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Tesla Fremont Factory continues to receive refinements and upgrades
Tesla’s Fremont Factory continues to receive refinements and upgrades to help with the production of electric vehicles, filings show.
Tesla continuously upgrades its factories, and through the daily operation of machinery, things continue to be fixed, replaced, and refined to keep manufacturing lines moving.
However, Tesla is doing more than just routine production line maintenance at the Fremont Factory.
Over the past year, the automaker has started preparing for a new Model 3 design and potential refresh with the Model Y and even started preparing for Cybertruck battery production on the second floor of the plant.
Tesla seems to be making even more refinements to Fremont in preparation for a smoother manufacturing process and could be preparing for changes in the production line to prepare for the new vehicles.
Over the past month, Tesla has made numerous improvements to production lines, including tool updates and installations, filings seen by Teslarati show. These improvements were made to several lines and occurred on February 19, 23, and 24, as well as on March 2 and 3.
The tooling upgrades can help with everything from build quality to the overall operation of the plant.
After building hundreds of thousands of vehicles at the plant annually, upgrades are required to keep the facility in working order, especially as Tesla has overwhelming demand for its vehicles in the U.S.
Additionally, new ground in rollers and lifter tools were installed at the facility on March 9 and 10, respectively.
Maurizio Pesce from Milan, Italia, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The changes at the plant follow the installation of several new manufacturing lines to support Project Highland, which was the codename given to the Model 3 revamp last year. Additionally, Tesla started implementing automated quality control at Fremont that would help monitor build quality earlier this year.
Tesla has long struggled with build quality complaints in its vehicles but has improved over the years. The installation of new equipment at Fremont helps continue these improvements, and the development of new technology, like the automated quality control equipment, helps raise the standard of Tesla’s cars.
Project Juniper – No Hints Yet
Filings seen by Teslarati have yet to mention specific upgrades for the potential Model Y revamp, known as Project Juniper.
Tesla started filing improvements related to Project Highland about six months before reports started circulating on the new Model 3 program.
Tesla has been building the Model Y at Fremont since its initial production phases in 2020 but it is now built at Gigafactory Texas in the United States, also.
Tesla may not be completely overhauling the vehicle, according to some reports, and instead could opt for more refinements to increase the quality and the DNA of the vehicle, as it did for the Model S and Model X in 2021.
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News
Tesla partners with Lemonade for new insurance program
Tesla recently was offered “almost free” coverage for Full Self-Driving by Lemonade’s Shai Wininger, President and Co-founder, who said it would be “happy to explore insuring Tesla FSD miles for (almost) free.”
Tesla owners in California, Oregon, and Arizona can now use Lemonade Insurance, the firm that recently said it could cover Full Self-Driving miles for “almost free.”
Lemonade, which offered the new service through its app, has three distinct advantages, it says:
- Direct Connection for no telematics device needed
- Better customer service
- Smarter pricing
The company is known for offering unique, fee-based insurance rates through AI, and instead of keeping unclaimed premiums, it offers coverage through a flat free upfront. The leftover funds are donated to charities by its policyholders.
On Thursday, it announced that cars in three states would be able to be connected directly to the car through its smartphone app, enabling easier access to insurance factors through telematics:
Lemonade customers who own @Tesla vehicles in California, Oregon, and Arizona can now connect their cars directly to the Lemonade app! ⚡🚘
Direct connection = no telematics device needed 📵
Better customer experience 💃
Smarter pricing with Lemonade 🧠This is a game-changer… pic.twitter.com/jbabxZWT4t
— Lemonade (@Lemonade_Inc) December 11, 2025
Tesla recently was offered “almost free” coverage for Full Self-Driving by Lemonade’s Shai Wininger, President and Co-founder, who said it would be “happy to explore insuring Tesla FSD miles for (almost) free.”
The strategy would be one of the most unique, as it would provide Tesla drivers with stable, accurate, and consistent insurance rates, while also incentivizing owners to utilize Full Self-Driving for their travel miles.
Tesla Full Self-Driving gets an offer to be insured for ‘almost free’
This would make FSD more cost-effective for owners and contribute to the company’s data collection efforts.
Data also backs Tesla Full Self-Driving’s advantages as a safety net for drivers. Recent figures indicate it was nine times less likely to be in an accident compared to the national average, registering an accident every 6.36 million miles. The NHTSA says a crash occurs approximately every 702,000 miles.
Tesla also offers its own in-house insurance program, which is currently offered in twelve states so far. The company is attempting to enter more areas of the U.S., with recent filings indicating the company wants to enter Florida and offer insurance to drivers in that state.
News
Tesla Model Y gets hefty discounts and more in final sales push
Tesla Model Y configurations are getting hefty discounts and more benefits as the company is in the phase of its final sales push for the year.
Tesla is offering up to $1,500 off new Model Y Standard trims that are available in inventory in the United States. Additionally, Tesla is giving up to $2,000 off the Premium trims of the Model Y. There is also one free upgrade included, such as a paint color or interior color, at no additional charge.
NEWS: Tesla is now offering discounts of up to $1,500 off new Model Y Standard vehicles in U.S. inventory. Discounts of up to $2,000 are also being offered on Model Y Premiums.
These discounts are in addition to the one free upgrade you get (such as Diamond Black paint) on… pic.twitter.com/L0RMtjmtK0
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) December 10, 2025
Tesla is hoping to bolster a relatively strong performance through the first three quarters of the year, with over 1.2 million cars delivered through the first three quarters.
This is about four percent under what the company reported through the same time period last year, as it was about 75,000 vehicles ahead in 2024.
However, Q3 was the company’s best quarterly performance of all time, and it surged because of the loss of the $7,500 EV tax credit, which was eliminated in September. The imminent removal of the credit led to many buyers flocking to Tesla showrooms to take advantage of the discount, which led to a strong quarter for the company.
2024 was the first year in the 2020s when Tesla did not experience a year-over-year delivery growth, as it saw a 1 percent slide from 2023. The previous years saw huge growth, with the biggest coming from 2020 to 2021, when Tesla had an 87 percent delivery growth.
This year, it is expected to be a second consecutive slide, with a drop of potentially 8 percent, if it manages to deliver 1.65 million cars, which is where Grok projects the automaker to end up.
Tesla will likely return to its annual growth rate in the coming years, but the focus is becoming less about delivery figures and more about autonomy, a major contributor to the company’s valuation. As AI continues to become more refined, Tesla will apply these principles to its Full Self-Driving efforts, as well as the Optimus humanoid robot project.
Will Tesla thrive without the EV tax credit? Five reasons why they might
These discounts should help incentivize some buyers to pull the trigger on a vehicle before the year ends. It will also be interesting to see if the adjusted EV tax credit rules, which allowed deliveries to occur after the September 30 cutoff date, along with these discounts, will have a positive impact.
News
Tesla FSD’s newest model is coming, and it sounds like ‘the last big piece of the puzzle’
“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026.”
Tesla Full Self-Driving’s newest model is coming very soon, and from what it sounds like, it could be “the last big piece of the puzzle,” as CEO Elon Musk said in late November.
During the xAI Hackathon on Tuesday, Musk was available for a Q&A session, where he revealed some details about Robotaxi and Tesla’s plans for removing Robotaxi Safety Monitors, and some information on a future FSD model.
While he said Full Self-Driving’s unsupervised capability is “pretty much solved,” and confirmed it will remove Safety Monitors in the next three weeks, questions about the company’s ability to give this FSD version to current owners came to mind.
Musk said a new FSD model is coming in about a month or two that will be an order-of-magnitude larger and will include more reasoning and reinforcement learning.
He said:
“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026. We’re gonna add a lot of reasoning and RL (reinforcement learning). To get to serious scale, Tesla will probably need to build a giant chip fab. To have a few hundred gigawatts of AI chips per year, I don’t see that capability coming online fast enough, so we will probably have to build a fab.”
NEWS: Elon Musk says FSD Unsupervised is “pretty much solved at this point” and that @Tesla will be launching Robotaxis with no safety monitors in about 3 weeks in Austin, Texas. He also teased a new FSD model is coming in about 1-2 months.
“We’re just going through validation… https://t.co/Msne72cgMB pic.twitter.com/i3wfKX3Z0r
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) December 10, 2025
It rings back to late November when Musk said that v14.3 “is where the last big piece of the puzzle finally lands.”
With the advancements made through Full Self-Driving v14 and v14.2, there seems to be a greater confidence in solving self-driving completely. Musk has also personally said that driver monitoring has been more relaxed, and looking at your phone won’t prompt as many alerts in the latest v14.2.1.
This is another indication that Tesla is getting closer to allowing people to take their eyes off the road completely.
Along with the Robotaxi program’s success, there is evidence that Tesla could be close to solving FSD. However, it is not perfect. We’ve had our own complaints with FSD, and although we feel it is the best ADAS on the market, it is not, in its current form, able to perform everything needed on roads.
But it is close.
That’s why there is some legitimate belief that Tesla could be releasing a version capable of no supervision in the coming months.
All we can say is, we’ll see.