Tesla starts making its own battery cells at Grünheide next year. The manager responsible for the factory has now said, on the record, that the economics do not justify it on their own.
Robert Meyer, cell factory lead at Tesla Manufacturing Brandenburg, set out the reasoning to the trade publication Battery-News on 2 October 2026. "From a purely cost perspective, the move offers limited advantages," he said. "For us, however, this is a strategic decision."
What is being built
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Cell format | 4680 |
| Production start | 2027 |
| Target capacity | up to 18 GWh a year |
| Additional staff | more than 1,500 |
None of those figures is new. Giga Berlin plant manager André Thierig announced them in May 2026 alongside a 250 million dollar investment that raised the site's cell target from 8 GWh to 18 GWh. What Meyer adds is the reasoning behind them, and it is unusually blunt.
The admission
"In international competition, it is currently extremely difficult to manufacture cells economically in Europe," Meyer said. That is the assessment of the person who has to make it work, and it matches what the carmakers' lobby has been telling Brussels.
Two arguments carry the decision anyway. The first is vertical integration: "Localizing cell manufacturing puts us in a position to produce everything from the battery cell to the finished vehicle at a single site. That is unique in Europe." No other carmaker on the continent will take raw materials in at one gate and drive finished cars out of another.
The second is the absence of an alternative. "There simply isn't a comparable ecosystem of manufacturers here that could serve as suppliers," Meyer said, contrasting Europe with Shanghai, where Tesla buys cells from Chinese manufacturers and drops them straight into its own vehicle production.
The dry electrode is the cost argument
Tesla's answer to the cost gap is process. The dry-electrode method coats electrodes without the solvent-based wet step the industry normally uses, which removes the drying ovens, the solvent-recovery plant and much of the floor space that goes with them. Meyer links that to both capital expenditure and running cost: the process "not only has a noticeable positive impact on production costs, but also on the environmental footprint of manufacturing."
Dry coating has been the hardest part of the 4680 programme since it began, and Tesla spent years getting it to volume in Texas. Meyer treats that as the transferable asset: "For the ramp-up of our cell factory in Grünheide, we benefit enormously from the fact that we have already solved this challenge at our sister factory in Texas."
Hiring an industry that does not exist locally
The 1,500 roles cannot be filled from a European cell industry, because there barely is one. Meyer says prior cell experience is not required and leans into it — career changers "can even be an advantage, because they may approach complex problems with a fresh and unbiased perspective" — with internal training carrying the rest.
What it changes for a European buyer
Today a Model Y built in Brandenburg runs on cells made somewhere else: LFP from CATL in China, NCM from LG Energy Solution, and Tesla's own 4680s shipped in from Texas. Tesla's in-house cathode work is also in Texas, not Europe.
That matters beyond logistics, because the EU's draft localisation rules count where a cell was produced rather than where a car was screwed together. From 2027, a Grünheide Model Y starts to become as European as its number plate — the return Tesla is buying with a project its own cell chief says does not pay for itself.