Tesla is finally going to Nikola Tesla’s home country

After years of waiting, Tesla is finally expanding to Croatia, the home country of the automaker’s namesake, Nikola Tesla.

An ethnic Serb, Tesla was born in a village called Smiljan in the Austrian Empire, but it is now located in Croatia.

Tesla has been talking about expanding into Croatia for years, but the launch in the country has been delayed a few times.

Last year, CEO Elon Musk seemed serious about opening a store and service center in the country and said the company would “do Nikola Tesla proud”.

The CEO said:

“Hoping to open in Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia & most of Eastern Europe early next year. Finally, we will do Nikola Tesla proud by having his cars in his countries of origin!”

While Tesla doesn’t have a retail or service presence in Croatia, there are already plenty of Tesla owners in the country.

The automaker has already deployed 8 Supercharger stations in the country and plenty of buyers decided to import vehicles despite no sales or service support from Tesla.

But now it’s finally about to change.

Tesla has started posting job listings to hire people at a sales and service location in Zagreb, the capital and the largest city of Croatia.

The automaker writes in one of the job listings:

“As we prepare for our exciting new entry in to Croatia, we are looking to recruit a number of Tesla Advisors to join our brand new team in Zagreb!”

While not a big automotive market, Croatia has already started embracing electric vehicles with several groups of EV enthusiasts in the country.

Last year, Tesla owners, as well as a few other EV owners, in Croatia protested against gasoline car owners blocking charging stations by blocking a gas station for a few minutes.

Also, Croatia is the home of Rimac, an electric hypercar manufacturer now partly owned by Porsche.