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Tesla has been forced to go back to the drawing board after residents of the east German town of Grünheide, the site of its only European assembly plant, overwhelmingly rejected a plan to massively expand the facility.
A total of 65 per cent of those who voted in a local referendum in Grünheide expressed opposition to Tesla’s plan, which involves the clearing of 100 hectares of forest to make way for a railway station, warehouses and a day-care centre.
The vote was non-binding, but local councillors say they will respect the wishes of the community. It was unclear on Thursday whether the expansion plan will still be submitted to the local council for approval or withdrawn.
The vote is a setback for Elon Musk, five years after he stunned the German auto industry by announcing he would build his first gigafactory in Europe next to Berlin, throwing the gauntlet to an industry still in thrall to petrol and diesel cars.
The factory, which opened in March 2022, employs 12,500 people and produces 6,000 electric vehicles a week. But Tesla has ambitious plans to expand capacity from 500,000 cars a year to 1mn. To do that, it will need additional space for logistics.
Tesla recently had to suspend production for about two weeks because the disruption to container traffic caused by Houthi missile attacks on shipping in the Red Sea deprived it of crucial parts. More warehouses might allow it to accumulate larger stocks of parts and so avoid future outages.
The project has long faced opposition from environmentalists. They objected to its location in a water conservation zone bordering on a nature reserve and to the fact that hundreds of hectares of forest had to be cleared to make way for the factory.
They say local authorities granted Tesla too many exemptions from German planning law in their push to secure the landmark investment and complain that since the plant’s construction it has had a detrimental impact on air and water quality.
Concerns have been expressed about how much water the plant consumes, in a part of Brandenburg that has been struggling to cope with sinking groundwater levels amid frequent droughts.
Tesla had tried hard to win residents round to its expansion plan, holding weekly town hall meetings where locals could air their misgivings and ask questions about the project.
But it struck a conciliatory tone this week. “We see that the citizens of Grünheide have concerns in connection with the planned expansion of the site,” it said.
The company was “still convinced that the logistical optimisation of the factory would be a big win for the community”, adding it would “agree on further steps together with all those concerned, on the basis of the feedback from the last few weeks”.
Grünheide mayor Arne Christiani, who once said Grünheide had “won the lottery” by luring Tesla to the town, told Inforadio on Wednesday he was “annoyed” that the authorities had “failed to explain to people that the expansion plan also contained really important infrastructure projects, such as [a] new . . . highway or railway station forecourt”.
He added that he could not tell yet whether the local council in Grünheide would comply with the referendum outcome.
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