BERLIN — Employees at Tesla's huge new factory near Berlin will elect a works council to represent their interests, a German trade union said on Tuesday.

The IG Metall trade union said seven employees had taken the first step towards setting up a works council, planning to choose an election committee on Nov. 29.

"A works council ensures that the interests of the workforce have a voice and a weight. This is in line with the democratic work culture in Germany," said Birgit Dietze, IG Metall district leader in Berlin, Brandenburg and Saxony. The Tesla plant near Berlin will employ 12,000 workers, although only about a sixth of that have been hired so far, meaning the election of a works council will not take place soon, IG Metall said.

IG Metall has said applicants have told it that Tesla, whose CEO Elon Must is known for his rocky relationship with organized labor, is offering pay 20% below the collectively bargained wages offered at other German automakers.

Tesla is also shaking up conventional German contracts by offering packages with stock options and bonuses rather than predetermined holiday pay.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a phone call or email request for comment.

Earlier this year, Musk was ordered to delete a 2018 tweet threatening that U.S. employees would lose their stock options if they formed a union.

Musk has made his irritation for German laws and processes known, saying in a letter to authorities in April that the country's complex planning requirements were at odds with the urgency needed to fight climate change.

Jean de la Fontaine may be dead for more than 400 years, but his fables are still spot on when it comes to modern life. Take “The Fox and the Grapes:” it describes precisely how Tesla and Elon Musk reacted to the fact that they lost €1.1 billion ($1.132 billion at the current exchange rate) in subsidies to build a battery factory at Giga Grünheide.
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As Financial Times stressed, the European Union law for these incentives states that the funds are only for the “first industrial development” of the technology. We have no idea what the advantage is, especially if Tesla can build other factories elsewhere for the same cells shortly after that – or even simultaneously. Regardless, rules are rules, and this one determines Tesla is not eligible.

Its priority for when the 4680 cells are finally ready is very likely the Cybertruck. With a long waiting list for it, the company has to focus on delivering these vehicles. Apart from that, Tesla also said it has a pilot plant for the 4680 batteries close to its Fremont factory, on Kato Road. It may be enough to count as the first attempt to produce these batteries, even if they are not ready yet.

Instead of waiting for a negative answer, Tesla preferred to withdraw its request for subsidies. Elon Musk was quick to say that “it has always been Tesla’s view that all subsidies should be eliminated, but that must include the massive subsidies for oil & gas.” Sour grapes, you know? Which does not match with accepting subsidies for multiple other things.

Thanks to them, Tesla chose Grünheide for its factory. It has done the same in Texas because of incentives. Tesla took carbon credits for years and still does: it was only profitable in multiple quarters due to them. Even Fremont was bought with California’s help and tax incentives.

In other tweets, Musk seems to argue that subsidies are harmful but that everybody else takes them, so... Tesla would be just making the game more even by doing the same. That does not seem precisely coherent.

Like La Fontaine’s fox, Tesla and Elon Musk could not reach the subsidies for the battery plant, so they decided to pretend they did not want them. Some people will defend Musk’s version of the story with all their hearts. Too bad it is not true: if it were, Tesla would not have applied for them in the first place.

While vehicle deliveries were delayed for most brands throughout 2021 due to the chip shortage and other issues, a recent memo from Elon Musk stands out as being unusual. Tesla's CEO urged company employees to stop rushing orders to obtain record deliveries and focus on reducing costs instead.
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Last year, Tesla Motors delivered almost 500,000 vehicles, but the first three quarters of 2021 brought an excess of 637,000 units delivered. That is a serious increase in deliveries, but customers still must wait months to get the vehicles they wanted.

At this point, you might ask yourself why the CEO of a company would ask employees to avoid rushing into deliveries. Well, the answer is simple, and it is provided in the memo that was emailed to employees and obtained by CNBC. Rushing to deliver vehicles in Q4 brings increased spending on overtime, temporary contractors, and expedite fees.

As Elon Musk pointed out in the memo, this is a historic occurrence within the company, and it is followed by a "massive drop in deliveries in the first few weeks of the new quarter."

Musk points out that the effects of this rush over six months are that there is no effective boost in deliveries, but just an increase in expenses to accelerate deliveries in the last two weeks of each quarter, which leads to burnout among employees.

Going forward, Elon Musk wants to obtain "a steadier and more efficient pace of deliveries." The latter would bring more predictability to the company, which is something that would be appreciated by customers, employees, and stockholders.

Tesla has not provided a target for deliveries in 2021, which means that there would be no reason for a rush to get as many as possible by the end of the quarter, except for bragging rights. However, those who have ordered a Tesla vehicle and are waiting for it to arrive will have a different opinion on the matter.

As usual, when discussing a matter of cost per unit, actions that increase the expenditure for the delivery of a vehicle might be ignored at first, but they can lead to excessive costs if they happen to more units.

Imagine having to spend an extra $5 on the delivery of a new vehicle. If you put the $5 next to the price of a new vehicle, it would be a drop in the ocean, but multiply the $5 by the number of deliveries, and you end up with a nightmare.

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4361821

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The BMW Group is swiftly and systematically expanding its range of electrified models. With demand for electrified vehicles on the rise, it sold 231,575 fully electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles during the first nine months of 2021, twice as many as one year earlier (2020: 116,400 units; +98.9%). Sales of fully electric vehicles grew particularly dynamically, rising by 121.4% to 59,688 units (2020: 26,957 units).

In the period up to 2025, the BMW Group is set to grow its sales of fully electric vehicles by an average of more than 50% annually, delivering around two million fully electric vehicles to customers by the middle of the decade.

Tesla repeated a previous forecast that sales would grow about 50 percent per year on average for the next few years, but the company cautioned that “semiconductor shortages, congestion at ports and rolling blackouts have been impacting our ability to keep factories running at full speed.”