Is Tesla preparing to enter Turkey?
Tesla is looking for people to hire in Turkey, where it has already planned to install charging points. Here are all the goals of Musk's company and the Ankara government
According to the specialized electrek portal, Tesla, the electric vehicle manufacturer led by Elon Musk, is looking for personnel to hire in Istanbul, Turkey: the news has been interpreted as the anticipation of a formal entry of the company into the country.
TESLA'S PREPARATIONS FOR ENTRY INTO TURKEY
Tesla's entry into Turkey has been talked about for years. In May 2018, for example, Musk said the company would soon open stores and launch its services in the country, but the plan was abandoned in the following months.
Last January, however, Tesla appointed a director for its Turkish branch. And it is pursuing a plan to install charging stations in the country: superchargers – as the company's fast charging stations are called – are not yet available, however.
THE AUTOMOTIVE IMPORTANCE OF TURKEY
The online newspaper al-Monitor wrote that the expansion into Turkey would represent "a significant development" for Tesla, whose only stores in the Middle East are in Israel and Jordan.
In addition to offering a large domestic market (the population amounts to about 85 million people), Turkey is also an important automobile manufacturing hub: Ford, Toyota and Mercedes, for example, have production plants there.
According to Trading Economics , over one million vehicles are produced in the country every year.
THE GOVERNMENT'S INTEREST
The Turkish government is also very interested in electric cars , the diffusion of which should grow significantly in the coming decades, encouraged by energy transition plans.
The Turkish electric car market is still small, but already in 2017, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced a plan for the domestic production of these cars. Last October, a plant of the Turkish automobile company Togg (Turkey's Automobile Joint Venture Groug) went into operation.
THE CONTACTS BETWEEN MUSK AND ERDOGAN
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, has had several contacts with Erdogan in recent years. The two, for example, got together in 2017 to discuss electric vehicles.
They had another meeting in December 2021, during which they talked about space exploration: a few days later Musk's aerospace company, SpaceX, launched a Turkish telecommunications satellite (Turksat 5B) into orbit.
THE MIDDLE EAST WANTS ELECTRIC CARS
Turkey isn't the only country in the Middle East wanting to secure domestic production of electric cars. In September, Chinese company NWTN Motors signed an agreement to build a battery-powered vehicle plant in Abu Dhabi. And in November, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, launched its own electric car company, called CEER.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/tesla-turchia/ on Fri, 23 Dec 2022 14:45:47 +0000.