Tesla is having trouble managing its Fremont factory parking: EVs being ICEd and overcrowding

The Tesla Factory in Fremont, California, is one of the biggest buildings on earth with 5.3 million square feet of manufacturing and office space. Since buying the plant for a mere $42 million in 2010, Tesla has occupied only a fraction of the building, but everything changed over the last year as the automaker increased its production to 2,000 vehicles per week and it is now investing over $1.2 billion in the plant to increase the production rate to 10,000 per week for the Model 3 production.

In order to achieve its goal, Tesla has been hiring at an insane rate and has now over 6,000 employees working in Fremont, which is creating irritating parking problems for the workers. Ironically, the problems are similar to what some Tesla owners are experiencing at Superchargers – like being ICEd.

If you are not aware, ‘ICEd’ is a term used by EV owners to describe a gas-powered car blocking a parking spot reserved for electric vehicle charging. ICE is an acronym for ‘Internal Combustion Engine’.

Tesla created an additional parking lot south of the factory and it has a shuttle running all day to help the flow of cars in the parking lot, but it looks like it can’t keep up.

The problems even inspired a Tesla employee to create an Instagram account to document the issues.

In June, someone created the account ‘TeslaParkingLot‘ and shared their first post with the caption:

“This guy is wondering how he’s going to get out when his car is boxed in. I hope he doesn’t have to pick up his kids from school because they’re going to be waiting a while.”

Here it is:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BGuaGZCyR3h/?taken-by=teslaparkinglot

The person has since shared two dozen more posts with some interesting nuggets about the life of a Tesla Factory worker.

For example, it looks like it’s a common thing for employees to leave their vehicle blocking other cars in parking spots and employees have to jack it to let the others leave the parking:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BITgcKRhQj4/?taken-by=teslaparkinglot

It looks like they are using Hydraulic Car Wheel Dolly Jacks.

Interestingly, Tesla has its own parking violation tickets, but apparently they don’t have any punitive impact:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BIXzEV_BwcJ/?taken-by=teslaparkinglot

Or at least they didn’t when TeslaParkingLot posted the image 4 weeks ago. This picture posted today seems to indicate Tesla is now cracking down on those not respecting EV parking spots:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BJk41sxhFk8/?taken-by=teslaparkinglot

Some non-EV owners are getting more imaginative and instead of ICEing EV-only parking spots and blocking others, they make their own spots:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BHPoXvPhiNb/?taken-by=teslaparkinglot

Maybe it’s time for Tesla to invest in a multi-story parking complex? Or maybe hook up some automated busses and some decent public transportation from the BART (lol). Tesla will likely have to increase the number of EV-only spots anyway as more employees will be able to afford a Tesla with the upcoming Model 3. Employees were given the opportunity to order early and it looks like thousands of them jumped on the opportunity.