Tesla Adds Warehouses In Lathrop, California, To Relieve Pressure At Its Fremont Factory
New Video Highlights Progress At Tesla’s New Facility In Lathrop, California
Tesla has continued its ongoing expansion with the construction of its new Distribution Center in Lathrop, California. The facility sits just over 50 miles from its Fremont factory.
The company originally moved into Lathrop back in 2014 as it fleshed out plans for the then-new Model X. It is now working to expand its footprint in the city to accommodate the surge in volume required for Model 3.
Tesla’s 10K filing with the SEC from 2017 noted that, “We manufacture our vehicles, and certain parts and components that are critical to our intellectual property and quality standards, at the Tesla Factory and our manufacturing facility in Lathrop, CA.” It went on to list 4 warehouse and manufacturing locations in the city, totaling nearly 1.4 million square feet of floor space.
A new YouTube video that was posted on Reddit (featured above) shows that Tesla continues to push into the small city with the construction of another massive facility. The sheer size of the new facility has many speculating that it will come online as a distribution center that will allow Tesla to offload some of the more space-intensive delivery preparation work away from its Fremont manufacturing plant.
As Tesla’s near-term production target of 6,000 Model 3s per week stacks on top of its existing base of 100,000 Model S and X per year, Tesla is pulling out all the stops to roll as many cars as possible through its Fremont factory. Actually, 412,000 vehicles per year is already more than Tesla thought it would produce from the factory, and it now has plans to continue to ramp up Model 3 production to a target rate of perhaps even 10,000 Model 3s per week!
Cramming the production of more than 600,000 vehicles per year into the Fremont factory is going to require a bit of ingenuity, but that’s just business as usual for Tesla, which has built its business on challenging the status quo and redefining normal — one day, one innovation at a time.
Tesla has not announced the North American manufacturing location for its yet to be unveiled electric CUV, the Model Y, but it has admitted that it will need another production facility since Fremont is already bursting at the seams. It recently broke ground on its third full-scale manufacturing facility, dubbed Gigafactory 3, in Shanghai, China — its first production facility in Asia — where it will produce the Model 3 and the Model Y when production begins in 2020.
Though, in the midst of the international expansion, it has largely been ignored that back in Lathrop, California, Tesla continues to ramp up its operations. Dozens of logistics, administrative, and metal-working jobs have been posted in the greater Lathrop region by the California company.
Source: YouTube via Reddit
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