Gary Zhou 
Activists recently attacked a Tesla store in central Berlin with paint bombs and posters as a form of protest against Gigafactory Berlin. Online posts about the attack suggested that the anti-Tesla acts were carried out due to Giga Berlin’s water consumption, among other reasons.
The motive behind the attack seems to be a desire to put a halt to car production in general, at least based on posts about the protests that have been shared online. Photos of the protests showed that the activists threw paint bombs at the Tesla store. They also placed posters in the store windows which read “Driving for a Dead Planet.”
The Twitter account @IL_Berlin shared the protesters’ arguments against Giga Berlin. Among their arguments, the protesters claimed that “The e-cars are a water disaster and therefore a dirty lie!” and that “Car production and factory expansion at Berlin must stop!”
The protesters also noted that instead of electric vehicles like Teslas, the region should focus on free public transport. “Instead of expensive e-cars for a few and profits for the greenwashing group Tesla, we need well-developed and free public transport for everyone in Berlin and Brandenburg,” @IL_Berlin wrote.
“The repeated environmental violations of the US corporation during the construction and expansion of the gigafactory in #Grünheide and the robbing of valuable #Wasser |s in our region are criminal… Neo-colonialism during #Lithium mining in the Atacama Desert in #Chile destroys the livelihoods of the people in the assisted areas. No more liter of water for Tesla!” The activists argued.
While the frustration against Giga Berlin among critics has been known for some time, the approach of the activists is difficult to support. There are a lot of ways to hold protests against companies and causes that one disagrees with, after all, but vandalism is hardly justifiable.
Apart from this, the activists seem to be pointing their anger at the wrong target, especially with regard to their concerns about the water in the region. As per local broadcaster rbb24, Tesla actually uses little water relative to the size and scope of its operations. The electric vehicle maker highlighted this recently when it stated that it intends to use the same amount of water even when it ramps its Model Y production to 1 million units per year.
