Tesla’s Indian odyssey

The courtship started (at least in the public domain) back in 2014 when Jay Vijayan, the then Chief Information Officer for the company (now Founder and CEO of Tekion Corp.) said in an interview that India would be an attractive market for the $35,000 Tesla model 3.

As per the interview, Jay highlighted that the company would need to liaise with the Indian government to discuss subsidies, import duties and infrastructure availability.

In 2015, the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi's visit to the company's factory in California filled consumers, business leaders and industry watchers with a lot of hope. The visit did prove fruitful with Musk tweeting in October 2015 that "Given high local demand, a Gigafactory in India would probably make sense in the long term".

The positive developments gathered momentum in 2016 when Tesla opened bookings for its Model 3 in India. Also, in June 2017 Elon Musk tweeted a World Economic Forum article highlighting the Indian Government's commitment to have only electric cars sold in the country by 2030.

Many EV/RE leaders from India including Chetan Maini, Anand Mahindra, among others reacted positively to this. While Chetan Maini, Founder Sun Mobility said "India needs 280GW of solar (0.5% of the state of Rajasthan) to power its target of an all electric fleet by 2030. Very feasible & affordable", Anand Mahindra's quip, "Time you got out here Elon. You don't want to leave that whole market to Mahindra do you?? The more the merrier--and greener..!" got a response in agreement from Elon Musk as well. It was a great moment where, through the power of social media, business leaders could engage in a dialogue that could potentially have a significant impact on the future of a large industry in India.