‘Tesla would love to be in India this year or next’
NEWDELHI/SAN FRANCISCO: Elon Musk isn’t giving up on bringing Tesla Inc. to India.
“Would love to be there this year. If not, definitely next!” Tesla’s billionaire chief executive officer said in a Twitter post, nearly ten months after he blamed restrictive policy for delaying the carmaker’s entry into the world’s fourth largest automobile market.
The Narendra Modi-led government has been wooing Tesla to set up a factory but Musk, in a May 2018 Twitter post, had pointed to “some challenging government regulations” as a hurdle. The year before, he had sought temporary waiver on import penalties and other restrictions until a local facility is built.
Tesla broke ground in January on a $5 billion factory in China, its first car-manufac- turing facility outside the US, after four years of planning. Tapping overseas markets may help the Us-based automaker stave off a potential dip in demand on its home turf.
While India is a promising market for electric vehicle makers, it has lagged far behind neighbouring China, plagued by minimal government support for cleaner technology and paucity of charging stations.
With similar populations, India has a mere 6,000 passenger electric vehicles on its roads, compared with China’s 1.35 million, according to Bloomberg NEF data.
It also had just 425 publicly available charging points at the end of 2017 but that is expected to rise to 2,800 charging points by 2022, according to BNEF.
Musk also unveiled a cheaper electric crossover, the Model Y, in a bid to regain momentum after a rough start to the year on Friday.
Taking the stage at the company’s design studio in Hawthorne, California, Musk showed off a blue prototype of the mid-sized sports utility vehicles (SUV), which is roughly 10% bigger than its best-selling sedan. Three higher-end versions of the new vehicle will start delivery in fall 2020, with a standard one available in spring 2021, priced at $39,000 and equipped with a 230-mile battery, according to the company.
Getting the new vehicle into production quickly will be key for Tesla to build on the momentum of its Model 3, a less-expensive sedan that’s catapulted the automaker up the sales charts and helped Musk post back-to-back quarterly profits for the first time.