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German Minister boldly supports Tesla Gigafactory 4: 'If the plant does not come, it would be a damage for all of Germany'

Tesla Store in Stuttgart, Germany. Credit: Twitter/@kathl_fritzsche

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German Federal Minister of Economics Peter Altmaier spoke freely about his support for Tesla’s presence in the European country in an interview with a German media outlet this weekend. Altmaier proved optimistic about the upcoming facility, stating that Gigafactory 4 will likely benefit Germany as a whole.

“If the plant does not come, it would be a damage for all of Germany. If we are asked for help as a ministry, we will be happy to help,” Altmaier said in an interview with Tagesspiegel.

Musk announced Tesla’s plan to bring a Gigafactory to the town of Brandenburg on November 12 at the Golden Steering Wheel Awards, where the Model 3 won an award for Best Midsize Car of the Year. Brandenburg surrounds the country’s capital of Berlin in the northeast region of Germany.

Speculation of where Gigafactory Europe would ultimately end up was extensive, but it appears that Altmaier may have had some influence on Musk’s decision. “I also explicitly encouraged Elon Musk to make this investment in Germany. At Tesla they understood that anyone who can build and sell cars in Germany can build and sell them anywhere in the world,” he said.

Altmaier has previously said that Tesla and the German government have not yet discussed subsidies for the Silicon Valley-based electric car company. It’s clear that Tesla – if it invests in Germany and creates jobs here, will be treated like all other companies in the automobile and automotive industry,” he said.

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Along with the financial benefits of Tesla’s newly-found potential home in Brandenburg, Altmaier expects the electric car company’s presence to accelerate Germany’s transition to clean transportation and fully-autonomous vehicles, something that he believes could reduce the number of accidents the country has on the road.

“This will also result in less fuel being used and there being less traffic jams and impairments. I believe that it is crucial for the location whether the first practical model for autonomous driving will be launched in the USA, China or Germany,” said Altmaier.

While many German government officials have been vocally optimistic about Tesla and its upcoming facility, Altmaier seems to be one of the company’s more ardent supporters. With support of people within the country’s political system, Tesla will be able to expand its business faster in Germany, perhaps similar to how the company and its Gigafactory 3 in China. They will not be given exclusive benefits that other carmakers don’t have, but Altmaier recognizes the company is leading the way in the electric car industry.

“I want us to be as good and even better in the area of ​​e-mobility than we were in the classic drive technologies,” he said.

Tesla’s construction of Gigafactory 4 in Brandenburg is expected to begin in January 2020, with the initial production of the Model Y crossover to start in early 2021.

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H/T Alex Voigt

Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Tesla Model Y configurations get hefty discounts and more in final sales push

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla Model Y configurations are getting hefty discounts and more benefits as the company is in the phase of its final sales push for the year.

Tesla is offering up to $1,500 off new Model Y Standard trims that are available in inventory in the United States. Additionally, Tesla is giving up to $2,000 off the Premium trims of the Model Y. There is also one free upgrade included, such as a paint color or interior color, at no additional charge.

Tesla is hoping to bolster a relatively strong performance through the first three quarters of the year, with over 1.2 million cars delivered through the first three quarters.

This is about four percent under what the company reported through the same time period last year, as it was about 75,000 vehicles ahead in 2024.

However, Q3 was the company’s best quarterly performance of all time, and it surged because of the loss of the $7,500 EV tax credit, which was eliminated in September. The imminent removal of the credit led to many buyers flocking to Tesla showrooms to take advantage of the discount, which led to a strong quarter for the company.

2024 was the first year in the 2020s when Tesla did not experience a year-over-year delivery growth, as it saw a 1 percent slide from 2023. The previous years saw huge growth, with the biggest coming from 2020 to 2021, when Tesla had an 87 percent delivery growth.

This year, it is expected to be a second consecutive slide, with a drop of potentially 8 percent, if it manages to deliver 1.65 million cars, which is where Grok projects the automaker to end up.

Tesla will likely return to its annual growth rate in the coming years, but the focus is becoming less about delivery figures and more about autonomy, a major contributor to the company’s valuation. As AI continues to become more refined, Tesla will apply these principles to its Full Self-Driving efforts, as well as the Optimus humanoid robot project.

Will Tesla thrive without the EV tax credit? Five reasons why they might

These discounts should help incentivize some buyers to pull the trigger on a vehicle before the year ends. It will also be interesting to see if the adjusted EV tax credit rules, which allowed deliveries to occur after the September 30 cutoff date, along with these discounts, will have a positive impact.

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Tesla FSD’s newest model is coming, and it sounds like ‘the last big piece of the puzzle’

“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026.”

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla Full Self-Driving’s newest model is coming very soon, and from what it sounds like, it could be “the last big piece of the puzzle,” as CEO Elon Musk said in late November.

During the xAI Hackathon on Tuesday, Musk was available for a Q&A session, where he revealed some details about Robotaxi and Tesla’s plans for removing Robotaxi Safety Monitors, and some information on a future FSD model.

While he said Full Self-Driving’s unsupervised capability is “pretty much solved,” and confirmed it will remove Safety Monitors in the next three weeks, questions about the company’s ability to give this FSD version to current owners came to mind.

Musk said a new FSD model is coming in about a month or two that will be an order-of-magnitude larger and will include more reasoning and reinforcement learning.

He said:

“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026. We’re gonna add a lot of reasoning and RL (reinforcement learning). To get to serious scale, Tesla will probably need to build a giant chip fab. To have a few hundred gigawatts of AI chips per year, I don’t see that capability coming online fast enough, so we will probably have to build a fab.”

It rings back to late November when Musk said that v14.3 “is where the last big piece of the puzzle finally lands.”

With the advancements made through Full Self-Driving v14 and v14.2, there seems to be a greater confidence in solving self-driving completely. Musk has also personally said that driver monitoring has been more relaxed, and looking at your phone won’t prompt as many alerts in the latest v14.2.1.

This is another indication that Tesla is getting closer to allowing people to take their eyes off the road completely.

Along with the Robotaxi program’s success, there is evidence that Tesla could be close to solving FSD. However, it is not perfect. We’ve had our own complaints with FSD, and although we feel it is the best ADAS on the market, it is not, in its current form, able to perform everything needed on roads.

But it is close.

That’s why there is some legitimate belief that Tesla could be releasing a version capable of no supervision in the coming months.

All we can say is, we’ll see.

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Investor's Corner

SpaceX IPO is coming, CEO Elon Musk confirms

However, it appears Musk is ready for SpaceX to go public, as Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger wrote an op-ed that indicated he thought SpaceX would go public soon. Musk replied, basically confirming it.

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Joel Kowsky, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Elon Musk confirmed through a post on X that a SpaceX initial public offering (IPO) is on the way after hinting at it several times earlier this year.

It also comes one day after Bloomberg reported that SpaceX was aiming for a valuation of $1.5 trillion, adding that it wanted to raise $30 billion.

Musk has been transparent for most of the year that he wanted to try to figure out a way to get Tesla shareholders to invest in SpaceX, giving them access to the stock.

He has also recognized the issues of having a public stock, like litigation exposure, quarterly reporting pressures, and other inconveniences.

However, it appears Musk is ready for SpaceX to go public, as Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger wrote an op-ed that indicated he thought SpaceX would go public soon.

Musk replied, basically confirming it:

Berger believes the IPO would help support the need for $30 billion or more in capital needed to fund AI integration projects, such as space-based data centers and lunar satellite factories. Musk confirmed recently that SpaceX “will be doing” data centers in orbit.

AI appears to be a “key part” of SpaceX getting to Musk, Berger also wrote. When writing about whether or not Optimus is a viable project and product for the company, he says that none of that matters. Musk thinks it is, and that’s all that matters.

It seems like Musk has certainly mulled something this big for a very long time, and the idea of taking SpaceX public is not just likely; it is necessary for the company to get to Mars.

The details of when SpaceX will finally hit that public status are not known. Many of the reports that came out over the past few days indicate it would happen in 2026, so sooner rather than later.

But there are a lot of things on Musk’s plate early next year, especially with Cybercab production, the potential launch of Unsupervised Full Self-Driving, and the Roadster unveiling, all planned for Q1.

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