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    • Tesla plans German battery plant

    The American electric carmaker Tesla says it expects to have a battery-making factory in Germany within five or six years. The news came from an interview with Tesla’s chief executive Elon Musk in the German news magazine Der Spiegel in which he said German carmakers lacked interest in electric cars.

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    ‘The German car industry should put more energy into the development of batteries,’ Musk said, following news that the only battery plant for electric cars on German soil was to close. But Tesla is working with two leading German carmakers, BMW and Daimler.
     
    Musk said he was very interested in BMW’s work on lightweight carbon fibre materials used in BMW’s own electric and hybrid cars, but he dismissed Toyota’s new range of fuel cell cars as ‘making no sense’ as they required three times as much energy as battery-powered cars. And he also criticised plug-in hybrids as being ‘like an amphibian car – not ideal in water and not ideal on land’.