As we recently reported, the labor situation at Tesla Advanced Automation Group, formerly Grohmann Engineering, has been improving since CEO Elon Musk sent a letter to employees in which he made several promises.
But now BMW and VW, two former clients of Grohmann Engineering, are starting a dispute of Tesla’s recent cancellation of the engineering contracts between the companies.
In February, Tesla dropped all of Grohmann’s existing clients in order to have all hands on deck for the Model 3 production lines.
Sources familiar with Grohmann’s clients told Electrek that Bosch was the company’s biggest client and the most affected by Tesla’s cancellations of the contracts, but several other clients, mostly German automakers like BMW and VW, lost support on their current production lines made by Grohmann.
After they announced that they will only work on Tesla’s lines, we reached out to the affected automakers for comment, but they all refused to talk about their supplier.
Now German paper Wirtschaftswoche says that BMW and VW claim that they were not warned of the end of the contracts and they are asking Tesla to fulfill them.
When Tesla announced that they would be focusing on their own lines, they said that they were still in the process of ending the contracts. Therefore, it could be still in the works.
Update: Tesla confirmed that it is still working with clients to resolve the situation:
“We have been in contact with every client for weeks on this issue and are on the way to finding individual solutions with each of them,”
Musk sees the company as a key component for Tesla’s to achieve its goal of being a leader in manufacturing – building the machine that builds the machine, as he likes to say.
He wrote in the letter to Grohmann employees last month:
“We bought Tesla Grohmann because we believe that Tesla Grohmann will play an important role in creating this future. It is not enough to produce cool products. To be successful, we need factories that are as good as the products themselves.”
Since they stopped working on third-party projects, the number one priority at Tesla Grohmann has been to ship the Model 3 inverter production lines that they designed for the company. Last we heard, they were scheduled to ship starting in late May – or just over a month before the scheduled start of Model 3 production in July.
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