8 ms·

German region to fine Tesla for illegal construction

81 points by tonyjstark 5y ago

cuillevel3 5y ago
The picture in the article faces away from the factory? https://www.rbb24.de/content/dam/rbb/rbb/rbb24/2021/2021_07/dpa-account/c247187006.jpg https://www.rbb24.de/content/dam/rbb/rbb/rbb24/2021/2021_07/...
Semaphor 5y ago
The Tagesspiegel has a newer article [0] (German): * They asked for 5 chemical tanks, got 2 permitted, built 5 anyway. * There will be an inspection of the whole construction site to make sure they didn’t build more than allowed in other areas as well. * This is the third time Tesla ignored where/what/when they are allowed to do something. * An unspecified insider said that a lot of things are going haywire at the site. [0]: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/gesamte-baustelle-unter-der-lupe-grosskontrolle-bei-tesla-gigafabrik-in-gruenheide/27406856.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/gesamte-baustelle-unter-d...
- atlasunshrugged 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing this, indeed it was helpful (and the automatic translation from German to English wasn't bad at all). I am a bit surprised that things are going wrong this often (if indeed it is neglect rather than intentional) as I would have thought they'd have this down pat given their work in Fremont/Nevada/Shanghai already.
  - volta83 5y ago
    I know a couple of people (EDIT: two people) that have started working for Tesla in Germany and the one that was there the longest quit in less than 6 months. Basically, Tesla does not pay enough here for competent people to work for them. EDIT: For mechanical and civil engineers, they pay ~10-20% more than market average, but market average works 9-4 (35h/week), has a pretty relaxed work, colleagues are also relaxed, etc. These type of people are used to a very relaxed life, spending lots of time with their kids, leaving their work phone at work, not checking emails after work or on the weekends, etc. In Tesla you work your ass off, work shifts, there is apparently a high level of incompetency, high turnover, lots of stress to deliver impossible things, etc. A very skilled friend told me he wouldn't do it for less than 3x their actual salary. For 20% more the offer made absolutely no sense. I think he was there for ~2 months or so. He took a pay cut for their next job, and did so very happily. If the only people you can attract are juniors without anybody to help them grow, well this is what you get.
    - atlasunshrugged 5y ago
      Wow, that's intense! And because of mismanagement or work style or something else? My impression is that Tesla/SpaceX really drive people hard and I'm not sure how well that culture flies in Germany. Edit - saw your edit, thanks for clarifying!
      - progx 5y ago
        If you got no stock options or anything else, why should you work in germany more than 35 hours for a company? When you work more for more money, the taxes explode.
        volta83 5y ago
        Stock options are "salary" in Germany, and they get taxed at ~45%. --- In Germany, everything that a company gives an employee is salary. Company car? You have to pay 1% of the listing price of the car _per month_ in taxes (that's 1000$ per month in taxes for the employee if their company gives them a 100k$ car..). Stock? The day you receive the stock, price is measured, and 45% you pay in taxes. Stock options? The day you receive the option, the price of the stock were you to exercise it right away is measured, and that's taxed with 45% (which kind of forces you to exercise at least some of the options to pay the taxes), etc. Otherwise companies could pay you by paying your whole life (car, house, etc.) to avoid taxes. BTW, this is also why startup culture in Germany sucks. Startups can't really pay people in stock options, cause they are super highly taxed, and they are hard to value. Worst case you end up paying a lot of taxes for something that ends up being valued == 0 the moment you can't sell it (startup dies).
        foepys 5y ago
        Correction, you have to declare (or whatever you call "anrechnen") 1% of the company car that you are allowed use in your free time, which often works out cheaper than a privately owned car. In the end you pay at max 45% of the 1% for it, although 45% only applies to every € over 250,000€/year. For every € between about 60,000€/year and 250,000€ you are taxed 42%.
- jozvolskyef 5y ago
  Are the permits and rejections publicly available? From the article seems that Tesla didn't intend to use the tanks without permission.
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    Possibly, apparently the 11,000 pages for the proposal are public. But I wouldn’t know where to search for them.
    - sgift 5y ago
      https://www.uvp-verbund.de/trefferanzeige?docuuid=94AFADF0-92F1-44EA-AA54-E1CD7C0FF6AD&plugid=/ingrid-group:ige-iplug-bb&docid=94AFADF0-92F1-44EA-AA54-E1CD7C0FF6AD https://www.uvp-verbund.de/trefferanzeige?docuuid=94AFADF0-9...
  - Pyramus 5y ago
    In general yes, applications and permits are public documents. I'm not 100% sure about rejections though (maybe somebody can chime in) but in any case you can infer it from the diff of application and permit. Publicly available does not necessarily mean easily accessible: The official way they get published is at the official bulletin board ("Amtstafel") or the official gazette ("Amtsblatt") of the local administrative entity, and usually for a limited amounted of time. Most councils etc. do have electronic versions though.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    That latter point seems pretty relevant. If they intended to not use the tanks unless approved, And the construction process itself wasn’t particularly disruptive (I’m assuming they have a broad construction permit for the total amount of area being built on), it doesn’t seem morally questionable to build things ahead of time while the paperwork for use is still being finalized. Like, would building the tanks have been illegal if they were simply art pieces? That confusion may have been why they proceeded. Generally speaking, I don’t think we should underestimate the degree to which regulatory burdens hold back progress in decarbonization. Getting permits for a solar farm in the US is a long process but planting a field for agriculture is much easier spite of concerns for runoff from fertilizers etc. The status quo bias of strict regulations needs to be considered if we are to decarbonize fast enough. (This is particularly bad in the US for increasing housing density and building public transport infrastructure… these things are stymied by status-quo regulations and NIMBYism, and it makes it essentially impossible for us to decarbonize via densification on a reasonable timescale.) How long does it take to satisfy all stakeholders to get HSR built in California? What about building multiplexes in places zoned single-family? You run into hall monitor NIMBYism and slow regulatory burdens constantly. Meanwhile, people continue to buy big fossil-fuel guzzling trucks and SUVs, planes keep belching emissions, etc. I think the climate is going to run out of time.
- jmpman 5y ago
  Any information on why the other 3 weren’t permitted? Are the local officials trying to subvert an American company?
  - adwn 5y ago
    > Are the local officials trying to subvert an American company? Is this an "I'm just asking questions" thing?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - jmpman 5y ago
      I’m legitimately interested in why their original request was denied. Environmental concerns? Safety concerns? Too much power? Too much noise? Fire concern? Insufficient containment area if the tanks leak? Without a prior documented restriction for a specific reason, it appears to be government interference. Was the reason identified? Any mitigations suggested?
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  From the tagesspiegel article: “ Why is Tesla risking all of this?” A possible answer: https://vtdigger.org/2021/06/13/michael-shank-with-time-running-out-radical-action-needed-on-climate/amp/ https://vtdigger.org/2021/06/13/michael-shank-with-time-runn... We are running out what time for fighting anthropogenic climate change. As long as there are still new ICEs being built and sold that electric carmakers could displace, it’s understandable why you’d want to go extremely fast in building more electric cars. (Appropriate regulations should be followed, but still, it’s not as if there’s all the time in the world…)
  - sgift 5y ago
    A more likely answer: They thought they can just fix all of this later and no one will care. I still remember this one story by pg where he had the part how they did their startup and that they didn't do all the things they were required to do (by law) at first, but just hired an accountant later to fix it all up. Those things don't fly in Germany. And Tesla is learning that the hard way.
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      Nope. The more likely answer is they were trying to get work done in parallel with the paperwork so that By the time the approval was ready to use the tanks, they had already been built instead of requiring these things to be done in series. I suppose it is up to the regulators how they want to enforce this, but it seems like they were going to wait on actually using the tanks until it was actually approved, but the regulators thought there was too much risk they could use them anyway. If they were just trying to skirt the law they wouldn’t have applied for a permit for five of the tanks anyway. It’s kind of hard to tell from a popular media article what the reality of the regulatory situation is. Sometimes mere /concerns/ and notes by regulators can be upgraded to “violations” by the press. Everyone just kind of read between the lines and unless you’re an actual expert in the topic it’s super easy for a journalist or (more likely) an editor to try to spin a certain narrative in order to get engagement. And this can happen not due to intention to deceive but simply because the editor isn’t very familiar with the topic.
  - deleted 5y ago
- AlbertoGP 5y ago
  To add, this Video in German from last March: https://www.zdf.de/politik/frontal-21/dokumentation-turbo-tempo-tesla-elon-musk-in-brandenburg-108.htmlhttps://www.zdf.de/politik/frontal-21/dokumentation-turbo-tempo-tesla-elon-musk-in-brandenburg-108.html https://www.zdf.de/politik/frontal-21/dokumentation-turbo-te... It describes how Tesla goes on building things without permits, on a protected area that provides drinking water to the region (“Trinkwasserschutzgebiet”), which they of course chose because they want that water, then proceeded to bury poles [“Pfähle”] going all the way to the groundwater, which is explicitly forbidden. That parts starts at 23:21″, but this video player does not let me link to that point directly. So they start putting the poles there, illegally, then the regional economy minister comes saying that he talked sternly with them, and that they will have to pay a fine, says “I believe they have learned their lesson”, but later they just got a waiver from the environmental regulations and put all 560 poles in place. There is a fight between different parts of the local government, with the economy minister courting Tesla, and the environment minister resisting the pressure to just let them do whatever they want. So yes, it seems that this is not an isolated incident, but a pattern of behavior by Tesla, enabled by part of the local government. Edit: copy of the video in YouTube, where you can use the automatic translation to English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQa3uW3qBgo&t=23m21s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQa3uW3qBgo&t=23m21s Edit2: that attitude is quite a contrast with how hard Elon Musk is kowtowing to the CCP these days: https://youtu.be/oQ4Xqki6VqQ?t=3126 https://youtu.be/oQ4Xqki6VqQ?t=3126
flavius29663 5y ago
And this is why Europe lags the US in large tech companies. They just don't bend over backwards to appease the billionaires, which the states do.
- ghomrassen 5y ago
  Or because Europe is a bureaucratic nightmare.
  - atlasunshrugged 5y ago
    Certainly doesn't help. One of the things I was most surprised about when I worked for e-Residency in Estonia was how many users were actually from inside the EU but didn't want to incorporate in their own country because of the bureaucracy or how arbitrarily rules could be interpreted by authorities (one Greek or Italian entrepreneur mentioned to me going to several tax officials to ask one question and getting different answers from each of them ).
  - piva00 5y ago
    Unlike the US? From what I've experienced and seen the US is another bureaucratic nightmare, it's just more localised in the states/counties but regulations vary quite a lot, creating its own set of nightmares. Europe varies as lot as well, I wouldn't say that here in Sweden it's a bureaucratic nightmare by any stretch, it's quite straightforward in most cases.
    - atlasunshrugged 5y ago
      @piva00 Really? I rarely hear people comment on things like that in the U.S. except in really regulated industries like healthcare and finance. When you can start a company via Stripe Atlas in a few mins and get a bank account, that seems relatively streamlined. Plus workers rights are minimal so you can easily fire people in most right to work states, etc.
      - raverbashing 5y ago
hybridtupel 5y ago
At first I was thinking since when does Tesla build (war) tanks. Because then I’d understand the fuzz.

81 points by tonyjstark 5y ago

The picture in the article faces away from the factory? https://www.rbb24.de/content/dam/rbb/rbb/rbb24/2021/2021_07/dpa-account/c247187006.jpg https://www.rbb24.de/content/dam/rbb/rbb/rbb24/2021/2021_07/...

Semaphor 5y ago

The Tagesspiegel has a newer article [0] (German): * They asked for 5 chemical tanks, got 2 permitted, built 5 anyway. * There will be an inspection of the whole construction site to make sure they didn’t build more than allowed in other areas as well. * This is the third time Tesla ignored where/what/when they are allowed to do something. * An unspecified insider said that a lot of things are going haywire at the site. [0]: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/gesamte-baustelle-unter-der-lupe-grosskontrolle-bei-tesla-gigafabrik-in-gruenheide/27406856.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/gesamte-baustelle-unter-d...

atlasunshrugged 5y ago
Thanks for sharing this, indeed it was helpful (and the automatic translation from German to English wasn't bad at all). I am a bit surprised that things are going wrong this often (if indeed it is neglect rather than intentional) as I would have thought they'd have this down pat given their work in Fremont/Nevada/Shanghai already.
- volta83 5y ago
  I know a couple of people (EDIT: two people) that have started working for Tesla in Germany and the one that was there the longest quit in less than 6 months. Basically, Tesla does not pay enough here for competent people to work for them. EDIT: For mechanical and civil engineers, they pay ~10-20% more than market average, but market average works 9-4 (35h/week), has a pretty relaxed work, colleagues are also relaxed, etc. These type of people are used to a very relaxed life, spending lots of time with their kids, leaving their work phone at work, not checking emails after work or on the weekends, etc. In Tesla you work your ass off, work shifts, there is apparently a high level of incompetency, high turnover, lots of stress to deliver impossible things, etc. A very skilled friend told me he wouldn't do it for less than 3x their actual salary. For 20% more the offer made absolutely no sense. I think he was there for ~2 months or so. He took a pay cut for their next job, and did so very happily. If the only people you can attract are juniors without anybody to help them grow, well this is what you get.
  - atlasunshrugged 5y ago
    Wow, that's intense! And because of mismanagement or work style or something else? My impression is that Tesla/SpaceX really drive people hard and I'm not sure how well that culture flies in Germany. Edit - saw your edit, thanks for clarifying!
    - progx 5y ago
      If you got no stock options or anything else, why should you work in germany more than 35 hours for a company? When you work more for more money, the taxes explode.
      - volta83 5y ago
        Stock options are "salary" in Germany, and they get taxed at ~45%. --- In Germany, everything that a company gives an employee is salary. Company car? You have to pay 1% of the listing price of the car _per month_ in taxes (that's 1000$ per month in taxes for the employee if their company gives them a 100k$ car..). Stock? The day you receive the stock, price is measured, and 45% you pay in taxes. Stock options? The day you receive the option, the price of the stock were you to exercise it right away is measured, and that's taxed with 45% (which kind of forces you to exercise at least some of the options to pay the taxes), etc. Otherwise companies could pay you by paying your whole life (car, house, etc.) to avoid taxes. BTW, this is also why startup culture in Germany sucks. Startups can't really pay people in stock options, cause they are super highly taxed, and they are hard to value. Worst case you end up paying a lot of taxes for something that ends up being valued == 0 the moment you can't sell it (startup dies).
        foepys 5y ago
        Correction, you have to declare (or whatever you call "anrechnen") 1% of the company car that you are allowed use in your free time, which often works out cheaper than a privately owned car. In the end you pay at max 45% of the 1% for it, although 45% only applies to every € over 250,000€/year. For every € between about 60,000€/year and 250,000€ you are taxed 42%.
jozvolskyef 5y ago
Are the permits and rejections publicly available? From the article seems that Tesla didn't intend to use the tanks without permission.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  Possibly, apparently the 11,000 pages for the proposal are public. But I wouldn’t know where to search for them.
  - sgift 5y ago
    https://www.uvp-verbund.de/trefferanzeige?docuuid=94AFADF0-92F1-44EA-AA54-E1CD7C0FF6AD&plugid=/ingrid-group:ige-iplug-bb&docid=94AFADF0-92F1-44EA-AA54-E1CD7C0FF6AD https://www.uvp-verbund.de/trefferanzeige?docuuid=94AFADF0-9...
- Pyramus 5y ago
  In general yes, applications and permits are public documents. I'm not 100% sure about rejections though (maybe somebody can chime in) but in any case you can infer it from the diff of application and permit. Publicly available does not necessarily mean easily accessible: The official way they get published is at the official bulletin board ("Amtstafel") or the official gazette ("Amtsblatt") of the local administrative entity, and usually for a limited amounted of time. Most councils etc. do have electronic versions though.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  That latter point seems pretty relevant. If they intended to not use the tanks unless approved, And the construction process itself wasn’t particularly disruptive (I’m assuming they have a broad construction permit for the total amount of area being built on), it doesn’t seem morally questionable to build things ahead of time while the paperwork for use is still being finalized. Like, would building the tanks have been illegal if they were simply art pieces? That confusion may have been why they proceeded. Generally speaking, I don’t think we should underestimate the degree to which regulatory burdens hold back progress in decarbonization. Getting permits for a solar farm in the US is a long process but planting a field for agriculture is much easier spite of concerns for runoff from fertilizers etc. The status quo bias of strict regulations needs to be considered if we are to decarbonize fast enough. (This is particularly bad in the US for increasing housing density and building public transport infrastructure… these things are stymied by status-quo regulations and NIMBYism, and it makes it essentially impossible for us to decarbonize via densification on a reasonable timescale.) How long does it take to satisfy all stakeholders to get HSR built in California? What about building multiplexes in places zoned single-family? You run into hall monitor NIMBYism and slow regulatory burdens constantly. Meanwhile, people continue to buy big fossil-fuel guzzling trucks and SUVs, planes keep belching emissions, etc. I think the climate is going to run out of time.
jmpman 5y ago
Any information on why the other 3 weren’t permitted? Are the local officials trying to subvert an American company?
- adwn 5y ago
  > Are the local officials trying to subvert an American company? Is this an "I'm just asking questions" thing?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jmpman 5y ago
    I’m legitimately interested in why their original request was denied. Environmental concerns? Safety concerns? Too much power? Too much noise? Fire concern? Insufficient containment area if the tanks leak? Without a prior documented restriction for a specific reason, it appears to be government interference. Was the reason identified? Any mitigations suggested?
Robotbeat 5y ago
From the tagesspiegel article: “ Why is Tesla risking all of this?” A possible answer: https://vtdigger.org/2021/06/13/michael-shank-with-time-running-out-radical-action-needed-on-climate/amp/ https://vtdigger.org/2021/06/13/michael-shank-with-time-runn... We are running out what time for fighting anthropogenic climate change. As long as there are still new ICEs being built and sold that electric carmakers could displace, it’s understandable why you’d want to go extremely fast in building more electric cars. (Appropriate regulations should be followed, but still, it’s not as if there’s all the time in the world…)
- sgift 5y ago
  A more likely answer: They thought they can just fix all of this later and no one will care. I still remember this one story by pg where he had the part how they did their startup and that they didn't do all the things they were required to do (by law) at first, but just hired an accountant later to fix it all up. Those things don't fly in Germany. And Tesla is learning that the hard way.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Nope. The more likely answer is they were trying to get work done in parallel with the paperwork so that By the time the approval was ready to use the tanks, they had already been built instead of requiring these things to be done in series. I suppose it is up to the regulators how they want to enforce this, but it seems like they were going to wait on actually using the tanks until it was actually approved, but the regulators thought there was too much risk they could use them anyway. If they were just trying to skirt the law they wouldn’t have applied for a permit for five of the tanks anyway. It’s kind of hard to tell from a popular media article what the reality of the regulatory situation is. Sometimes mere /concerns/ and notes by regulators can be upgraded to “violations” by the press. Everyone just kind of read between the lines and unless you’re an actual expert in the topic it’s super easy for a journalist or (more likely) an editor to try to spin a certain narrative in order to get engagement. And this can happen not due to intention to deceive but simply because the editor isn’t very familiar with the topic.
- deleted 5y ago
AlbertoGP 5y ago
To add, this Video in German from last March: https://www.zdf.de/politik/frontal-21/dokumentation-turbo-tempo-tesla-elon-musk-in-brandenburg-108.htmlhttps://www.zdf.de/politik/frontal-21/dokumentation-turbo-tempo-tesla-elon-musk-in-brandenburg-108.html https://www.zdf.de/politik/frontal-21/dokumentation-turbo-te... It describes how Tesla goes on building things without permits, on a protected area that provides drinking water to the region (“Trinkwasserschutzgebiet”), which they of course chose because they want that water, then proceeded to bury poles [“Pfähle”] going all the way to the groundwater, which is explicitly forbidden. That parts starts at 23:21″, but this video player does not let me link to that point directly. So they start putting the poles there, illegally, then the regional economy minister comes saying that he talked sternly with them, and that they will have to pay a fine, says “I believe they have learned their lesson”, but later they just got a waiver from the environmental regulations and put all 560 poles in place. There is a fight between different parts of the local government, with the economy minister courting Tesla, and the environment minister resisting the pressure to just let them do whatever they want. So yes, it seems that this is not an isolated incident, but a pattern of behavior by Tesla, enabled by part of the local government. Edit: copy of the video in YouTube, where you can use the automatic translation to English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQa3uW3qBgo&t=23m21s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQa3uW3qBgo&t=23m21s Edit2: that attitude is quite a contrast with how hard Elon Musk is kowtowing to the CCP these days: https://youtu.be/oQ4Xqki6VqQ?t=3126 https://youtu.be/oQ4Xqki6VqQ?t=3126

flavius29663 5y ago

And this is why Europe lags the US in large tech companies. They just don't bend over backwards to appease the billionaires, which the states do.

ghomrassen 5y ago
Or because Europe is a bureaucratic nightmare.
- atlasunshrugged 5y ago
  Certainly doesn't help. One of the things I was most surprised about when I worked for e-Residency in Estonia was how many users were actually from inside the EU but didn't want to incorporate in their own country because of the bureaucracy or how arbitrarily rules could be interpreted by authorities (one Greek or Italian entrepreneur mentioned to me going to several tax officials to ask one question and getting different answers from each of them ).
- piva00 5y ago
  Unlike the US? From what I've experienced and seen the US is another bureaucratic nightmare, it's just more localised in the states/counties but regulations vary quite a lot, creating its own set of nightmares. Europe varies as lot as well, I wouldn't say that here in Sweden it's a bureaucratic nightmare by any stretch, it's quite straightforward in most cases.
  - atlasunshrugged 5y ago
    @piva00 Really? I rarely hear people comment on things like that in the U.S. except in really regulated industries like healthcare and finance. When you can start a company via Stripe Atlas in a few mins and get a bank account, that seems relatively streamlined. Plus workers rights are minimal so you can easily fire people in most right to work states, etc.
    - raverbashing 5y ago

hybridtupel 5y ago

At first I was thinking since when does Tesla build (war) tanks. Because then I’d understand the fuzz.