Why there are no Tesla cars in India yet?

April 16, 2022

Why there are no Tesla cars in India yet?

Elon musk is one of the popular figures in the world right now. He is the richest person in the world and first to cross three hundred billion dollars of net worth in the history. We know what he does for a living. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Tesla Motors. Tesla, Inc. is the world’s most valuable automotive industry with a market capitalization of over one trillion dollars. Tesla is a Texas based clean energy company, designs and manufactures electric vehicles and had the most sales of EV last year. Tesla cars are one of the best-selling plug-in electric cars in about 40 countries. But there are no Tesla cars on the roads in India “yet”. Let’s find out why.

However, Tesla Inc has registered its subsidiary “Tesla India Motors and Energy Private Limited”. It is automotive based company. This company was set on January 8,2021 in Bengaluru, Karnataka. The company had appointed three new directors – David Jon Feinstein, Vaibhav Taneja, Venkatrangam Sreeram. Tesla India has not started its productions nor imported vehicles for sale in India. India has already more than 300 million cars running on roads. But the cost of petrol and diesel are Rs.110.75 and Rs.100.94 respectively. So, it’s obvious that India is moving towards the clean energy phase which is more affordable and good to the environment. Currently there are 15 electric car manufacturers and about 20 models of Electric cars in India. India has a whopping number of 9.66 lakh electric vehicles already running on roads. People like me have been really anxious about the launch of Tesla cars in India and several people have been tagging Elon Musk in Twitter asking the same. Now the most influential person in the world took his time and replied to a Tamil Youtuber who asked about the launch of Tesla cars. He stated that he also wants to launch the cars in India but the import duties are the highest in the world by far of any large country. Elon thinks that clean energy vehicles are treated as the same as petrol or diesel in India, which does not seem entirely consistent with climate goals of India. Elon might be true about the import duties. You might want to know that India levies a 100% tax for cars priced above 40,000$ and a 60% tax for those priced below 40,000$. Tesla’s cheapest car is priced around 46,000$ which is around 36 lakh rupees and with the tax levied the car might price around 60 lakh rupees which might not be affordable for Indians. Why does not Tesla manufacture vehicles in India itself? Well, I don’t think they are quite there yet. Tesla’s catchy feature “Autopilot” might be very hard to be implemented in India with its large area, tough terrains to cover, not so promising traffic rules, etc. There’s a fact that India has not been so kind to US based car manufacturers. General Motors, US based automotive manufacturing corporation shut down its operations in India by the end of 2017. They failed to adapt to the market and their poor planning resulted in their end of the business. Following GM, Ford India decided to leave India after it failed to stay in the market. They were forced to increase the cost of productions due to the heavy import restrictions. Now, Tesla wouldn’t want to take this risk, they would rather sell imported cars and would expect the government to reduce the tariff plans. Tesla would want to handle the taxes and might consider assembling the cars in India. India would love having Tesla cars in its roads. Indians definitely love their car being fancy and Tesla cars sure not only meet the expectations but also exceeds the expectations. The body of a Tesla car is almost rock solid and the design is just stunning.