An interesting meeting is taking place this week in Passau, Germany, unofficially being named 'forum for understanding', where some of the most influential men from business talks about politics, economy, art and culture. One of the spokesmen was also Matthias Müller, CEO of German car maker Volkswagen, who has a particularly bad opinion about American electric car manufacturer Tesla and its owner Elon Musk.

What bothers Müller most is 'big announcements', Tesla is making with each and every thing, that it makes. In his opinion, Tesla is trying to compare itself with major car manufacturers. »There are companies that barely sell 80,000 cars a year. Then there are companies like Volkswagen that sell 11 million cars this year, and produce a profit of 13 or 14 billion euros«. On the other hand, Tesla is supposed to be spending millions of dollars each month, yet he was not clear how and where losses are 'produced'.

Müller not alone, when commenting Tesla's recent actions

Müller also accused Musk of not being socially responsible. This accusation refers to the fact, that Tesla supposedly dismissed somewhere between 400 and 700 workers of all profiles – factory workers, managers and engineers, which according to Tesla is not a sign of problems in company, for instance connected to recent reports about delays in production of Model 3.

On the other hand, it is quite interesting if not brave move from Volkswagen to accuse Tesla of not being socially responsible, while they have been charged with cheating on emission tests for several years. On the other hand, this is not a lone case of accusation against Tesla. Less than two weeks ago GM's CEO Scott Miller declared, that Tesla is far from being able to produce reliable autonomous car.

It is far too early to say what is true and what is false. The fact is thou, that all of the companies involved are also some of the major players in fast growing market of electric cars so practices like this are nothing but expected.

Jure Šujica

Photo: Volkswagen