In a recent interaction with students from IIT Madras, Elon Musk said that Tesla vehicles may be launched in India as early as next year. The SpaceX and Tesla CEO was answering a question posed by the Avishkar Hyperloop team – a group of IIT Madras students who had recently participated in the finals of a Tesla-organized global contest called ‘SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition 2019’. The conversation reportedly took place on July 21, when the team asked Musk about his plans to bring Tesla vehicles to India.
Elon Musk has been moving back and forth on his India dream for a couple of years, but things haven’t gone the way many in the country would have wanted. Musk tweeted in March this year that he would love to be in the country by the end of 2019, but he has since blamed government policies for giving up on his India dreams. He also blamed the FDI norms for the delay in the electric car maker’s entry into the Indian market. “Would love to be in India. Some challenging government regulations, unfortunately”, Musk had tweeted.
Earlier this year, Tesla’s Indian-origin CFO, Deepak Ahuja, announced his retirement from the company, bringing Musk’s India dream to a halt once again. Tesla was expected to enter the Indian market with the Model 3 that sells for nearly $35,000 (around Rs. 23 lakh) in the US.
In January this year, Musk laid the foundation of Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai – the company’s first-ever outside the US – that is expected to produce 500,000 electric vehicles per year, doubling the overall production capacity. Gigafactory Shanghai continues to take shape, and in Q2, Tesla started to move machinery into the facility for the first phase of production there. According to IANS, moving Tesla cars to India would be easy from the Gigafactory Shanghai once it starts operations.
With inputs from IANS
