Electric carmaker Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) has been given permission to start selling its Shanghai-made Model Y sports utility vehicle throughout China.
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in Beijing published the approval on its website Monday. The permission should further boost Tesla’s sales in the world’s largest consumer market.
Tesla now sells its Model 3 electric cars in China and has been building new car manufacturing capacity in Shanghai to make its Model Y SUV. The company applied for the Shanghai-made Model Y SUV sales permission earlier in November.
Tesla had started delivering vehicles made in its Shanghai factory last December and sold more than 13,000 Model 3 vehicles in China in October. Tesla’s made-in-China Model 3 vehicles are also being shipped to Europe, with about 3,500 Model 3s from China having been shipped to Europe this autumn.
Tesla also said last week that it plans to also start making electric vehicle chargers in China in 2021. Tesla plans to invest $6.4 million in a new factory to produce up to 10,000 new “Superchargers” a year to serve the domestic Chinese market.
Superchargers allow customers to charge their electric vehicles quickly, and Tesla aims to have enough of them distributed so that its customer can worry less about range issues and finding places to recharge their car batteries.