Progress on the $7bn site has been painfully slow as environmental campaigners and bureaucratic red tape frustrate the Tesla boss
Elon Musk’s early vision for Tesla’s gigafactory in Berlin was typically outlandish.
Brimming with confidence, the world’s second richest man promised to build a “mega rave cave” beneath the car factory “with an epic sound system and woofers the size of a car.”
It would be Tesla’s first gigafactory in Europe and its fourth overall, after sites built in Nevada, New York and Shanghai.
But progress at the $7bn (£5.8bn) site in the German municipality of Gruenheide has so far been painfully slow.
Its opening was originally planned for this Thursday July 1, but the first electric crossover is unlikely to run off the assembly line in Germany until early 2022 at the earliest.
“Musk has often been quoted saying that Tesla’s Model 3 had production hell problems,” says Matthias Schmidt, an independent Berlin-based car analyst.
“In Germany, it is ‘welcome to bureaucratic hell’”
While the country has been praised for efficiency, its planning processes can be Kafkaesque. A new airport for Berlin, only a few miles from Tesla’s plant, opened eight years late, and 29 years after planning started, at a cost of €7bn.
Musk now fears he will suffer the same fate. So far, Tesla has been forced to work using preliminary construction permits, and has been waiting 20 months to get full approval.
The billionaire has been vocal about his frustrations with the planning process. In May, he told reporters that planning rules in Germany were “immortal” and that they “just accumulate until eventually you can’t do anything”.
In April, Tesla wrote to a German court over its construction permits saying it had “learned firsthand that obstacles in Germany’s approval processes are slowing down the necessary industrial transformation”.
But planning permission and red tape haven’t been the only obstacles. In November 2019, Musk surprised attendees at an awards ceremony by revealing that Berlin had been picked for its new factory. “Berlin rocks,” he said, telling Auto Express that Tesla had turned down a site in Britain. “Brexit made it too risky to put a Gigafactory in the UK.”
As local politicians celebrated in Berlin and Brandenberg, in the villages dotted through the postcard pine forests that surround the site, locals were outraged.
By January, picket lines were forming near the village of Gruenheide, accusing Tesla of “stealing our water”. Musk may have expected environmental groups to support a new electric vehicle factory, but opposition has been intense.
“They have been sandbagging Tesla’s plans by saying it is not built to the right green standards,” Schmidt says.
Green groups Nabu, GruneLiga Brandenburg and local opposition from the Grunheide Citizen’s Initiative have all complained about the site, which partly overlaps a drinking water protection zone and borders on a nature reserve.
“Thousands of hectares of forest will be cleared to create the needed infrastructure and housing space,” says Manuela Hoyer, who is a member of a local campaign opposed to it.
“To build such a plant in a protected drinking water area is actually a crime against the environment.”