Elon Musk’s first vision for Tesla’s gigafactory in Berlin was typically far-fetched.

Bursting with confidence, the second richest man in the world has promised to build a “mega rave cave” under the car factory “with an epic sound system and car-sized woofers.”

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 $ 7 billion (NZ 9.9 billion) site in the German municipality of Gruenheide has so far been painfully slow.

Its opening was initially scheduled for this Thursday, July 1, but the first electric crossover is not expected to roll off the assembly line in Germany until early 2022 at the earliest.

“Musk has often been quoted as saying that Tesla’s Model 3 had hellish production issues,” said Matthias Schmidt, an independent car analyst based in Berlin.

“In Germany, it’s’ welcome to bureaucratic hell.”

While the country has been praised for its efficiency, its planning processes can be Kafkaesque. A new airport for Berlin, just a few kilometers from the Tesla plant, opened eight years late and 29 years after planning began, at a cost of € 7 billion.

Musk now fears he will suffer the same fate. So far, Tesla has been forced to work using preliminary building permits and waited 20 months for full approval.

The billionaire has expressed his frustrations with the planning process. In May, he told reporters that planning rules in Germany were “immortal” and “just pile up until you can’t do anything more.”

In April, Tesla wrote to a German court about its building permits, saying it had “learned firsthand that obstacles in Germany’s approval processes are slowing the necessary industrial transformation.”

But building permits and red tape weren’t the only obstacles. In November 2019, Musk surprised attendees at an awards ceremony by revealing that Berlin had been chosen for their new factory. “Berlin is rocking,” he said, telling Auto Express that Tesla had turned down a site in Britain. “Brexit has made it too risky to set up a Gigafactory in the UK.”

As local politicians celebrated in Berlin and Brandenberg, in the villages dotted with the postcard pine forests that surround the site, locals were outraged.

In January, picket lines were forming near the village of Gruenheide, accusing Tesla of “stealing our water”. Musk may have expected environmental groups to back a new electric vehicle plant, but opposition has been intense.

“They bagged Tesla’s plans saying it’s not built to the right green standards,” Schmidt said.

Environmental groups Nabu, GruneLiga Brandenburg and the local opposition of the Grunheide Citizens’ Initiative have all complained about the site, which partly overlaps with a drinking water protection zone and borders a nature reserve.

“Thousands of hectares of forest will be cleared to create the necessary infrastructure and housing,” said Manuela Hoyer, member of a local campaign against it.

“To build such a factory in a protected drinking water area is in fact an environmental crime.”

In December last year, Tesla was forced to stop logging 205 acres of pine trees on two separate occasions for the welfare of slick snakes and hibernating sand lizards, despite the automaker’s efforts. to relocate wildlife.

On June 16, the groups submitted new injunctions against Tesla’s new planning demands.

More worrying than the peaceful demonstrations, a fire, started by a radical left group. “Tesla is not green, green or social,” the group wrote online. “Our fire stands against the lie of the green automobile.”

Philippe Houchois, analyst at Jefferies, says Tesla seems to have been caught off guard by the level of opposition after its success with a gigafactory in China.

“In Germany the reality is more complex. It is a democracy where people can oppose planning.”

Tesla also didn’t help itself by making several changes to its planning proposals. Its construction plans had to be resubmitted earlier this month to reflect the addition of battery cell production to the site, which cost precious months.

The Gruenheide plant includes several units to handle component manufacturing and final vehicle assembly, including a press shop, foundry, and body production.

It also includes a water recycling facility, a local fire brigade and a depot to ensure more efficient transportation of components and other goods. According to plans, the site’s electricity needs are to be met by local renewable energy sources.

But the addition of battery cell production required the company to modify and reclassify the entire application. Based on the most recent version, the plant will have the capacity to produce 500 million cells totaling 50 gigawatt hours (GWh) per year.

Despite the delays, Brandenburg Minister of State Jorg Steinbach said he hoped for “the biggest Christmas present” from the plant’s completion this year.

Analysts are not so optimistic. Tesla has still not obtained final approval for its installation of batteries at the plant, said Sandy Fitzpatrick of analyst firm Canalys, “which means a further delay is expected to extend to 2022 or even until the beginning of 2023 “. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.

Even after getting the approval, Musk will be forced to face another animal hatred: unions.

With 12,000 workers planned for its Gigafactory, Germany’s largest workers ‘union, IG Metall, plans to set up a workers’ committee.

In Britain, regional leaders have used the struggles of the gigantic Berlin factory as a problem to assert the advantages they believe their regions could offer against the Berlin-Brandenburg site.

In December, Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen wrote to Tesla urging the company to head northeast and joked on Twitter about the delays in Germany.

“When it comes to building an electric car plant and associated battery plant, there’s no better place to do it than Teeside,” Houchen says.

“If anyone needs proof of that, we recently got a building permit for a state-of-the-art 4.5 million square foot manufacturing space – the largest planning app in the north of England – in only four months without a single objection. “

Despite positive noises from the Northeast, Tesla has yet to confirm the site of its next gigafactory.

So far, it has appeared to be content with expanding its current facilities and increasing their efficiency to increase production, although it has recently halted the purchase of new land in Shanghai. Gigafactory 5 is already in preparation in Texas.

Houchois, of Jefferies, thinks Europe might still be the logical place for Tesla to grow after Texas. “They need to increase their market share in Europe and that’s where a lot of the market is,” he says.

Musk recently raised the possibility of a Russian gigafactory, but the prospect seems remote in a market with barely 10,000 electric vehicles nationwide.

Schmidt believes it will be difficult for the UK to convince Tesla to choose Britain, arguing he may have missed his chance. “The UK would have been the best choice for Tesla before Brexit,” he said, “I think Brexit torpedoed that. The UK government would have offered favorable terms, but it was exactly the wrong time.”

While Musk bristled at the nomination process, he also used Twitter to try to stay on good terms with German officials. In a response to Steinbach, the Minister of Brandenburg, he said: “I know this is a large and complex project… when all the finishing touches are completed I hope it will be considered the crown jewel. of Brandenburg.

Yet the billionaire will probably not soon forget his crisis in Berlin.

– Telegraph media group