Shanghai (ZXZC)- Tesla’s vice president, Grace Tao, said that the company holds great hope for realizing 100% localization on all China-made Teslas and even seeing China-designed models on the road of the country in the future.

Photo credit: Tesla

At the 2021 China International Import Expo, Grace Tao reemphasized Elon Musk’s statement of China being the future and stated the company’s faith in the Chinese market during an interview.

Notably, early on, it was talked that Tesla has a potential plan of releasing a $25,000 compact model in the near future.

According to Grace Tao, since 2014, Tesla has opened up over 300 patents and will continue to do so to help the long-term development of China’s domestic new energy industry, intelligent transportation, smart city, and artificial intelligence.

Moreover, with the completion of Tesla’s research and development (R&D) innovation center and its Gigafactory data center in Shanghai, the automaker’s localization progress moved another step forward.

Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory; photo credit: Tesla

The R&D innovation center consists of 28 laboratories, and is currently exploring the development of Tesla’s software/hardware, process and technologies in China. The center also bears the application adaption and standardized test responsibilities, and conducts R&D for global AI machine learning technology.

The Gigafactory data center has finished official procedures, and will be storing operational data occurred in China.