Tesla plans to build Gigafactory in Germany

During the recent annual shareholders meeting, Tesla’s chief Elon Musk spoke about the company’s plans to build Gigafactories in other countries. His plans included having Gigafactories in Shanghai (China) and Europe. Since then, several European countries used various approaches to attract the attention of the billionaire entrepreneur. And it appears that Tesla favors Germany for its next Gigafactory.

Musk dropped this big hint about the location of the next Gigafactory when replying to a Twitter user. His response clearly indicated that Germany is the front-runner. Other countries that were said to be the ideal location for next Gigafactory included Portugal, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Picking Germany for its next Gigafactory makes more sense, considering the company’s headquarters for its Grohmann Engineering division is situated in Pruem, Germany, and its European headquarters is in Amsterdam.

Also, Musk doesn’t seem to be discouraged by President Trump’s latest warnings of high crime rate in Germany.

Related: Tesla’s 2018 annual shareholder meeting  

Currently, Tesla’s only Gigafactory is based in Nevada that will produce lithium-ion batteries and powertrains for vehicles. The company is still building its Nevada Gigafactory that is divided into four phases and will take at least four years to complete the construction. When completed, Tesla believes it will be world’s biggest building that is powered by renewable sources of energy. This factory’s battery production capacity is expected to be 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh) per year.

According to Reuters, Tesla even flew down six planes of robots from Germany to its Nevada factory, with an aim to speed up the battery production to meet the 5000 cars per week production target. However, the robots are not yet fully operational.