Tesla vehicles are full of German parts. The most obvious instance is the turn stalk in the model S/X borrowed from Mercedes.

All of the established domestic car manufacturers have significantly expanded their operations in Berlin in the last 5 years (though mainly R&D, especially software). Germany has relatively high immigration, and it's a lot easier to draw highly qualified immigrants to Berlin than to the Southern German countryside due to the youthful appeal and lower CoL of the city. The US, OTOH, has become more hostile to immigration over time. From a "competition for global talent" PoV, Berlin is a decent stake in the ground in many ways. Tesla also has plans to build an R&D site on the land of the recently shuttered Tegel inner city airport.

They don't if you outsource the labor to a Polish staffing company and feign ignorance about their handling of labor issues. This is how most large industry companies handle cheap foreign labor in the country. Employing most of your industrial work force directly is so pre-Agenda-2010.

This practice actually became somewhat infamous during the pandemic when an outbreak in a meat factory shined light on Eastern European workers' working and living conditions. The company went on to hire thousands of workers directly in an attempt to salvage some of its reputation but previously had outsourced the work to a network of such staffing companies it claimed to have no insight into while actually having funded (and likely owned) several of them.

Oh, I'm German by birth and residence, I have no illusions about the country. But "manufactured in Germany" still somehow evokes a level of quality whereas "manufactured in Poland" sounds like you're saying the quiet part out loud.

Berlin is special in many ways. It has a national reputation for being dysfunctional and ramshackle (but also quirky and sexy and vibrant). This is often broadcasted dismissively, but of course has complex historical reasons. Just from the top of my head:

- During the West/East divide, West Germany was financially kept alive through major subsidy from the outside, which created political and organizational structures not designed for self-sufficiency. After the unification those subsidies from the national state were all but halted, plunging the city into debt

- A ruthless debt management approach has kept the city from spending ever since, which has resulted in a lot of administrative functions stagnating or slowly deteriorating by e.g. not hiring

Things are improving now, slowly, due to the Capital City effect and the startup boom, but it's important that Berlin is special within in Germany in many ways. In most European countries, if you make a GDP-per-person stat, it falls considerably if you remove the capital city from the equation (say almost 20% in France). Germany is perhaps the only industrial country in the world where it goes up instead.

Note: The Tesla factory, despite being called "Giga Berlin" by Tesla, is being built in the state of Brandenburg, which is not the state of Berlin. Brandenburg has a different complex situation.

Not sure what the ability of paying in a restaurant with card has to do with prestige of engineering professions and companies.

OTOH, unemployment is average in the region and wages and salaries are below average (maybe not in IT anymore). Traditional car industry regions have low unemployment and high wages and salaries - IG Metall, the traditional union of the car industry, is very strong. It will be interesting to see how Tesla deals with the unions. Wal-Mart had its troubles with that.