Closer look at Tesla’s giant new building in Northern California

Tesla has a giant new building under construction in Northern California. It’s rumored to be a distribution center and/or a manufacturing facility and now we get a closer look with a drone video.

Ever since it took over the Fremont factory from Toyota and GM in 2010, Tesla has been expanding in the bay area with new facilities.

A few years later, it started expanding further in Northern California outside of the Bay area, like Lathrop and Livermore.

According to Tesla’s 10k SEC filing, the company owns a 500,000 sq-ft building in Lathrop, which is about an hour east of the factory, and it has long-term leases on at least 3 more buildings for a total of over 1 million sq-ft of floor space in the city of about 23,000 people.

Last year, we reported on a new 870,000 sq-ft building currently under-construction near Tesla’s current Lathrop facilities that is reportedly meant for the automaker:

Most of Tesla’s locations in Lathrop are warehouses and with the ramp up of Model 3 production, Tesla has also been using the facilities as a “loading hub”:

“We use Lathrop as a loading hub for cars being shipped to other locations for delivery to customers,“As our deliveries increase, we’re obviously going to have more cars there.”

One of the locations in Lathrop is also a casting foundry. We previously reported Tesla is setting up casting lines at Gigafactory 1 and using metallurgists from Lathrop to do the installation.

Last year, we reported on the construction of the new building based on a drone video by Troopr1023 on Youtube.

Now he is back with an updated at the facility, which looks almost complete from the exterior at this point:

Interestingly, many car-carrying trailers and several semi trucks can be seen next to the new Lathrop facility.

Tesla recently announced that it is buying car-hauling trucks and trailers using $13 million in equity.

It followed an announcement Tesla made last year about “acquiring trucking capacity” in order to shorten the delivery timelines for Model 3 before the end of the full tax credit for electric vehicles in the US.

Tesla is currently in the middle of the end of a quarter and it’s attempting to deliver as many vehicles as possible by the end of the month. It’s unclear why those vehicles are not currently in use.