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EXCLUSIVE: Environmental lawyer tasked with suing Tesla speaks: ‘Win Some, Lose Some’
Since Tesla launched the construction of Giga Berlin, the company’s first European vehicle assembly plant in the State of Brandenburg, nearly every element of the project has been met with pushback and backlash from local citizens and other groups. The necessary removal of trees, the displacement of some species on the once forestry-infested property, groundwater, and a coolant tank have all been subjects of complaints brought to the attention of the California-based automaker.
Thousands of miles and a continent away from its home in Northern California, Tesla has sparred with local environmental groups NABU and the Green League for nearly a year, with lawyer Thorsten Deppner representing the Earth-friendly entities. In an exclusive interview with Teslarati, Deppner told us about his intentions for the lawsuit and what is next to come in a long line of issues that the automaker continues to sift through as production of sustainable passenger vehicles nears at the German plant.
Deppner, casually dressed and inviting me into a Zoom-like chatroom to talk about Tesla, was friendly. Knowing my position as a journalist covering the EV space and Tesla, specifically, Deppner was openly willing to talk about the points of the case that were recently put to rest, which has to do with the coolant tank that sits on the property of Giga Berlin. “Tesla had not filed certain documentation with respect to emergency procedures concerning the storage of a particular coolant. That coolant, if ignited, can produce Hydrogen Fluoride,” Deppner told me. “That was our main concern of this particular case.”
Credit: Twitter | @gigfactory_4
The tank was also the subject of a July 2021 investigation by the State Environment Agency, which was originally reported by Tagesspiegel. According to the report, the tank is reportedly holding the chemical tetrafluoropropene, and Tesla does not have permission to have this on the site. The coolant was not, and still is not present in the tank on site. However, Deppner’s cases were already set in motion when the State Agency decided to launch its investigation.
While somewhat risky for the company applying for the permit, this process is also risky for the citizens. Deppner’s most recent issue dealt with coolant tanks on Giga Berlin’s property, following the lawsuit with sand lizards that he won in December, as he proved Tesla broke German Endangered Species Law. A risk for the people in Deppner’s opinion, Tesla did not have the correct documentation to have the coolant tank on site. Safety regulations were not met, which ultimately could have become a risk to the people, especially if the highly toxic contents of the tank were released.
Many of those who have followed Tesla’s process in Berlin as things continue to progress know that preliminary permits were being issued left and right, giving Tesla permission to erect, construct, and perform nearly any task that it needed concrete authorization to perform. Deppner explained that German environmental law allows for those preliminary permits only if an application is more likely to be ultimately approved than not. Then, the company that filed the application will have the opportunity to begin building what was outlined in the documents, provided that the company is guaranteeing to restore the site to its original state if the application should be denied.
This tank was the subject of the most recent NABU and Green League lawsuit, which the groups and Deppner, their representing attorney, dropped. Deppner and the groups lost the injunction on this case, but it is still being monitored.
Deppner told me throughout the conversation on several occasions that the goal was never to have Tesla Giga Berlin shut down; the complaints and lawsuits were more meant to be “guidance.” The goal was to have Tesla adhere to German environmental law throughout the entire process of building Giga Berlin, a misconception that many people do not realize. “We did not want to have this project shut down; we just want Tesla to follow environmental law,” Deppner added.
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Tesla Giga Berlin critic finally drops lawsuit over high costs
This is not to say that these groups don’t exist, the ones who would like nothing more than to shut down Tesla’s German operation and halt the spread of sustainable transportation, but Deppner said he was unwilling to represent those groups, as their funding may have been provided by untrustworthy sources. “I wouldn’t represent people or groups like that, not in the slightest,” Deppner said.
The next steps for Deppner are to continue monitoring the Tesla situation until things are ultimately filed, approved, and completed in Brandenburg. As for the attorney, he likely won’t be driving a Tesla anytime soon, but that is not to say that he doesn’t appreciate what the company is doing. He said that the mission of transitioning the world to sustainable energy and transportation is important, and EVs are undoubtedly a step in the right direction. As for the case, Deppner said, “You win some, you lose some.”
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Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
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The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Inside Tesla’s secretive $10 Billion “Project Crystal Sun” filing
