Electric car maker Tesla Inc. has delivered the first 15 cars made at its Chinese Gigafactory less than a year after it first broke ground on what is its first manufacturing facility located outside the U.S.

Reuters said in a report Sunday that the Model 3 vehicles were delivered to 15 Tesla employees at a special ceremony and arrived earlier than expected. Its original schedule called for the first deliveries to be made by the Lunar New Year, which takes place on Jan. 25.

The deliveries are an important milestone for Tesla. It hopes the factory will help it to gain a foothold in China’s electric vehicle market, the world’s largest. Officials also hope the factory, the first ever wholly foreign-owned car plant in China, will help to protect Tesla from the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.

Reuters said that the locally produced cars are significantly cheaper than Tesla’s imported models. The Standard Range Plus Model 3s produced in the Chinese factory will sell for 355,800 yuan (about $50,000) before subsidies, compared to a price of 439,000 yuan ($63,000) for imported U.S. models, Reuters said.

Tesla further hopes to be able to reduce the cost of its Chinese-made cars by as much as 20% once it begins using more locally sourced components from next year.

The company has gotten its Chinese manufacturing operation up and running in double-quick time. Plans for the Shanghai Gigafactory were announced in July 2018, construction work began in January 2019, and trial production was up and running by October, just 357 days later, Reuters said.

What a way to close out 2019, and this is only just the beginning.
Congratulations to the Shanghai team! https://t.co/N6U8qlTPWp

— Tesla (@Tesla) Dec. 30, 2019

Tesla’s next step is to expand production at the Shanghai facility. The company recently secured $1.4 billion worth of loans from Chinese banks in order to expand its operations there. It’s hoping to produce 3,000 Model 3 cars a week by early next year, before increasing that to around 500,000 vehicles per year within the next two to three years. That would amount to about 10,000 new vehicles per week.

The success of the Shanghai operation bodes well for Gigafactory 4, which is a new facility that Tesla is planning to open in Berlin by 2021.

Photo: SAUD AL-OLAYAN/Flickr