Tesla Restarts Production at Gigafactory Berlin After Arson Attack

Tesla announced that it restarted production at Gigafactory Berlin today after an arson attack killed the power at the factory earlier this month.

Earlier this month, we reported on Tesla having to shut down Gigafactory Berlin after some people set a high voltage pylon on fire, which killed the factory’s power supply.

It was beleived that a group of environmentalists who have been targeting Tesla were behind the attack, which has since been confirmed.

At the time, it wasn’t clear how long it would take for Tesla to relaunch production as the damage to the power supply were significant.

CEO Elon Musk aslo visited the factory today to thank workers for the help in rapidly ramping production back up after the shut down.

Tesla has been dealings with efforts from so-called environmentalists to shut down its expansion project at Gigafactory Berlin. They claim to have concerns about Tesla’s deforestation of the forrest around the factory for the expansion and the company’s water usage – despite the company’s claims that they have addressed those issues.

It’s unclear how much the shutdown will have affected the automaker’s production this quarter. Tesla makes over 5,000 cars per week at the plant and it was shut down for just over a week, but it will also take some time to ramp back up to that level of production.

When accounting for the missing production capacity, the impact of the attack is expected to be valued at over $1 billion in damages.