San Francisco (AFP)

The high-end electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla will open a giant factory in the suburbs of Berlin, announced its boss Elon Musk Tuesday, the fourth after those of Nevada, New York and Shanghai China.

"I have an announcement that will probably be well received," he said on stage after receiving the "Golden Wheel" awarded by the newspaper Bild.

"Everyone knows that German engineering is extraordinary, and that's one of the reasons why we are going to set up our mega European factory in Germany," he said.

Last July, Elon Musk told investors that his company was accelerating its efforts on its giant battery plant in Europe.

He said Tuesday that the German factory would also include a center of engineering and design, because "Berlin has some of the best works of art in the world".

Tesla accounts for 30% of the European battery electric car market, according to Matthias Schmidt, an analyst specializing in the automotive industry.

Asked about Germany's delay in electric vehicles, Elon Musk replied: "I do not think Germany is very late."

"It's always more difficult when there is still a lot of dynamism and infrastructure in place around old technology," he continued. "When we started at Tesla, everyone thought we were crazy."

The US manufacturer has recently returned to profitability, after two quarters in the red, and his boss said he was "fully confident" in the ability of his group to keep his promise to deliver between 360,000 and 400,000 new cars in all this year.

He also welcomed the production tests carried out in the new giant factory in Shanghai (about 865,000 square meters), built in ten months and an annual production capacity of at least 500,000 cars.

This plant "was almost 65% cheaper (...) to build than our entire model 3 production system in the United States," said the group, whose objectives are to continue to increase sales volumes and control its costs to be sustainable profitably.

The European plant will be located near the "new airport", said Elon Musk, causing some laughter in the audience, because the "Berlin-Brandenburg" should have been inaugurated in 2012, but its opening was postponed sine die because of a multitude of defects, particularly in terms of fire safety.

"We must definitely move faster than the airport," admitted the billionaire boss.

© 2019 AFP