Tesla's Shanghai plant delivered over 480,000 vehicles in 2021, said the U.S. electric carmaker on Tuesday, counting for over half of the company's total sales.

The global delivery volume of Tesla in 2021 is 936,000, and the Shanghai Gigafactory delivered 484,130 vehicles and accounted for 51.7 percent of the total, with an increase of 235 percent from 2020.

In 2021, over 160,000 of Tesla's made-in-China cars were exported to over 10 countries and regions in Europe and Asia. The localization rate of spares reached 90 percent with 92 percent of Tesla's battery metal parts in the Shanghai plant capable of being recycled.

Thanks to high intelligence, digitization and an 86 percent component localization rate, Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory further advanced its production capacity in 2021, said the carmaker. In the third quarter of 2021, Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory even surpassed Tesla Fremont, California plant in Model 3 and Model Y production for the first time.

Furthermore, the retail sales of new energy vehicles in the Chinese market reached 2.989 million in 2021 with a 169.1 percent year-on-year increase, according to a data released by the China Passenger Car Information Association (CPCA) on Tuesday.

Last year, the retail sales of passenger vehicles reached 20.146 million units, an increase of 4.4 percent year on year, with NEVs contributing 9 percentage points to the year-on-year growth of passenger cars while the retail sales of traditional fuel vehicles reached 17.16 million units, down 6 percent year on year.

Cui Dongshu, the secretary general of CPCA, said that the strongly differentiated features between NEVs and traditional fuel vehicles showed the change in consumer demand, with the large increase in the scale of the new energy industry chain and the subsidies for purchasing NEVs, sales are expected to see another strong increase in 2022.