Already at the end of 2021, the Tesla gigafibrika in the federal state of Brandenburg will begin production of cars, the head of the company, Elon Musk, confirmed on Monday, May 17, during a visit to the construction site in the village of Grünheide.
“We've made pretty good progress,” he told Reuters, assessing the pace of construction of the factory.
Musk's visit to Germany is of a "technical nature" and does not provide for meetings with politicians, the Brandenburg authorities emphasized.
Originally slated to begin production in July 2021, Tesla changed the construction proposal to include the world's largest battery plant, along with Tesla's only electric vehicle plant in Europe. Since the additions to the construction plan require careful scrutiny by the regional authorities and the public, a delay of several months is expected.
Musk complained in early April that even 16 months after the initial application, there was no specific date for the final approval of the gigafactory project, forcing Tesla to move forward at its own risk and based on prior approvals.
For the first time, the head of Tesla announced his plan to build a gigafactory near Berlin in November 2019. The design capacity of the plant is 500 thousand electric vehicles per year. The construction of Gigafactory 4, which began in the first quarter of 2020, is progressing at a record pace for modern Germany. Initially, Tesla intends to hire 12,000 people, but local authorities assume that by the end of the decade, the enterprise could create up to 40,000 jobs.
