0
50,000
2019100,000
150,000
ANNUALIZED
NEW REGISTRATIONS FOR ELECTRIC* PASSENGER CARS IN WESTERN EUROPE
BMWDAIMLERPSATESLARENAULT/
NISSAN/
MITSUBISHI/HYUNDAI/KIAVOLKSWAGEN2020 2021
- WITHOUT SECONDARY SOURCE OF PROPULSION SOURCE: SCHMIDT AUTOMOTIVE RESEARCH, 12-MONTH MOVING AVERAGE, 18 NATIONS COVERED
96,36269,56442,618
40,11 596,018173,402135,111MUSK’S EUROPEAN TOUR
Tesla dominates the worldwide electric-vehicle market, with about 18% of total sales.
But the company’s primacy is slipping in Europe.44 FORTUNE FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021the animals have burrowed in the
woodlands around Grünheide, an in-
creasingly precious respite from the
encroaching human world. Imme-
diately after Musk’s 2019 announce-
ment, environmental groups sued
Tesla for endangering the reptiles, as
well as the rare western barbastelle
bat. All are protected under strict
nature conservation laws, which pro-
hibit construction that might harm
listed wildlife. Musk admits he was
amazed there were reptiles on the
site. “I think this is not a fun place for
a snake or lizard,” he says. “They will
be very, very cold. Frozen!”
In February of last year, a court
order mandated that Tesla suspend
building until it had a plan to save the
wildlife on the land and relocate the
lizards and snakes. Tesla offered to
plant three times the number of trees
it was planning to obliterate, but the
legal challenges persisted. In Decem-
ber Tesla was twice ordered by judges
to stop felling trees, because it could
kill reptiles still alive on the site. As of
late January, work was continuing.vantages,” says Christiane Schröder,
managing director in Brandenburg
for the Nature and Biodiversity Con-
servation Union, one of the organiza-
tions that sued Tesla for endangering
the animals.
Rescuing the reptiles from Tesla’s
bulldozers has required months of
painstaking planning. “It is very, very
difficult,” says Jens Frayer, a profes-
sional lizard catcher for German
conservation company Natur und
Text, which is searching for animals
living on the company’s land.
Even in the best of times, Germa-
ny’s indigenous Coronella austriaca
snakes and Lacerta agilis lizards
wage an all-out battle against the
elements. Those that survive the cold,
wet weather are often eaten by crows;
an eight-year life span is rare. These
are hardly the best of times. As Tesla
began its frenzied build-out, so Frayer
scrambled to save the reptiles, a task
he says requires immense patience
and well-honed skills. “Both the
snakes and the lizards have camou-
flage,” he says. “First we have to train
people to see them. And then we have
to train people to catch them.”
The railway tracks on Tesla’s land,
which sit atop piles of small rocks,
are a favorite and frustratingly effec-
tive hiding place for the creatures.
“The snakes can hear and feel when
you’re near,” Frayer says. “You will
never see them.” In the end, the
team built black plastic boards toFor all the controversy, there ap-
pears to be no stopping Tesla’s Giga-
factory. “The total investment is very,
very substantial,” Musk says. “And we
will continue for quite some time.”
Tesla’s building application estimated
the factory construction would cost
a billion euros. And for politicians,
the influx of new jobs is crucial for
a region that suffered a disastrous
brain drain after the collapse of Com-
munism. “Almost a whole generation
left from East to West,” Branden-
burg’s Economic Affairs Minister
Jörg Steinbach tells me. Thanks in
part to Tesla’s arrival, he says, “we are
turning the wheel around 180 de-
grees.” Musk says he intends to make
the factory a tourist site, a “beautiful”
tech showcase heavily powered by
wind and solar. Being on the edge
of Berlin is crucial, he says, to luring
thousands of top engineers: “We are
recruiting from across Europe.”
But to environmentalists, offi-
cials have simply traded nature for
business interests. “They saw all the
advantages and ignored all the disad-MUSK’S WILD LIFE: An endangered sand lizard (left). Musk holds court with journalists outside the Gigafactory site in September.NICOLAS ARMER—PICTURE ALLIANCE/GETTY IMAGES