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Tesla Sales Center in Works for Irvine

The country’s most valuable car company, Tesla Inc., clearly has a large customer base in Irvine, based on the growing number of Model 3s, Model Xs and other electric vehicles of the company running on the city’s streets.

Irvine will soon have its first Tesla location to handle that demand, city records indicate.

City planning and permitting documents indicate a Tesla sales facility is in the works for a 58,000-square-foot building fronting Jamboree Road, at the intersection of Barranca Parkway.

Construction work is underway at the currently vacant site, which is on the opposite side of Jamboree from the District at Tustin Legacy shopping center.

Permits for several charging stations at the facility have been issued or requested in recent weeks, along with other tenant improvement and signage-related needs.

Service Center Expansion?

The intersection of Jamboree Road and Barranca is among the city’s busiest, though the location would in theory allow test drives along a multi-mile stretch of Jamboree Road without traffic lights or other stops.

Specific uses of the building haven’t been disclosed by the new tenant. The building would appear large enough to house repair and other services, beyond automobile sales.

Industry reports suggest the car company is looking to open on average one new service center every week in 2021, to keep pace with rising sales figures of its vehicles.

Other stand-alone Tesla sales centers and showrooms in Orange County run in the 20,000 to 25,000-square-foot range. Tesla also has showrooms at several area malls, including Fashion Island, Brea Mall, and the Shops at Mission Viejo.

SpaceX, the aerospace company run by Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, has an office about a block away from the Irvine building.

$800B Value

The carmaker and its CEO can afford the rent of the Irvine site.

Musk’s estimated fortune of $180 billion made him the world’s seventh-wealthiest person as of last week, according to Forbes. His car company’s $800 billion valuation (Nasdaq: TSLA) was larger than that of the next nine largest automakers combined as of mid-December.

Tesla produced and sold half a million cars last year, up about 36% year-over-year. Its Model 3, the company’s most affordable offering, has been the world’s best-selling electric cars each of the past two years.

California is believed to be the company’s largest market in the U.S. Specific sales figures for individual markets and sales centers aren’t disclosed, but auto trade data indicates that the company’s Model 3 was Orange County’s best-selling car as of mid-2020.

New Owners

The Tesla plans come about a year after the Irvine property, at 2801 and 2803 Barranca, changed hands.

Thrifty Oil Co., a private real estate investor based in Santa Fe Springs, bought the site for a reported $18.6 million, or nearly $321 per square foot.

Marketing materials at the time from brokerage Newmark indicated that possible uses for the site “include industrial/R&D/manufacturing, office, hotel, retail, public storage, car wash, [and] vehicle sales.”

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Mark Mueller
Mark Mueller
Mark is the Editor-in-Chief of the Orange County Business Journal, one of the premier regional business newspapers in the country. He’s the fifth person to hold the editor’s position in the paper’s long history. He oversees a staff of about 15 people. The OCBJ is considered a must-read for area business executives. The print edition of the paper is the primary source of local news for most of the Business Journal’s subscribers, which includes most of OC’s major corporate and community players. Mark’s been with the paper since 2005, and long served as the real estate reporter for the paper, breaking hundreds of commercial and residential real estate stories. He took on the editor’s position in 2018.
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