That seems like an awfully small town for what Tesla wants to use it for. Won't they have trouble with recruiting?
Wow, that's a brilliant way to keep senior talent longterm.
There doesn't seem to be any public transit but in rural Germany most commuters use cars anyway. The next biggest nearby town seems to be Trier, which is one hour away by car.
There's also a US airforce base nearby and the town is relatively close to the borders of Luxembourg and Belgium.
I don't think they'll have trouble with recruiting. If the jobs are appealing enough, people will be willing to relocate -- if not to Prüm itself then probably to one of the nearby towns.
That plus good infrastructure and moving around isn't that big a deal.
Culture counts too. In the north of the UK, the idea of living in Manchester city centre is awful compared to the idea of living in quiet rural.
They're buying an existing company which is HQ'd there.
> Won't they have trouble with recruiting?
Why would they? People can easily move around.
I understand that, but it sounds like they are also planning to try and add a lot of people in the future.
> Why would they? People can easily move around.
Perhaps in Germany the attitudes are different (I recently moved here so maybe I'll find out!), but in the US you'd have an extremely hard time recruiting talented engineers to a city of just 5,000 people. Most educated people in the states want the amenities of a larger city.
You don't generally get these vast empty stretches of land between places in Germany, especially not in the West (the most densely populated region of Germany). But you also don't get American megacities like NYC, SF or LA.
The autobahn is frequently overestimated by foreigners. That there is no speed limit in principle doesn't mean that you can go any speed in practice. Most of the autobahn has speed limits and road works.
An hour drive is an hour drive, but 60 miles is an hour drive in the US, it might be 30~45mn via the Autobahn or Schnellstraßen.
> s. That there is no speed limit in principle doesn't mean that you can go any speed in practice. Most of the autobahn has speed limits and road works.
Sure, but speed limits tend to be much higher than they are on US interstate.
We don't have that many million people hubs in Germany so it's more common. And even with "Wüstenzulage" many Engineering salaries at VW are nowhere compared to SV salaries for engineers.
Especially with self-driving electric cars ;)
Also, the amount of big cities in a 100-200km radius might be interesting. And those being spread out over 5 countries.
I was going to say hope it has good train links for a more relaxed commute, but then relevantly the engineers might use Teslas on autopilot to work....
The good thing is most Germans living in rural areas are used to commuting by car anyway. I doubt there will be many commuters from Cologne (commuting by car from within Cologne is bad enough without having to drive for over an hour once you've managed to escape the city) but it seems like a nice region to settle down.
This was a bit of a culture clash for me when moving from a city of one million to a much smaller city of fifteen thousand. I was used to being able to take public transport to get everywhere and I can actually take the train to move between the two cities, but in the smaller city everybody has or shares a car.