AUSTIN, Texas — Tesla has gone to federal court to recover manufacturing tooling it says it owns, filing an emergency lawsuit against supplier Angstrom Automotive Group after the company locked the equipment inside a Texas plant it is closing and, according to Tesla, asked for extra payments to keep it running.
The dispute centers on die-cast machinery, trim dies, fixtures, cutting tools, gauges, and X-ray inspection gear used to stamp Cybertruck components. Tesla's ask is narrow: it wants a judge to grant physical access to retrieve its own property, not damages or a broader ruling on the commercial relationship.
A Plant Closure That Became a Standoff
Tesla filed the case on July 23 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. According to the complaint, first reported by Bloomberg Law, Angstrom notified Tesla on July 13 that it planned to close its Troy, Texas facility. A shipment of roughly 700 finished parts due out on July 17 never left the building, and when Tesla representatives arrived on July 21 — accompanied by law enforcement — they were turned away.
Tesla says Angstrom then sought an additional $250,000 a week to keep the plant operating, a demand the automaker characterized as holding its property "for ransom." Angstrom has not commented publicly. Tesla has moved aggressively to protect its supply chain before, and here it is pressing forward with the same decisiveness it has shown scaling Cybertruck production across its business.
Why the Tooling Can't Simply Be Replaced
The equipment is purpose-built, multi-ton machinery tuned to specific Cybertruck castings. Tesla says no other supplier can currently produce the parts, and rebuilding the tooling from scratch would take five to six months. On-hand inventory of the affected components, the company warns, could be "exhausted in mere days" without court intervention, potentially stalling several thousand pickups already assigned to customers.
