In attendance at the event, CEO Elon Musk thanked the early adopters and reiterated the country’s importance for the startup’s expansion plans.
The Model S isn’t cheap in China, fetching $121,000 for the base model. The price disparity is mostly blamed on import duties, though shipping costs also play a role. To address both costs, Tesla expects to establish a factory in China to build its vehicles locally.
The first cars were delivered at the company’s headquarters, which also serves as the first Supercharger station. Aside from lower prices, the company also views charging infrastructure as necessary to expand in China. It is preparing to spend several hundred million dollars to achieve such goals.
“My instructions to the team are to spend money as fast as they can spend it without wasting it,” Musk said, as quoted by the Detroit Free Press.
Despite the celebration and first deliveries to a few customers, some early are frustrated over alleged delivery delays. The company does not expect to begin shipping sedans outside of Beijing and Shanghai until June, due to a lack of service centers.
We’ve delayed some of the customer deliveries just for a few months in order to ensure that when they got their car they would have a great experience and some of them were a bit upset about that,” Musk said, according to a Financial Times report. “I met with them earlier today and apologized. I think we resolved the issue.”
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