Tesla sued Alameda County on Saturday in an effort to reopen its Fremont, California, car factory, a new chapter in Chief Executive Elon Musk‘s months-long fight over restrictions imposed to battle the coronavirus pandemic. Tesla also will move its headquarters out of California and might stop manufacturing cars at the plant altogether, he said. “I’m not messing around,” Musk tweeted.
“The county is making rules that directly contradict and undermine the policy announced by the governor in his orders,” Tesla said in its lawsuit against the county. “The county’s orders should be declared void and without legal effect.” (See the full lawsuit below.)
Tesla closed the Fremont plant in March as the state and county sought to curtail the spread of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus. California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced plans to let some businesses reopen starting Friday, a move Musk cheered. But Alameda County, where Fremont is located, reportedly said Tesla doesn’t have permission to start reopening the plant.
Alameda County health authorities have been working directly with Tesla on a plan to safely reopen the factory, the county said in a statement Saturday. “The team at Tesla has been responsive to our guidance and recommendations, and we look forward to coming to an agreement on an appropriate safety plan very soon,” the county said. People and businesses have made sacrifices to save lives, and “we need to continue to work together so those sacrifices don’t go to waste.”
The dispute shows conflicting priorities in the effort to fight the pandemic: Restarting businesses lets people get back to work, but loosening shelter-in-place restrictions poses risks to public health. More than 78,000 people in the United States and 277,000 people globally have died from COVID-19, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Musk, who’s taken issue with what he’s called the coronavirus “panic,” isn’t happy about the restrictions on his company’s electric-vehicle manufacturing. Tesla has just begun producing its Model Y, a crossover based on the earlier Model 3 sedan.
“Tesla is filing a lawsuit against Alameda County immediately. The unelected & ignorant ‘Interim Health Officer’ of Alameda is acting contrary to the Governor, the President, our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense!” Musk said in one tweet.
“Frankly, this is the final straw,” Musk added in another tweet. “Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately. If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will be [depend] on how Tesla is treated in the future. Tesla is the last carmaker left in CA.”
Alameda County had been working on a plan to let Tesla reopen the factory on May 18, a county official, Scott Haggerty, told The New York Times. But a Tesla executive told him Thursday that Musk was thinking of suing, and that slowed down conversations with Tesla.
The health official Musk criticized is Dr. Erica Pan, interim health officer at Alameda County’s Division of Communicable Disease Control and Prevention. She went to Tufts University School of Medicine, had a residency at the University of California-San Francisco medical school and worked in pediatric infectious diseases at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland.
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