Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla’s California factory is at full capacity and they are considering a major expansion. On social media, Musk also said that their California factory is the largest auto plant in North America, producing two-thirds of all-electric vehicles in North America, more than double the number of other manufacturers.
The California factory that Musk said should refer to their vehicle assembly factory in Fremont, California. This factory is the first vehicle factory they put into operation, and it is also the factory where they are currently producing the most models, Model S, Model X, Model 3 and Model Y are produced at this facility.
Unlike Tesla’s already built and under-construction Gigafactories, the Fremont, California factory wasn’t originally built by Tesla. The plant was in operation in the 1960s, initially as a General Motors plant, and from 1984 to 2009 as a new joint venture between General Motors and Toyota, which Tesla purchased in 2010. This plant is where the first Model S rolled off the assembly line in June 2012.
According to information on Tesla’s official website, the factory in Fremont, California, covers an area of 370 acres and initially has 5.3 million square feet (about 492,400 square meters) of production facilities and office space. In 2016, the city of Fremont approved their expansion plans, and the factory nearly doubled in space during that expansion, with nearly 10 million square feet (929,000 square meters) of production and office space.
Judging from the pictures released by Tesla on the official website, there is still a lot of available space around their Fremont factory, which is also conducive to their large-scale expansion.
Tesla’s Fremont, Calif., the factory is operating at full capacity, which is also shown in their earnings report. Tesla’s financial report shows that from the fourth quarter of 2020 to the fourth quarter of last year, the annual production capacity of this factory has been 600,000 vehicles, of which Model S and Model X are 100,000 vehicles, and Model 3 and Model Y are 500,000 vehicles.
The last time the production capacity of the Fremont plant increased significantly was in the third quarter of 2020, from 490,000 in the previous quarter to 590,000, mainly because the production capacity of Model 3 and Model Y increased from 400,000 to 500,000 vehicles.