I was Tesla's head of supply chain. I saw how dependent the world was on Asian battery factories. Europe needs its own. That's not nationalism — it's industrial survival.
We raised $15 billion. We had $55 billion in orders from BMW, VW, and Volvo. And we still couldn't make it work fast enough. Battery manufacturing is the hardest industrial challenge on Earth.
Building a gigafactory in northern Sweden — above the Arctic Circle — was either visionary or insane. We had cheap clean energy and political support. What we didn't have was enough skilled workers willing to move there.
The green transition needs European battery independence. We proved the need exists. Whether Northvolt is the company that fulfills it — that question is now for others to answer.
Production yields were our Achilles heel. In the lab, our cells were world-class. On the factory floor, consistency killed us. The gap between prototype and production is where most hardware startups die. We were no exception.