Tesla is asking a federal judge for emergency access to a supplier’s plant in Troy, Texas, so it can haul out the tooling it needs to keep building the Cybertruck.
The supplier, Angstrom Automotive Group, is closing the plant and won’t let Tesla in. Tesla says that without those dies, several thousand Cybertrucks already committed to customers don’t get built.
A plant closure that turned into a standoff
Tesla filed the case on July 23 in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, No. 6:26-cv-0477. The ask is narrow. Tesla isn’t going after damages and isn’t trying to settle the commercial fight underneath all this. It wants through the gate to collect its own property.
“Tesla requests the Court to grant it one thing: retrieval of Tesla’s Tooling. It does not seek to litigate any other disputes between the parties,” the company wrote in the complaint, first reported by Bloomberg Law.
The timeline in the filing is short and ugly. Angstrom’s July 13 notice that Troy was closing came with no cooperation on a plan to get Tesla’s equipment out, according to the complaint. July 17 was the ship date for 700 finished Tesla parts. They never left the building.
Then came a bill for modifications Angstrom had made to the tooling, plus an offer: the plant keeps running if $250,000 a week shows up on top of what Tesla already owes on open purchase orders.
Tesla’s answer was to send representatives to Troy on July 21 with law enforcement. The gate stayed shut.
Angstrom hasn’t commented publicly on any of it.
This isn’t tooling you can order
The equipment Tesla wants back is described in the filing as large die-cast machinery, trim dies, fixtures, cutting tools, gauges, and X-ray inspection gear. Multi-ton stuff, purpose-built for specific Cybertruck castings.
So Tesla can’t just call someone else. According to the complaint, no other supplier can currently make these parts, and rebuilding the tooling from scratch would take five to six months. Tesla also says its on-hand supply of the affected components is “dwindling and will be exhausted in mere days.”
That’s the whole leverage problem in one sentence. Whoever physically controls those dies controls the Cybertruck line, and right now that isn’t Tesla.
Angstrom bought its way into Tesla’s supply chain last year
Angstrom is a Southfield, Michigan tier-one supplier founded in 1999, and it spent 2025 buying things. In July of last year it picked up Ontario-based KSR International, a deal Automotive News reported created a supplier with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and 4,500 employees. Then on September 9, it announced it had acquired Anderton Castings.
Anderton is the Tesla connection. The company runs aluminum die-casting operations in Troy, Texas and Monterrey, Mexico, making structural body components and EV propulsion parts like inverter housings and manifolds. Tesla’s relationship was with Anderton. Angstrom inherited it, and now Angstrom is closing the plant.
Electrek’s Take
Anderton/Andstrom has not commented yet so we only have Tesla’s side of the story. I’m sure there’s more to this. It can be a complicated situation when there’s a company being taken over.
Also, we know that Tesla can be rough with suppliers and in the case of the Cybertruck, Tesla has planned production for up to 250,000 units per years and it’s only able to sell about 20,000 per year. That likely resulted in bad situations where it ordered too many parts from suppliers – resulting in screwing some people over.
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