Elon Musk said concern that a Tesla assembly site in a rural area near Berlin would cause water shortages is exaggerated, pushing back against critics of the plant.

"Sounds like we need to clear up a few things!" the carmaker's chief executive officer tweeted. "Tesla won't use this much net water on a daily basis. It's possibly a rare peak usage case, but not an everyday event."

Tesla still has to jump through local hoops for the proposed plant, located in a water conservation zone in a forest bordering a nature preserve. Company planning documents saying the so-called Gigafactory 4 would need about 98,000 gallons of water per hour set off protests by residents this month.

Over the weekend, Musk cleared a different environmental obstacle: unexploded World War II ordnance, a result of the Berlin area's legacy as an industrial target for Allied bombers.