Tesla Wins Approval to Open European Assembly Plant - The New York Times

German authorities cleared the plant, which was built near Berlin, to open for production. Tesla plans to build 500,000 electric cars a year there.

BERLIN — German authorities gave final approval on Friday for Tesla to begin production of electric vehicles and battery cells at its first major assembly plant in Europe, after months of delays and disputes, paving the way for the electric car company to begin production of its Model Y sport utility vehicle.

Tesla posted record-breaking sales in 2021, a year when it became the industry’s first trillion-dollar automaker. The new plant, just outside Berlin in Brandenburg state, is expected to deepen the company’s earnings in Europe, where its cars are already top sellers among electric vehicles. The arrival of the U.S. giant has put Germany’s traditional automakers on notice that they must raise their game or lose out to a company seen as much as a tech giant as a competitor.

Tesla has said it plans to produce 500,000 vehicles at the new facility, known as Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg. It took just more than two years for construction to be completed to an extent to begin production — record time for a major factory in Germany, but slower than the company’s chief executive, Elon Musk, had hoped.

“This was a mammoth undertaking,” Dietmar Woidke, the governor of Brandenburg, said, announcing that the 537-page administrative notice had been handed to representatives of Tesla on Friday.

The announcement on Friday came as a judge in Frankfurt was considering a lawsuit challenging the plant’s opening over water issues. Local officials have maintained that the lawsuit, filed by environmental activists, would not derail the plant’s opening.

Mr. Musk announced he would build the plant — on a site where, during the days of the communist East Germany, soldiers trained to push back NATO — at an awards ceremony in Berlin in November 2019. Local authorities, eager to court the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, rushed through building permits in a matter of weeks, instead of the usual timeline that runs in months.

But the production began to bog down after Tesla announced last April that it wanted to add a battery production facility to the site, a step that required extra paperwork. Officials for Brandenburg said they received the final documents from Tesla before the end of last year.

This is a developing news story. Check back for updates.

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