Elon Musk picked a car awards ceremony hosted by the German newspaper Bild to drop his news. Accepting a Golden Steering Wheel for the Model 3 in November 2019, he told the audience: “I actually have an announcement, which I hope will be well received. We decided to put the first Tesla Gigafactory Europe in the Berlin area.”
It caught people off guard. Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia had long been seen as the front-runners for a German plant.
Musk said the factory would go up near the new BER airport, which had sat empty for years because of one problem after another. He hoped his plant would be finished sooner than the airport. Tesla would also open an engineering and design centre in Berlin. In a tweet, he said the site would make “batteries, powertrains & vehicles, starting with Model Y,” and the Model 3 was also expected to be built there.
Why not Britain
Britain had been an option. In an interview with Auto Express, a sister publication of Auto Bild, Musk said that “Brexit [uncertainty] made it too risky to put a Gigafactory in the UK.”
A base inside the European Union gives Tesla an easier route to the large EU market and shields it from any future tariff dispute between the US and Europe. Musk already had a foothold in the country: in 2017 he bought Grohmann, an engineering company in Rhineland-Palatinate.
On stage with Volkswagen’s chief
Musk shared the stage with Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess, and was asked why Germany trails in electric mobility. He disagreed with the premise. “I don’t think German is that far behind,” he said. Momentum behind an old technology is hard to shift, he argued, because “there’s a lot of infrastructure, and a lot of capital that’s tied up in an old technology.”
He talked about Tesla’s own early days, too. “When we started out at Tesla everyone thought we were huge fools, and I thought we were fools too, frankly,” he said. His reason for pressing on was a sustainable energy future. “Even if you discount the environmental situation, eventually we will run out of oil. You can’t recycle oil.” His interest in electric cars, he added, went back to “almost high school.”
The plant now stands in Grünheide in Brandenburg, about 35 kilometres southeast of central Berlin and roughly 8 kilometres beyond the city boundary. Its closeness to Berlin Brandenburg Airport was an explicit factor in choosing the spot. It is Tesla’s first manufacturing site in Europe.
