The Chinese auto firm says the plant will be able to produce 40-gigawatt hours (GWh) of batteries annually

The US carmaker's aggressive price cuts earlier this year helped it to stoke demand amid rising inventories

The US auto firm plans to ramp up output at its Shanghai plant over the next two months to meet demand sparked by price cuts early last month

Chief executive Elon Musk said the EV-maker's 2023 deliveries could hit 2 million vehicles, so long as there were no external disruptions

For most of 2022, Tesla joined rivals in aggressively raising EV prices but its decision to reverse course now challenges automakers’ established strategy of pursuing profit-over-volume

The Vietnamese EV-maker hopes to compete with existing automakers in the US by offering two models, the VF8 and VF9, with starting prices of $59,000 and $83,000

Tesla’s Autopilot team set out to engineer and record a “demonstration of the system’s capabilities” at the request of Musk, a senior engineer said

Jakarta has long courted the US auto company over setting up a production hub to build electric vehicle batteries and cars

Several Tesla owners in Shanghai also said they felt misled by Tesla sales staff who told them they would face higher prices in the new year

Rival Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD and the budget-EV joint venture of General Motors in China both outsold the US carmaker

The move has fuelled talk among colleagues he is being groomed for a bigger role in Tesla, at a time when chief executive Elon Musk has been distracted by Twitter

It has not been an established practice for the plant to shut down for a year-end holiday, which will cut planned production by a third