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Tesla’s ‘challenges’ with India gov’t halt potential rescue of $27B manufacturing initiative
In 2014 when Narendra Modi officially became Prime Minister of India, his first message to people around the world was that, under his leadership, Indian manufacturing operations would become one of the world’s most robust. In September of the same year, Modi officially launched “Make In India,” a government initiative that encouraged companies from all corners of the globe to develop, produce, and assemble products in India with sizeable investments into manufacturing.
Five years after the initiative began, India’s manufacturing GDP was the lowest it had been in twenty years. It dropped 1.2% in the first five years following the launch of Make In India, although the growth rate of manufacturing globally increased 6.9% from 2014-15 to 2019-20.
Seven-and-a-half years later, Make In India is still a work in progress.
It was a disappointing start to the still active program, which has not been a complete failure. General Motors brought a $1 billion investment to a manufacturing facility in Maharashtra, the city where Tesla has been rumored to land with a potential factory of its own. Kia invested $1.1 billion in 2017 and has been producing vehicles at its factory in the Anantapur District since January 2019. Electrification, where the global automotive industry is heading, is still a weak point in India. Less than 1% of the country’s cars are electric.
Because of the extensive and massive $27 billion budget that has been set aside for these programs, India has tried to persuade companies to bring manufacturing to the country directly. With a sky-bound budget and thirst for local manufacturing, the confusion begins to set in: Why is Tesla, a company with a reputation for building the world’s best electric vehicles, that could likely build a manufacturing facility anywhere in the world, having so much trouble landing a deal in India to manufacture its vehicles?
A Tesla Model 3 testing in India (Credit: pune_exotics | Instagram)
The disconnect seems to be between Tesla’s requests and India’s needs. When Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, tweeted last night that there were still “challenges” when working with the Indian government, which had put the plans on hold once again, it seemed that the automaker’s requests for import duty reductions went to the wayside. An issue that seems to be Tesla’s most integral wish, import duty reduction has received support from some Indian politicians, noting that demand testing, which has been one key factor in the company’s attempts to enter India, cannot happen if duties are too high. “If they have to manufacture here, they need the numbers, and no one can test the market when you impose such high import duty on the vehicles,” Union Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari said in August.
If import taxation was not an issue, Tesla could use data already available to them to determine whether a Gigafactory would make sense in India. Spoiler alert: Tesla would never build a factory in India based on sales figures from the past ten years as very few people can afford them when import duties are involved. Any vehicle below $40,000 is subjected to 40% tax. Any vehicle more expensive than $40,000 receives a 100% tax, effectively doubling the price of the vehicle. Currently, Tesla has no vehicles in its lineup that are under the $40,000 price threshold.
The problem is those import duties are a huge issue. India seems to be against doing it, at least for now, even though the massive $27 billion budget would not be directly affected by an import tax rollback. In fact, that budget could still factor in tax losses from duty reductions. Perhaps the reasons linked to Tesla’s delayed entrance into India could be linked to the automaker’s lack of need for other companies due to its vertical integration. While this sounds far-fetched, the President of the Automotive Component Manufacturers Association (ACMA) said that localization is always a priority, and companies entering the market need to promote local manufacturing across the board, not just with the final product.
This would include everything from complex factors like semiconductors to other elements that are as simple as car seats. Tesla makes many of its parts in-house, including some microcontrollers and its automotive seats. “Tesla is absurdly vertically integrated compared to other auto companies or basically almost any company. We have a massive amount of internal manufacturing technology that we built ourselves,” Musk said in late 2020. “This makes it quite difficult to copy Tesla, which we’re not actually all that opposed to people copying us because you can’t do catalog engineering. You can’t just [say] I’ll pick up the supplier catalog, I’ll get one of those.”
This leaves India at a crossroads because, while Tesla would be a great benefit to the economy, manufacturing efforts, and employment, the company would not have as much to offer other sectors and companies as an automaker that is less vertically integrated. Reports have indicated that Tesla was planning to source components from local suppliers, but details regarding these rumors were slim.
India Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits the Tesla Fremont Factory in 2015.
But Tesla is far from a liability for any region. After launching Gigafactory Shanghai in China in early 2020, the factory has become Tesla’s biggest producer of EVs and accounted for nearly 52% of the automaker’s total deliveries for 2021. Despite the company’s vertical integration, which has increased gross margin on some Made-in-China Tesla vehicles to nearly 40%, the company has provided China with many economic benefits. The site will soon employ 9,000 people on the Model Y line alone after a confirmed expansion found in Tesla’s Environmental Impact Assessment for 2021. Gigafactory Shanghai will have 18,000 employees by the time the line expansion is completed. Additionally, it has helped encourage the adoption of EVs in Europe through exports, making the Model 3 the best-selling EV on the continent in 2021, with over 109,670 units sold. The next closest was the Renault Zoe, with 58,242 sales.
Whether Tesla will ever enter India seems to be a question that has no definitive answer currently. However, Tesla has been teasing a potential entrance for seven years, ever since Modi visited the Fremont factory in 2015. The long saga of Tesla and India will continue for now. With Tesla’s attractive status as an EV powerhouse, other countries might come knocking on the door, stealing an opportunity to increase India’s slumping reputation as a manufacturing hub. Considering the Made In India initiative’s backtrack in manufacturing GDP, perhaps new strategies should be tested.
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Elon Musk recently restated a fact that still defines SpaceX’s origin story: if Falcon 1’s fourth launch had failed, the company would not exist. The comment answered a reminder that after three consecutive losses, SpaceX had money for only one more attempt.
On X, Peter Diamandis said that the present-day acknowledgement of SpaceX’s success does not discount the rough start the company had. “Almost nobody remembers that Elon’s first rocket failed three times, and there was money for exactly only one more attempt.”
Musk said, “If the 4th launch had failed, SpaceX would not exist.”
If the 4th launch had failed, SpaceX would not exist
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2026
In late 2008, the firm was nearly out of cash. Another failure would have ended payroll, closed the Hawthorne factory, and left the Falcon 9 and Dragon programs as unfinished drawings.
The first flight lifted off from Omelek Island on 24 March 2006. Thirty-three seconds later, a corroded aluminum fitting on a fuel line leaked. Kerosene ignited around the Merlin engine, control was lost, and the vehicle came apart. The small DARPA payload, FalconSAT-2, survived the short flight only to land on a storage shed near the pad. Investigators later traced the fitting to a materials mix-up that should never have reached the rocket.
Flight 2, on 21 March 2007, looked far better at first. The first stage burned cleanly and handed off to the Kestrel-powered upper stage. The vehicle crossed 100 kilometers and reached a peak of about 289 kilometers. Then propellant slosh in the second-stage tank started a circular coning motion that grew until the engine shut down. Telemetry faded as the stage tumbled, and SpaceX had reached space but not orbit. Over the next year, the team redesigned everything from the ground up, including tanks, baffles, and the new regeneratively cooled Merlin 1C.
That engine flew on Flight 3 on 2 August 2008. The first stage performed almost perfectly and reached 217 kilometers. After main-engine cutoff, leftover fuel in the cooling channels produced a faint residual thrust, roughly 10 pounds per square inch of chamber pressure. On a Texas test stand, the effect was invisible beneath ambient air pressure. In vacuum it was enough to push the spent first stage back into the second stage after separation. The stages collided, the upper stage spun, and the mission was lost. Musk later said a slightly longer delay before staging would have saved the flight.
Six weeks later, the team assembled Flight 4 from remaining parts and flew it on 28 September 2008 at 23:15 UTC. The payload was Ratsat, a 165-kilogram aluminum mass simulator built in-house. Staging was delayed so residual thrust could decay. The Kestrel ignited, the fairing split away, and nine and a half minutes after liftoff the vehicle was in orbit. After a coast, the second stage restarted, settling into a 621-by-643-kilometer path at 9.35 degrees inclination. Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach Earth orbit. Musk called the insertion “middle of the bull’s-eye.”
SpaceX restores a Falcon 1 rocket for 10th anniversary of first launch success
That success unlocked NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services award later that year. Without it, there would have been no Falcon 9, no reusable first stages, and no Dragon cargo or crew flights to the International Space Station. Launch prices would have remained far higher. Starlink’s constellation would not exist; broadband from low Earth orbit would still be a paper concept.
Ride-share markets, high launch cadence, and the current pace of lunar and Mars hardware would be years behind. Communications, Earth observation, and the cost of putting anything into space would look more like the 2000s than the 2020s.
One extra second of residual thrust in August 2008 would have written a different decade.
News
Tesla surges Robotaxi fleet ahead of Cybercab launch event
Tesla’s unsupervised robotaxi fleet quietly grew sevenfold in three weeks just before Cybercab Day arrives.
Tesla’s unsupervised Robotaxi fleet has grown far faster than the public numbers suggested, and the timing lines up with the company’s biggest autonomy showcase yet. According to data compiled by the crowdsourced Robotaxi Tracker, Tesla now has nearly 200 vehicles operating without a safety monitor across Austin, Dallas and Houston, yielding a roughly 7X increase in about three weeks.
The jump lands four days before this week’s Tesla Cybercab launch event in Austin, where the company plans to show off its purpose-built, two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals in a live commercial setting for the first time. Stick with us on X and Facebook for live reporting from the event.
The strategic logic is straightforward. Tesla has spent the past year scaling Robotaxi in small, deliberate steps, first widening geofences, then extending operating hours, then quietly growing fleet size, usually with little advance notice. Ashok Elluswamy told investors on the Q2 earnings call that the program had logged more than 380,000 unsupervised miles with zero notable incidents, a safety record the company has leaned on to justify moving slowly. Critics have used the flip side of that caution, a fleet that appeared stuck around two dozen vehicles for months, as evidence that Tesla’s driverless ambitions were outrunning its actual deployment.
A fleet quietly scaling to nearly 200 vehicles right before Cybercab Day undercuts that argument without Tesla having to say anything about it directly. It also sets up the event to do double duty. Rather than simply introducing new hardware, Tesla can point to an operating base of unsupervised Model Ys already running at meaningful scale, then argue the Cybercab, which uses the same underlying Full Self-Driving stack according to earlier coverage of the fleet’s software upgrades, is a natural next steps. Tesla has separately been registering the two-seat Cybercabs with Texas regulators this week, with the count climbing from seven to 45 in a matter of days.
The two ramps, one in software-driven Model Y deployment and one in physical Cybercab registrations, are happening in parallel rather than in sequence. That suggests Tesla wants Thursday’s event to land as proof that the robotaxi business is already running at scale, not just a reveal of a new vehicle shape. Whether the unsupervised numbers hold up once Cybercabs start mixing into the same fleet is the detail worth watching once the event wraps.
Tesla is lowering the monthly price of its Cybertruck Windshield Protection Plan from $35 to $25. The new rate will apply to the first payment on or after October 1, 2026. Tesla has told subscribers that all other benefits stay the same.
The plan covers unlimited repairs for chips and minor cracks on the front windshield. It also includes one full replacement every 12 months at no extra charge. Additional replacements in the same year carry a $100 deductible. Service is performed with Tesla glass and camera calibration, which matters because Autopilot and Full Self-Driving rely on those lenses behind the windshield.
Looks like Tesla is decreasing the Cybertruck windshield protection plan price from $35 to $25
Awesome https://t.co/MRlTU1XTbf pic.twitter.com/PWkMZt1H7G
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 28, 2026
There is no long-term contract. Coverage applies only to the front glass and does not include collision, vandalism, or weather damage.
The Cybertruck’s large, complex windshield has been more expensive to replace than glass on Tesla’s cars, which is why the pickup started at a higher subscription price. The $10 monthly cut reduces the annual cost from $420 to $300. Tesla has not publicly explained the change. The timing coincides with a year of claims data after the plan was extended to the Cybertruck.
Tesla sells several related protection products as monthly subscriptions through the Tesla app. The Windshield Protection Plan is also offered on other models. Model 3 and Model Y currently cost $16 a month. Those passenger-car rates are unchanged in the latest Cybertruck notice.
The Wheel and Tire Protection Plan covers road-hazard damage such as potholes, nails, and debris. Repairs are unlimited. Each wheel or tire replacement appointment has a $25 deductible. Pricing varies by model and whether the vehicle is a Performance version. Tesla is raising some of those rates on the same October 1 date.
Reported examples include Model 3 Performance moving from $16 to $24 and Model Y Performance from $20 to $24. Cybertruck wheel-and-tire coverage has been listed at $20 a month for the standard configuration.
A separate Luxe Package bundles four years of windshield coverage, wheel-and-tire coverage, and recommended maintenance on certain new Model S, Model X, and Cyberbeast orders, although the Model S and X are now defunct.
Tesla also offers an Extended Service Agreement after the basic vehicle warranty ends. That product covers many Tesla-manufactured parts rather than glass or tires. Together, the plans give owners a menu of targeted, cancel-anytime coverage instead of relying only on auto insurance.
Elon Musk says SpaceX would not exist if this crucial early launch failed
Tesla surges Robotaxi fleet ahead of Cybercab launch event
