Tesla Temporarily Shuts Factory Down as Environmentalists Call the Company a Sham

Mara is sick. The 24-year-old has been living in a mosquito-infested forest near Tesla’s German gigafactory since March, and despite the 78 degrees Fahrenheit heat, a cold is spreading through the camp. Sitting on a makeshift bench, she tells me how she left Berlin to live among the pine trees, roughly an hour’s drive outside the city, in an attempt to stop the company from expanding.

This week, she will be joined by the notorious German climate group Here And No Further (Ende Gelände), known for its theatrical, often law-breaking blockades, for a five-day-long protest. Anticipating the arrival of hundreds of demonstrators, Tesla said it would shut the factory for four days, telling its employees to work from home, according to an internal email obtained by the German newspaper Handelsblatt.

Despite the absence of Tesla workers, the company employees and local authorities will be on high alert for troublemakers. The factory is separated from the forest by only a thin fence, and as I walk the forest track tracing the factory’s perimeter, a police car lumbers slowly past, carrying out patrols. On the two days I visit, a black Tesla stands guard at the end of the path connecting the factory fence and the forest camp.

Mara, who declines to share her surname, vaguely estimates that there are 50 to 100 people involved in this anti-Tesla movement. But on a Thursday afternoon, the camp is quiet. Above us is a city of treehouses. She shows me where she sleeps, a broad wooden platform—built 10 or so meters aboveground and draped in green tarpaulin. The height provides some respite from the mosquitoes, she says, as I catch three sinking into my arm at once. A man with a partially shaved head lies on a salmon-colored sofa eating cake. Closer to the road, activists talk in raised tones about Israel. Several people are barefoot. The group expresses its politics in banners hanging from the trees—electric cars are not “climate protection”; “water is a human right”; “there is no anticolonialism without a free Palestine.”

Germany is Europe’s car-manufacturing heartland, the birthplace of BMW, Volkswagen, and Porsche. So why Tesla? The company’s presence threatens everything from local water supplies to democracy itself, she argues. “This is an existential issue.”

Their reasons for being here are part environmental, part anti-capitalist, Mara explains, turning a piece of bark between dirt-encrusted fingernails. Tesla’s ambition, to produce 1 million electric cars a year in Germany, isn’t in service to the climate, Mara says. Instead she describes the 300-hectare Tesla factory as a byproduct of “green capitalism,” a plot by companies to appear environmentally friendly in order to convince consumers to keep buying more stuff. “This has been completely thought up by such companies to have more growth, even in times of an environmental crisis,” she says, adding that the protesters have had no contact with Tesla.

To people like Mara, Tesla is a symbol of how the green transition went wrong and, as a result, the company’s German gigafactory has become the target of increasingly radical protests. The activists moved into the forest in February, in an attempt to physically block Tesla from clearing another 100 hectares of forest for its expansion. One month after the forest camp appeared, unknown saboteurs blew up a nearby power line, forcing the factory to close for one week. (A left-wing protest group called Vulkan, whose members are anonymous claimed responsibility for the action.)

Tesla should be the poster-child of the green transition. It is among the world’s most valuable companies, credited widely by analysts and journalists with turning electric vehicles from a quirky curiosity into a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet different generations of German environmentalists are now challenging clean energy orthodoxy and calling Tesla’s green credentials a sham. They complain that the new green economy is almost indistinguishable from its fossil-fuel-powered predecessor. The problems, they claim, are basically the same: the billionaires who believe they’re above the rules, the environmentally destructive mining required for electric car batteries, the industry’s disruption of communities in the global south, and unsafe working conditions. Tesla did not reply to WIRED’s request for comment.

German eco-activists’ interest in Tesla all started with local Manu Hoyer, the face of the anti-Tesla residents group the Grünheide Citizens’ Initiative (Bürgerinitiative Grünheide). The 64-year-old has lived in the Tesla’s local municipality of Grünheide for the past two decades, and ever since the factory’s arrival was first announced in 2019 she has worried about its impact on local water supplies. As with most cars, building a single Tesla requires thousands of liters, and the Grünheide factory is licensed to use 1.4 million cubic meters per year—similar to the demands of a large town. “They're stealing the water from the residents,” says Hoyer, noting that this area is among the most water-scarce in Germany.

She is not only concerned about Tesla using up local water supplies but also the potential that the company will contaminate them. To her, Tesla is a chemicals factory. “They use lots of paints and solvents that are toxic, and there's a very high danger that they contaminate the groundwater,” she claims. This is not an issue unique to Germany. In 2019, the US Environmental Protection Agency fined Tesla for hazardous waste violations at its California plant, prompting the carmaker to give hazardous-waste training to over 1,100 people working in its paint shop.

Hoyer was frustrated how, despite these concerns, German officials “rolled out the red carpet” for Musk. As we sit under pine trees earmarked to be cut down, she explains how for years this was a lonely battle. They were just a handful of locals trying to hold the German public’s attention through the pandemic and its aftermath. Then, last year, she had the idea to reach out to left-wing groups in Berlin, who she thought might help the cause regain some momentum. “We are too small to mobilize significant amounts of people on our own,” she says.

That idea worked. At a café in Berlin, I meet 41-year-old Esther Kamm, on her way to hand out leaflets about Tesla to the crowds attending May Day rallies. Kamm decided to get involved in the fight against the factory after friends told her about a speech Hoyer gave last year, asking for reinforcements in her fight against Tesla. The data scientist had taken a 12-year break from activism, focused instead on raising her kids. But this fight reminded her of her student days as an anti-nuclear activist. The dynamics were the same, she says: “private profit against the needs of the environment and local people.”

For Kamm, now part of the group Turn Off the Tap on Tesla (known by its German initialism TDHA), the battle against the company is both personal and political. Her Berlin neighborhood, Friedrichshain, sources its drinking water from an area downstream of the Tesla plant, she says, making her worry that chemicals from the factory could eventually end up in her kitchen. Ecology experts have expressed similar concerns. Any groundwater contamination “may eventually spread,” says Tobias Goldhammer, a scientist at The Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries. But Kamm also sees Tesla as a symbol of how the green transition is being hijacked for profit. “Companies like Tesla are there to save the car industry, they're not there to save the climate,” she says.

Instead she wishes more resources were being spent on building affordable public transport networks, not replacing fossil-fuel cars with electric ones. The green transition was supposed to be an opportunity to radically restructure the economy, she says, not just electrify the one we already have. There is also a sense of disappointment that it’s people like Elon Musk—a controversial figure in Germany after his interactions with the far-right AfD party on X—that will benefit from the new system. “I really wish that Tesla eventually says, ‘Fuck it, let’s leave [Germany], it’s not worth all the people opposing us,’” she says, stressing this is her personal opinion, not the position of TDHA.

Mara, Hoyer, and Kamm represent a broad anti-Tesla alliance of local residents with two generations of climate activists. Each group has different aims for the future of the factory. Hoyer just wants to stop its expansion, believing Tesla is unlikely to leave altogether. Mara talks about forcing Musk out and using the factory to build truly green technology. Kamm suggests the factory could be repurposed to manufacture buses or bikes. Yet the three women are currently united in their opposition against the expansion, ahead of a local government vote that is expected on May 16.

This week, all three will attend the five-day-long demonstration in the forest, designed to rally Tesla’s opposition. The threat of sabotage hangs over the plans, with the presence of Ende Gelände, which has previously focused on protesting coal mines or natural gas terminals. The group has also been trying to disrupt the German car industry, says spokesperson Jule Fink. “We are not only targeting electric vehicles but all the big car companies.”

Musk called the previous sabotage attempt—claimed by an unknown group of people called the Volcano group—as “extremely dumb.” But the act illustrated how much damage the anti-Tesla movement can cause the company. Estimates suggest that the arson cost Tesla hundreds of millions of euros. Still, no one has been charged.

The new wave of radical climate groups are hesitant to cause problems in areas where their presence is not endorsed by locals. But in a nonbinding vote in February, 3,499 residents said they were against Tesla’s expansion plans, with 1,882 in favor. In Hoyer, the activists also appear to have an endorsement for more radical tactics. “The Citizens' Initiative of course condemns any acts of violence,” says Hoyer, as we discuss the arson attack. But she believes it showed the factory’s vulnerability. “I think it was a good thing.”

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