Tesla Calls Approval Process For Giga Grünheide Irritating

The plans to start manufacturing cars there in July 2021 may have to wait longer.

By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo

Apr 8, 2021 at 8:29am ET

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Tesla is officially not happy about the German bureaucracy. Less than three months from its planned start of operations at Giga Grünheide, the company still lacks the final building permit that will allow it to manufacture cars there. That made the company classify the approval process as “particularly irritating” in a legal brief DPA (Deutsche Presse-Agentur) analyzed.

The German news agency states that Tesla also claims in the document that it does not think it is fair that companies that “help to combat global warming” get the same treatment as companies that make it worse. Apart from tax incentives, Tesla thinks that “spreading e-mobility” also deserves a fast-track when it comes to bureaucracy.

The “particularly irritating” part refers to Tesla having asked for a final building approval 16 months ago and still getting no answer about that. RBB24 said this is due to constant changes that Tesla submitted to Brandenburg’s authorities and the rough building plans that were first presented.

According to MLUK (Ministry of the Environment of the State of Brandenburg), the plans were not rough. Still, it confirmed that Tesla made changes to the building plans and that these substantial modifications led to another round of public discussion.

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Philip Barnstorf, the author of the RBB24 article, told InsideEVs the Brandenburgian Minister of economy, Jörg Steinbach, declared that Tesla was constantly “thinking out of the box,” which put the authorities under pressure. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Steinbach now says that he hopes “the environmental authorities do not throw the factory project off course.”

As Barnstorf stressed in one of his articles, BMW took four years to finish its factory in Leipzig. If Tesla manages to put Giga Grünheide to work in a little more than one year, German automakers will probably wonder why it was not the case with them. On the other hand, if Tesla also takes four years to start production, we’ll only see the German Model Y by December 2023.

Source: DPA via Automotive News