Tesla Model 3 Highland US regulation headlights get closeups before release along with door panel gaps

Tesla seems to be testing the US version of the Model 3 Highland facelift in plain sight on California roads. Despite that the Highlands driving around are with Chinese badging as if they came out of Giga Shanghai and were only fitted with US regulation headlights, their VIN number reveals they were actually made in Tesla's Fremont factory.

One of those Fremont-made decoys got its headlights snapped from up close out in the wild, and they seem to indeed be US-bound with the whole orange separator game that differentiates the US vehicles from the rest of the globe over things like housing reflectors, size, and overall luminance.

While the Fremont VIN and different headlights mean that the US release of the Model 3 Highland is in advanced stages of preparation, some door panel gaps and protection film that can be seen on the test units indicate that they are still quite a bit removed from a production version.

The big difference of the US-bound Model 3 Highland with the Chinese version that is also exported to Europe are not the headlights or other design quirks, but rather the Hardware 4.0 kit. Since in the US Tesla offers its Full Self-Driving autonomy option that the rest of the world can't get, it also has to equip the Model 3 Highland with its full HW4 autonomous driving suite of cameras, computers, and sensors, and test the whole setup accordingly.

It also has to pass a different set of crash tests which has reportedly delayed the launch, too. This takes time and may explain why the US release of the Tesla Model 3 Highland is only rumored to happen in the current quarter. It remains to be seen if the Highland will qualify for any part of the federal $7,500 EV tax credit, too, as its 2023 Model 3 counterparts lost the government subsidy on account of the made-in-China battery pack. 

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