Tesla factory in Grünheide a “gigantic money-burning furnace”?

Business is not particularly good for Tesla at the moment. Tesla CEO Elon Musk only recently announced a major wave of layoffs. Now he followed up, calling the two new factories in Austin and Greenheath gigantic money-burning furnaces that are currently losing him billions of dollars.

The last two years as a nightmare

Even beyond that, Musk is by all accounts rather unhappy with the state of his car company’s business. Speaking to the Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley fan club, he spoke of the past two years as a nightmare. At the same time, he pointed out that the problematic times for the company are not over yet. The current goal, he said, is to keep operations running to avoid insolvency and to continue to employ people.

It was foreseeable that the two new factories in Austin and Grünheide would initially consume large amounts of money: The construction of new production facilities is generally associated with enormous initial costs. In addition, there were problems with an existing factory in Shanghai, which Musk attributed to the very tough Covid policy there.

Not a good start in Grünheide

The start in Grünheide has also been rather less successful away from the financial area. For example, the planning and construction of the factory was associated with protests from the very beginning. Opponents of the factory construction were particularly bitter about the fact that a forest was cleared for the ostensibly environmentally friendly e-car production. The factory’s enormous water consumption has also come in for criticism.

Added to this is the fact that Tesla pays well below the collective wage agreement in Brandenburg. According to IG Metall, the average wage there is around twenty percent below the collectively agreed remuneration. This, in turn, fits in well with Musk’s image in this regard: In the past, he tried to prevent works councils with all his might, and in the U.S. he dismissed 500 employees in disregard of labor law, whose complaint he then dismissed as trivial. Furthermore, it recently became known that Tesla had employees spied on in Facebook groups.

Situation more relaxed than in Austin

Nevertheless, the situation in Grünheide, Brandenburg, is currently more relaxed than at the Austin factory. This is due to the fact that Grünheide uses older battery cells, which are currently easier to obtain than those used in Austin.