Tesla's butcher knife swung to the birthplace of the car! Germany, times have changed!

Hello everyone, I am the president of the Electric Vehicle Commune.

After the sales of major car companies were announced in March, Tesla was indeed on the hot search -

In the first quarter, Tesla delivered 310,000 vehicles worldwide, and it was the world's first new energy vehicle sales champion.

But Musk himself is not happy. The Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai has been out of production for two days since March 16, and production at Tesla's Shanghai plant has remained in a state of suspension since March 28.

The long-awaited resumption of production plan has also made the already difficult pick-up cycle even worse. It took 5-6 months to deliver the car before the suspension of production, so the president couldn't help but pinch a cold sweat for the owner who had already decided.

However, the current situation of this difficulty in lifting the car may soon be improved!

You know, Tesla's Berlin factory was finally officially put into operation at the end of March after 28 months of "torture".

The new plant's goal this year is to reach one car every 45 seconds by the end of the year and deliver 50,000 Model Y units to Europe.

Its expected planned production capacity is 500,000 vehicles per year, and it will also be equipped with 50GWh of power battery production capacity. After the new factory officially started construction and the production capacity climbed, it is presumably able to reduce the export pressure of many Shanghai factories.

But after in-depth understanding of Tesla's Berlin factory, the president found that almost everyone was "deceived" by Tesla!

The real location of this "Berlin factory" is not in Berlin, but in Greenhead, Brandenburg, 35 kilometers southeast of Berlin!

To take a less appropriate example, the geographical relationship between the two is a bit like Hebei and Beijing, which belongs to the relationship of geographical encirclement.

The black dot in the picture is where Greenhead is approximately located

And similar to the "Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei integration", brandenburg and Berlin also constitute the Berlin-Brandenburg metropolitan area. Greenhead is to Berlin what Yanjiao is to Beijing.

A Beijing worker living in Yanjiao can be said to live on the outskirts of Beijing; the factory built in Greenhead can naturally be said to be a factory on the outskirts of Berlin!

So the question is, why did Musk build the Gigafactory here?

What secrets are hidden behind this?

01. Berlin: The "poor but sexy" Capital of Germany

What are your first impressions of Berlin? Since it is the capital of Germany, it must be a very prosperous world-class city.

On the banks of the Spree River in Berlin

In fact, it is.

With a history of more than 700 years, Berlin is rich in cultural resources. Drama, dance, literature, small songs and dances, music, painting... All forms of art have had an impact on the area for decades or even centuries.

Countless museums and gardens create a unique landscape.

In addition, Berlin is known as the nightlife capital of Europe. Art, alcohol, graffiti, carnival, all intertwined, form a mysterious attraction, fascinating and dangerous.

Despite its unique cultural resources, Berlin's economy is very poor!

How bad is it?

In Europe, the capital of a country is often the economic center of the country. France would fall by 14.8% without Paris, and without London, GDP per capita would fall by 11.1%.

Just as the West cannot do without Jerusalem.

But Germany is different. If Berlin had been removed from Germany in 2015, Germany's per capita GDP would have grown by 0.2 percent!

The shallow reason is that Germany often does not "put eggs in the same basket", but spreads its focus across the country.

For example, Berlin is the political center, Frankfurt is the financial center, Hamburg is the trade center, and Munich is the economic center. Under several major centers, there are also a large number of medium-sized cities scattered according to different industrial clusters.

It is precisely because of the absence of the blood-sucking existence of super-large cities that the development of the German economy is more balanced, and there is a strong economic strength everywhere, which makes Germany the only country without world-class ports among the world's five largest economies.

And the deep reason, we have to mention what has happened here for thousands of years.

Throughout German history, from the East Frankish Empire to the Holy Roman Empire, from Prussia to the Second German Empire, to World War I and World War II, Berlin's war has hardly been broken.

During World War II, Berlin suffered years of "artillery fire", and the entire city was devastated.

After the end of World War II, Berlin ushered in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1961, the Berlin Wall was erected overnight, and Berlin was "broken in half."

Brandenburg, where Tesla's factory is located, was packaged and returned to East Germany along with East Berlin; as for West Berlin, it was under the "management" of the United States, Britain, and France, and became a solid "enclave".

The capital of the Federal Republic of Germany was also moved from Nazi Berlin to Bonn, six hundred kilometers away.

The long period of division and the control of the United States and the Soviet Union have made Berlin's economic recovery extremely slow. Even the demolition of the Berlin Wall, despite the voice of the people, will not help.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, the gap between the rich and the poor in East and West Berlin has become a social problem, and the economic system formed under different ideologies also needs to be adjusted and reformed, and the irreconcilable contradictions restrict the take-off of the Berlin economy.

Against this backdrop, it was not until 2019 that Berlin's GDP per capita exceeded the German average for the first time.

With its rich history and fascinating artistic atmosphere, Berlin is arguably the poorest capital in Europe. No wonder former Berlin mayor KlausWowereit has this to say about the city:

"Poor, but sexy."

02. Tesla: Fake factory, real savior?

This matter must first start with the relationship between Berlin and brandenburg.

In 1995, for development reasons, the Brandenburg state government and the Berlin city government jointly proposed that the two be directly merged into the "Berlin-Brandenburg region".

But at the time, there were two forces arguing over whether New Berlin would perform its functions as capital.

The positive side believes that since Germany has been unified, it must be relocated back to Berlin in accordance with the rules of history; the other side believes that it is not in line with Germany's international image to relocate the capital again and to lose money and lose money and rebuild the capital on the basis of Nazi Germany.

In the end, the parliamentary vote was chosen to settle Dublin, and the merger plan of Berlin and Brandenburg was also stranded.

However, in order to take advantage of their location, Berlin and Brandenburg established a common regional planning committee to relieve the construction pressure in Berlin as much as possible, and also transferred the available resources to the state of Brandenburg.

Against this backdrop, Berlin's economy has improved considerably.

According to data released by the Deutsche Institute for Economic Research, Berlin's capital dynamism ranks first in 2021, with economic dynamism performing well.

In recent years, Berlin's main innovative economic policy has also attracted many start-ups in the field of technology and services.

As more and more companies invest here, Berlin has gradually gained the name of "European Silicon Valley". The Berlin-Brandenburg metropolitan area is also becoming a "foreign investment destination where modern and high-quality talents gather".

And one of the most representative companies is Tesla.

As we all know, Germany, as an old automobile power, has an unshakable position in the German car era of fuel vehicles. For example, the first internal combustion engine car was invented by the German Carl Benz, and the BBA and Porsche were also German car companies.

However, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche are headquartered in Stuttgart, BMW and Audi are headquartered in Bavaria, and Volkswagen is headquartered in Wolfsburg. None of these famous German car companies are headquartered in Berlin and Brandenburg!

You know, a global car company or automobile factory can often greatly boost the local economy. The less provides tens of thousands of jobs and creates tens of billions of output values, and more revitalizes the entire economic ecology.

Because of this, the location of Tesla's European factory was finally selected in Greenhead, 35 kilometers from Berlin, which has extraordinary significance for the entire Berlin-Brandenburg metropolitan area.

Tesla's factory alone can bring 12,000 jobs (more than 3,000 employees are currently employed). In 2020, before the gigafactory was built, two battery suppliers announced that they would build factories in Brandenburg.

In addition to bringing industrial chain and economic help here, Tesla's greater role is to promote the development of new energy in Europe.

An American brand can actually stimulate the European new energy industry? You don't say, it really is.

In July 2021, the European Union released a package proposal called "Fitfor55", proposing to be carbon neutral by 2050 and calling for a ban on the sale of fuel vehicles by 2035.

As soon as the news came out, there was wailing everywhere: the days of this fuel vehicle could not be lived at all!

As a result, under the dual influence of increasingly stringent carbon emission regulations and increasing new energy subsidies, major traditional car companies in Europe have launched electrification transformation, and they are still tens of billions of euros of large-scale investment.

But even so, he still failed to do Tesla. In the whole of 2021, the best-selling electric car in Europe is actually the Tesla Model 3, or in the case of 10% import tariffs and high transportation costs.

After the local factory was built, Tesla's tariffs were gone, and the transportation costs were gone. Tesla will still raise the "butcher knife" of price reduction as before and start a new round of "slaughter".

If you don't want to be classified into the old paper pile of history, traditional car companies will inevitably have to do everything in their power to cope with the challenges brought by Tesla.

It is foreseeable that the "catfish effect" that was once displayed in China is likely to be staged again in Europe.

03. Europe's biggest challenge: the energy crisis

Why did Europe start to subsidize new energy? The root cause is anxiety about energy itself.

People's production and life are inseparable from energy. But the most important traditional energy sources, oil and gas, Europe is not rich and relies on imports every year.

This is equivalent to voluntarily handing over your lifeline to someone else, which is very dangerous.

On February 24 this year, the Russo-Ukrainian War officially began. So far, the most affected in this war, except for the two parties involved in the war, is probably Europe.

After the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the price of natural gas and oil in Europe began to soar.

When the increase was the greatest, the price of natural gas futures soared from $800/thousand cubic meters to $3900/thousand cubic meters, and oil prices also broke through the sky.

So much so that Citigroup in the United States directly released a report saying that European energy spending will soar to a record $1.2 trillion in 2022, the highest level since 2008 and much higher than $300 billion in 2021.

But the most outrageous thing is that in order to support Ukraine, Germany actually cut off the lifeline of the whole of Europe and the "Nord Stream II" project in cooperation with Russia!

Nord Stream 2 is, to put it bluntly, a natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. The pipeline could bypass Ukraine and cross the bottom of the Baltic Sea to transport a steady stream of Russian gas to Germany.

Since it does not pass through Eastern European countries such as Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland, Germany can directly save a large amount of "road money", and the source of natural gas will be very stable. If the supply is sufficient, you can also earn a difference as a second-way dealer.

From a German point of view, it was a fairly good deal. But jumping out from the perspective of the entire EUROPEAN Union is equivalent to "backstabbing" Ukraine, not to mention that Ukraine is about to become An "ally" of Europe.

Therefore, under the influence of political positions, "Nord Stream II" has become a political weapon, and it has been stopped from the state of completion to sanction Russia, and the recovery can be said to be far away.

But turning the other cheek, natural gas, as the basis of economic operation, cannot be used. Russia also saw this and issued a natural gas "ruble settlement order": the energy exported can only be settled in rubles.

As a result, the ruble nearly doubled and has returned to pre-war levels.

The EU, on the other hand, is in an embarrassing and tangled situation, repeatedly jumping around the "ruble settlement order" proposed by Russia, agreeing to lose the meaning of sanctions against Russia, and not agreeing to buy Russian energy.

After all, it is the European Union that has made the decision to impose sanctions on Russia, but it is a specific European country that really needs Russian energy.

On April 3, Slovakia officially stated its willingness to settle gas in rubles, becoming the first MEMBER of the European Union and NATO to agree to pay for natural gas in rubles. Latvia also said on April 4 that it was under consideration.

However, Germany is the first iron, not only still banning the import of Russian energy, but also announcing the trusteeship of the Russian gas company's subsidiary in Germany, and is not worried about completely tearing its face with Russia on the energy issue.

I don't know how Aunt Merkel, who has retired, sees the pragmatic project she has worked so hard to sign, and is like her successor, Huo Huocheng.

Under such a crisis, it is naturally not difficult to understand Europe's determination to vigorously develop clean energy and new energy industries.

04. Write at the end

As early as mid-March, Europe ushered in a revolt against Russia's bottomless sanctions, and many countries took to the streets to demonstrate because they could not stand the "rising" oil prices and inflation rates.

German truck drivers protested

Germans, fearing a natural gas outage, have begun snapping up and hoarding firewood in preparation for the next winter heating.

For Russia, this is a true response to the saying, "Everything has a cause and an effect, and your retribution is me!" ”

Natural gas imports from Russia account for 45% of Europe's total natural gas imports, energy is stuck in the neck, and it is so jumpy on the Issue of Ukraine that it is difficult to say that this wave of price increases in Europe is not deserved.

But then again, europe is not doing something similar in the Middle East. Like this energy crisis, Europe has experienced an unknown number of times, and each time it will deepen Europe's "wild hopes" for the development of new energy industries.

"Achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and ban the sale of fuel vehicles in 2035." This slogan sounds blood-boiling, but behind it can't escape the worry about energy.

Safe and stable power supply and low high energy prices are the core essence of Europe's development of new energy.

Tesla's construction of a super factory in Germany will not be the end of Europe's new energy layout, and it is even difficult to say that it is an important milestone, but it represents Europe's ultimate attitude to the new energy industry.

Even without war as a trigger, clean, cheap, sustainable energy, who would refuse?