Drone videos posted in June (via Electrek) showed the exterior of the building mostly completed. Now Tesla has released some low-res interior shots that appear to show a legion of robots and a huge stamping machine that will produce Model 3 body parts.

Tesla hopes to begin production in early Q4 of this year, and to quickly ramp up volume, starting with 3,000 vehicles per week in the first phase. “This will be a simplified, more cost-effective version of our Model 3 line with capacity of 150,000 units per year – the second generation of the Model 3 production process,” wrote Tesla in its Q2 shareholders letter.

Gigafactory 3 is Tesla’s first manufacturing facility in China, and the first EV factory in the country to be wholly owned by a foreign automaker. Producing cars in China will give the California automaker a huge advantage, not only saving on shipping costs, but insulating the company from increasingly unpredictable tariffs.

Source: Electrek