The Teesside Built-up Area (BUA) in the United Kingdom wants Tesla to build a new Gigafactory in the North East of England — reports Yahoo Finance.
“In the UK, where we have an £82bn automobile industry which leads the world in production of high end vehicles, it would surely make sense for Tesla to develop a serious presence, with Teesside being the best possible location to do this,” Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen wrote in a letter to Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Friday.
Teesside is situated around the River Tees and split between County Durham and North Yorkshire. Historically, the locality has been a major manufacturing hub for the U.K.
At Tesla’s annual meeting of shareholders earlier this week, Musk said the company aims to eventually have about a dozen Gigafactories around the globe to achieve its goal of producing 20 million vehicles per year by 2030.
Houchen told Musk that Teesside has “hundreds of acres of ideal developable land” for Tesla. He also said Tesla would be able to avoid “the bureaucratic entanglements seen at other sites.”
It’s no secret that Tesla and Musk aren’t fans of red tape. Tesla faced major delays in getting its German Gigafactory up and running because of bureaucratic obligations, much to Musk’s public chagrin.
During this week’s shareholder meeting, Musk also teased that the company could announce the site of its next Gigafactory by the end of this year. Canada was floated as a possibility at the event, and recently discovered filings revealed that Tesla is lobbying the Ontario government to ease permit procedures for an “advanced manufacturing facility.”
Houchen added that Tesla could get access to customs incentives via the Teesside Freeport, which opened in November of last year.
Back in 2019, Musk said Brexit made the U.K. less practical for a Tesla factory. “Brexit made it too risky to put a gigafactory in the UK,” the billionaire said. Whether or not the billionaire’s outlook has since changed remains to be seen.
