News
Opinion: Tesla and India is the right thing at the wrong time
Tesla and India will not be working together any time soon, as new reports now indicate that Tesla has pulled its team responsible for entrance into the Indian market to other regions. Tesla and India might be a powerful one-two punch in the future, but in 2022, the two are just the right thing at the wrong time.
When Tesla first started making moves toward entering the Indian automotive market, there was a lot of excitement. The unbelievable potential of a partnership between the world’s leading electric car company and a government that primarily focuses on domestic manufacturing efforts, mainly due to the Make in India initiative, had people buzzing. However, there were still hoops to jump through. Any person with any sort of knowledge about India and cars knows that it is an expensive place to own one, especially if it was not built there. Getting cars from outside of India into the country doubles the cost of the vehicle on most occasions due to import duties. This is when Tesla started to realize how difficult this whole process might be.
Tesla places its India entry on hold after failing to secure lower import taxes: report
In routine negotiations, even with companies and governments, there is always a brief standoff period to see who will budge first. The hypothetical game of chicken can be magnified when dealing with two large entities, but eventually, something happens where someone makes a move, and things start to come together. I thought a great, recent, and relevant example of this would be the Elon Musk-Twitter buyout, where, as the board of the platform mozied over the Tesla CEO’s offer, new developments were few and far between, as expected. Nothing was going to move forward until someone budged.
The issue is that sometimes people choose not to budge because their needs in a particular deal are non-negotiable. When the needs of both sides are non-negotiable, it complicates the entire ordeal, and this is what made the Tesla-India deal stagnate: Two large entities that had specific requirements to make something happen. Neither was asking for a small thing, so it is not necessarily unreasonable that Tesla put its plans for India on hold.
Tesla needed to test demand for its cars. It would only be able to do this by building them in Fremont, California, Austin, Texas, Brandenburg, Germany, or Shanghai, China, and then shipping them to India. The problem with this system was it would not be an accurate representation of what Tesla might be able to sell in the market, as the vehicles would still be subjected to massive import duties that would double the cost of the car in some cases. Only a small percentage of the population would be able to afford that, and with very little EV infrastructure in India, it made the company’s products even less attractive. Tesla was effectively stuck between a rock and a hard place because it had an interest in building and selling cars in India, it just needed to confirm that the people of India wanted to buy the cars. Indian government officials rarely offered commentary that was indicative of a willingness to budge.
India wanted Tesla to commit to building a new Gigafactory in their country, which would align with the government’s focus on domestic manufacturing efforts and would likely give officials enough to pull back import duties for Tesla. However, Tesla could not commit to this: there was no indication that demand would be high enough to justify an entire factory, and Tesla was not sure it would be able to export vehicles from the Indian factory to other countries. Given the economic situations across the world during the past two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, neither entity would be able to budge from their needs.
India and Tesla were the right thing, just at the wrong time. Given the extreme demands that both Tesla and Indian officials needed, it was best to not beat a dead horse any longer and move on from the potential partnership, at least temporarily. Tesla does have a lot of potential in India, but it cannot justify purchasing massive land plots for a new facility, it cannot justify spending millions more on showrooms and service centers, and it can not adequately test the want for its vehicles with massive import taxes trailing behind every car sent to the market.
Try again in a few years, hopefully.
I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or questions, please email me at joey@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @KlenderJoey, or if you have news tips, you can email us at tips@teslarati.com.
Elon Musk
Tesla Semi finally has an FSD timeline and it’s waiting on the Cybercab
Elon Musk told investors Semi self-driving should start working by early 2027, per today’s earnings.
During Wednesday’s’ Tesla Q2 earnings call, an analyst asked Elon Musk when Tesla would look at autonomy for the Semi. His answer set a real timeline for the first time, noting that self-driving on the Tesla Semi is expected to start working “around the end of this year or early next year”.
Musk framed the delay as a matter of priority, not capability. Tesla’s self-driving team is currently focused on Model 3, Model Y, and Cybercab, the vehicles that make up the overwhelming majority of Tesla’s fleet. Since Semi trucks on the road remain a small fraction of that total even after the recent Nevada factory ramp, Musk said it made more sense to keep the software team’s attention on what he called “the march of nines of safety” for the higher volume vehicles first. Autonomous Semi development is “taking a bit of a backseat for the next six months or so,” he said, before adding that it “will definitely be working next year and in time for the scale-up to high production of the Tesla Semi.”
Tesla Semi’s official battery capacity leaked by California regulators
The timeline lines up with what’s already been showing up on public roads. In June, a Tesla Semi was spotted in Sunnyvale wearing a full validation rig, the same rooftop sensor array Tesla mounts on vehicles ahead of an FSD milestone.
A second unit was seen near Fremont days later with a matching camera suite and lens washers. Separately, Tesla analyst Nic Cruz Patane posted video this month of the production Semi’s exterior camera array, ten AI4 based units built directly into the truck rather than added later.
Tesla Semi AI4 cameras. The production version has 10 cameras on its exterior.
These trucks are designed to be autonomous. pic.twitter.com/GH3BamxIBQ
— Nic Cruz Patane (@niccruzpatane) April 14, 2026
Musk also gave the reason autonomy on the Semi matters in the first place, a persistent shortage of qualified truck drivers. “There is a really serious shortage of truckers,” he said on the call, framing a self-driving Semi as important both for addressing that shortage and for improving safety and comfort for the drivers running the truck today.
The timing also tracks with the Semi’s production reality. Tesla’s Q2 shareholder letter, dropped language promising the Semi would reach volume production this year. Musk pointed to 4680 battery cell output as the near-term constraint on Semi and Cybercab production. A software timeline landing in early 2027 gives Tesla’s autonomy team room to work while the hardware ramp catches up behind it.
It’s worth nothing that this isn’t necessarily a promise the Semi ships driverless next year. Musk’s own language, self-driving “working” by early 2027, describes internal validation catching up to hardware already riding on every production truck, not a public unsupervised rollout.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a massive beat on vehicle deliveries for the second quarter, delivering 489,126 vehicles and building 451,758 cars during the three-month span.
This was a major shock for those on Wall Street as they anticipated somewhere around 400,000 deliveries for the quarter, and showed Tesla still has plenty of demand for its vehicles around the world and in the U.S. despite losing the $7,500 EV Tax Credit last year.
Tesla Q2 2026 Earnings Results
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.33 reported vs. $0.53 expected
- Revenues – $28.236 billion reported vs. $26.4 billion expected
- Free Cash Flow- -$1.092B
- Profit -$ 4.751B
Tesla (beat/missed) analyst expectations, so the market response to the company’s quarter is what we will look for next.
Tesla shares closed today down just over 1 percent, trading at $374.01.
In the past, it has been anyone’s guess with what Tesla shares will do after they report earnings. Strong quarters have resulted in sharp drops, while lackluster quarters have seen the stock shoot up considerably.
Tesla will hold its Q2 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q2 2026 Earnings Call https://t.co/zZS6ii2TWK
— Tesla (@Tesla) July 22, 2026
Tesla is about to make parking in busy parking lots at businesses and other points of interest less stressful than ever by allowing drivers more control over where they park and how, CEO Elon Musk confirmed on X.
Tesla has been working to improve the parking performance of vehicles utilizing the Full Self-Driving suite, but now it is looking to add more customization, allowing drivers to choose the specific space they park in, but also potentially the orientation the car pulls into the spot:
It’s coming soon
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 21, 2026
Musk has reiterated on X twice over the past several weeks that Tesla is working to make things with the FSD suite based more on the driver’s specific preferences and behaviors that were seen in past drives.
Essentially, it sounds like if you tend to park away from a business to avoid other vehicles, Tesla FSD will soon recognize that preference of yours and start parking further away as well. Additionally, the prospect of assigned parking spaces has been something many owners have voiced concerns about.
Living in a community with assigned parking spaces makes using FSD incredibly difficult as it will rarely park in the correct spot when there are so many to choose from. This is also pertinent in work settings where there are sometimes assigned parking spaces.
The updates to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite in terms of listening to driver preferences with parking are also extending to routing. Tesla announced yesterday that with the release of its 2026 Summer Update, it was adding Automatic Navigation and Preferred Routes:
Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more
Tesla has always maintained the idea that any human input is bad input, and that, ideally, Tesla Full Self-Driving will always make the right decision. Of course, this is all in theory, but the issue is that so many of Tesla’s interventions have come because it does something that is not necessarily wrong, but perhaps not what the driver would prefer.
Taking these preferences into account will help Tesla alleviate some of the potentially unnecessary interventions that drivers perform.
Elon Musk’s answer to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey got way more specific
Tesla Semi finally has an FSD timeline and it’s waiting on the Cybercab
