Late last year, Elon Musk kissed California goodbye. The Tesla CEO sold his mansion in Bel-Air and said he had moved to Texas. But even though he also threatened to shut down the electric car factory in California in Fremont, the threats now look like shock.
The company recently submitted permits to city managers to convert an assembly line that now runs through an outdoor tent into a permanent structure. It will expand the current plant by 64,000 square feet, although it is not clear whether it will increase production capacity.
The news application news was first reported by the online news publication Teslarati. Although the permit application indicates a commitment to the site, there is no guarantee that the project will be completed. It is also not clear whether the current production of Model 3 and Model Y, which is now running through the tent, would construct. Tesla is also building Model X and Model S cars in Fremont. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment and did not have a media relations department.
Musk’s threats to leave California gave weight to Tesla’s great pressure to increase production elsewhere. It already operates another plant in Shanghai, and large new factories are currently being built in Austin, Texas and near Berlin.
Musk first threatened to shut down Fremont in May, when the plant was ordered by Alameda County health officials when the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading across the United States. He defied the orders and reopened the plant, inviting officials to arrest him.
The then Alameda County Public Health Officer, Erica Pan, conceded and allowed the plant to remain open. (Pan was later named state epidemiologist by Governor Gavin Newsom.)
A few months later, Musk reiterated his threat of a Fremont closure in an interview with Automotive News. When he announced that he would move California to Texas in December, followed shortly after by announcements that Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Oracle would move headquarters to the Lone Star State, it aroused in the technology industry whether California was sufficiently hospitable to the business world and whether Austin or another city can recreate Silicon Valley’s success with new businesses.
Yet there is no sign that Musk is seriously considering moving Tesla’s headquarters in Palo Alto or the Hawthorne headquarters of its rocket company SpaceX.
It remains to be seen whether Tesla will sell enough vehicles to justify all its new plants. The company sold about 500,000 cars from its plants in Fremont and Shanghai last year. The company said it could build 500,000 from the Fremont plant alone.
The factory in Berlin has experienced numerous delays, even though Tesla’s sales in Europe declined and fell by 10% in 2020, according to Schmidt Automotive Research. The market share for electric cars in Europe fell from first to third place, behind Volkswagen and Renault.