I grew up on the east side of San Francisco Bay, about 30 miles north of the Tesla assembly plant in Fremont, and it gives me a certain sense of pride that cars are still being built in the East Bay (transit buses have been built there since 1938, and I wrote the shop manuals for those buses during the second half of the 1990s). During a recent visit to the area, I drove a 2017 Toyota Corolla XSE to the Tesla plant and took a tour of the facility. I also drove a Model S P100D, briefly, and its acceleration was terrifying; more on that later.

Back when the Nimitz Freeway was two lanes in each direction, and GTOs and Cutlasses were built in Fremont. National Archives

General Motors built an assembly plant in Oakland in 1917 to make Chevrolets for the Northern California market (now the site of Eastmont Mall). In 1962, The General closed the Oakland plant and opened Fremont Assembly, 30 miles to the south. Production of GMC light trucks and various Chevrolet/Oldsmobile/Buick/Pontiac cars continued there through the time of the plant's shuttering in 1982. Then Toyota entered the picture and formed the New United Motors (aka NUMMI) joint venture with GM, building various Geo-, Pontiac-, and Toyota-badged machines through 2009. Starting in 2010, the facility became the Tesla Factory, building the Model S and Model X, while gearing up for Model 3 production.

This is the first driving Tesla car. Murilee Martin

The Tesla Factory has a mini-museum in the front, and so I got to see the Tesla Roadster test mule. This is the first driving vehicle made by Tesla Motors.

Model S Numero Uno. Murilee Martin

The first Model S is there as well. This is the car that went to all the car shows and was in all the early press materials.

Model Xs getting spot-welded at the Tesla Factory. Murilee Martin

In 1989, I had a warehouse job in nearby Hayward, working for a company that sold paint-filtering equipment to NUMMI, and part of my job involved making deliveries to the Prizm/Corolla assembly line. I spent a fair amount of time at NUMMI, and it seemed like a rackety, chaotic place on the production line (from the hair-raising descriptions I have heard of the Fremont Assembly era, NUMMI was like the sterile control room of an intergalactic spaceship next to the dangerous and miserable factory floor during the 1970s).

Fast-forward 28 years, and the same facility is a brightly-lit, no-earplugs-needed, high-tech operation, the car version of what you'd see across the Bay in Cupertino or Sunnyvale.

Aluminum body components need a lot of hand-finishing work. Murilee Martin

While robots do a lot of the assembly and nearly all of the moving of vehicles and major components between sections of the assembly line, human workers still build these cars. Because most of a Tesla car is aluminum, which can be difficult to get into a paint-ready state, human eyes and hands are needed to check and finish the body panels before painting.

After I was done with the Tesla Factory tour, I headed to a nearby self-service wrecking yard, where I found a numbers-matching Zenn Electric car in the inventory. All in all, a good day for East Bay automotive stories.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io