Tesla Fremont Factory: stunning new 360-image shows scale of the plant which could soon double in size

Tesla recently submitted plans with the city of Fremont to almost double the size of its vehicle factory, which is already massive as beautifully illustrated through these stunning new shots, including a 360-degree image.

A few weeks ago, a friend of the site, Lance Neveu, shared with us some impressive images of the Tesla Gigafactory which he took during his cross-country road trip from Montreal to San Francisco.

The images were appreciated by our readers and since Neveu also made his way to the Fremont factory while in the Bay Area during his trip, we figured we might as well shared his shots of the vehicle factory since they do a beautiful job of representing the scale of the facility.

Here’s Neveu’s 360-degree image of the Fremont Factory taken 2 weeks ago (embedded on Facebook for 360-degree experience):

Neveu also sent us these high-resolution shots of the plant:

Tesla currently has 5.3 million square feet of manufacturing and office space in Fremont, but the company’s new “Master Plan” to increase production at the plant includes adding 11 new buildings and 4.6 million square feet.

It’s hard to imagine Tesla could build those buildings at what already looks like a packed location, but it would look something like this according to Tesla’s submission with the city of Fremont:

Of course, the expansion is part of Tesla’s plan to achieve a production rate of 500,000 cars per year at the factory by 2018 and to support the demand for the Model 3.

The factory is currently producing cars at a rate of 100,000 per year.

CEO Elon Musk thinks 500,000 cars per year is not the maximum capacity of the Fremont plant and he sees a path to 1 million cars per year.

But Tesla has also been expanding its presence around Fremont and not only at the current plant. Earlier this year, Tesla added an important 1 million sq-ft of space near the Fremont Factory and the company also operates the former Solyndra manufacturing building (500,000 sq-ft), another building on Kato Road in Fremont (300,000 sq-ft) and the Lathrop facility not too far from the plant either.

Those locations and some vehicle manufacturing capacity being transferred to the Gigafactory could help Fremont achieve a greater output than anticipated.