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A look at Tesla’s Fremont factory ‘masterplan’ progress

Tesla had a major expansion plan at its Fremont factory called its ‘masterplan’ to enable Model 3 production at the plant.

Today, we take a look at the progress through a report on Tesla’s building permits at the factory.

Tesla first introduced the expansion plan in 2016 and it included the addition of several new buildings to almost double the size of the already giant electric vehicle factory – 5.3 million square feet to 9.9 million square feet.

Those new buildings will enable Tesla to increase the production capacity of the plant to over 10,000 units per week.

We have already seen a few of those new structures at the Fremont factory and of course, the new tent is attracting a lot of attention recently.

Buildzoom has been gathering building permits at the plant and they report that Tesla filed over 400 building permits with a collective valuation of over $51.3 million since it started the “masterplan” expansion:

Those permits include a few major expansion and upgrades to Tesla’s facilities at the plant:

“In the last 2 years, Tesla has pulled a handful of permits over $1 million, including a $4.5 million grading and foundation permit for a 104,324 sqft North GA3 (General Assembly 3) building. Two of the larger permits filed, valued at $4.2 million and $2 million, describe ‘capacity increases’ to the North Paint building. Other notable permits include $1.2 million and $800k permits for site work for two new facilities (one of which is a temporary structure, as discussed below), and a $400k 3-lane “Tesla Sunrise” road with bio-retention system at the eastern boundary of the factory.”

Of course, the “temporary structure” is the tent that is housing Tesla’s general assembly line 4, which is not actually really under a tent but a “Sprung structure” and it might not even end being temporary according to CEO Elon Musk.

Buildzoom reports about the permits:

“As Musk stated, General Assembly, located within the body and assembly facility, has been one of the largest challenges to the mass production of the Model 3 car. Since July 2016, permits worth $14.2 million have been filed to develop infrastructure for the “GA3” (General Assembly 3) building. More recently, Tesla addressed this bottleneck by adding an entirely new pop-up facility to house a fourth assembly line. Unlike the other assembly facilities, which Musk said cost hundreds of millions of dollars and require months to build, the new assembly line is housed within a temporary, tent-like pavilion known as a Sprung Structure. Although permits valuations for the new GA4 structure have not been fully published, we can see that Tesla was issued at least $2.9 million in permits for all Sprung and repack structures at their 45500 Fremont address in the last 2 years.”

As for a visualization of Tesla’s expanded factory, we got a good look at it in the most recent drone flyover of the plant:

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Avatar for Fred Lambert Fred Lambert

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