By Michael Elkins
Electric vehicle giant, Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) has received approval from Michigan's City of Southfield to expand a building for a research development and repair facility.
The city recently updated its zoning ordinance to allow for "this type of use," Southfield Planning Director Terry Croad said in an interview Friday. "We hadn't covered electric vehicles and research and design."
"As I've been telling people, this isn't your grandfather's bump shop," Croad said. "You know, there's not oils and gases, there's a lot of computers and chips and (you can) do diagnostics in a much cleaner way than your typical automotive repair shop."
The property, located at 21375 Telegraph Road in Southfield’s “Telegraph Technology Corridor” will be expanded to 34,500 square feet.
"It's a well-known name," Croad said. "We continue to say that we're the center of it all. We're just finishing up our master plan where we're trying to anticipate the industry moving to electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles and automated vehicles. And we're trying to position ourselves with our zoning to be flexible for these new technologies."
Shares of TSLA are down 5.33% near end of day trading on Friday.