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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.
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.
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Tesla Cybercabs take over Austin’s F1 weekend
Tesla Cybercabs swarmed Austin’s F1 Grand Prix as sightings hit a record during race weekend.
Tesla’s driverless Cybercabs used the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix in Austin as their biggest public stress test yet. On Sunday afternoon, Tesla head of AI software Ashok Elluswamy quoted a photo from X user Ben Steindl showing a long line of gold Cybercabs and Model Y Robotaxis stacked up on a road near Circuit of the Americas. “Robotaxis as far as the eye can see!” Elluswamy wrote. Steindl’s original post was more matter of fact: “@Tesla @robotaxi is busy for the Austin F1.”
The fleet also handled the trip home. The race started at 3 p.m. Central, and once it ended, Cybercab Spotter, an account that logs Cybercab sightings around Austin, posted that “People are requesting Cybercabs to get home.”
Robotaxis as far as the eye can see! 🤩
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) October 25, 2026
Tesla set this up days in advance without announcing it. Late on October 22, rider David Moss posted Robotaxi app screenshots showing the Austin service area wrapping around the track toward Elroy and FM 812, with ride requests open until 1 a.m. A banner in the app read “Last call is 1am · Limited to nearby dropoffs.” Austin rides ended at 11 p.m. as recently as early October, as Teslarati reported, before moving to midnight on October 17.
Not every rider got dropped at the gate. Early app searches showed spots like COTA Karting as “Service blocked,” and one rider who took a Cybercab to the track Friday said the rideshare area was less than a 20 minute walk from the front gate.
The weekend also produced a new activity record. Cybercab Spotter counted 1,250 Cybercab sightings in Austin on Saturday, qualifying day. The previous high was 1,072 on October 16. Sightings count the same car more than once, so they measure how busy the fleet is rather than how big it is. For size, the Texas automated vehicle registry listed 463 Cybercabs at midday Sunday, up from the 300+ Tesla claimed on October 10, when Elluswamy also said Dallas is next for Cybercab.
The track was out of reach for Tesla’s main rival. Waymo runs in Austin only through Uber, and its service area stops well short of COTA. Waymo did not announce any race day service.
Tesla has not said how many rides it gave to and from the circuit, or whether the expanded zone and 1 a.m. cutoff will stay after race weekend. On the third quarter earnings call, Elluswamy said 2 a.m. service is coming “pretty soon” and that Tesla plans to run Robotaxi around the clock before the end of the year. The company is also aiming to hand the first Cybercabs to customers before 2026 ends, which would put cars like these outside Tesla’s own fleet for the first time.
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Tesla makes good on its Cybercab promise in just two weeks
Tesla Cybercab riders can now pull up a rear camera view and darken the screen.
Tesla has given Cybercab passengers a way to see what is behind them, along with a way to turn the cabin screen off entirely.
Riders in Austin can now bring up a live rearview camera feed on the Cybercab’s center display in the middle of a trip. Austin rider Ethan McKanna spotted the change late Friday night, posting from a ride that “You can now open the camera to view what’s behind you in Cybercab!” His photo shows a strip of rear camera video across the top of the screen, with another Cybercab following on a bridge. Sawyer Merritt shared the image Saturday and wrote that it “sounds like” there is also a new quiet mode that darkens the entire screen for riders who want to relax, sleep, or avoid a bright display at night.
The camera view goes beyond the rear feed. Tesla UI software engineer Evan, who posts as @CarCoder, replied to McKanna with a tip: “You can also tap it to see more cameras, and swipe it up or down to hide and show.” Until now, the Cybercab only showed its rear and repeater feeds on the “Please Exit Safely” screen at the end of a ride, so passengers could check for cyclists and traffic before opening a door.
Quiet mode surfaced a day earlier. Austin rider Jackson Blatz posted a video Friday morning of the new Robotaxi interface in a Cybercab with the option. Tesla has not published release notes for either feature.
The rear camera view moved quickly from request to release. Earlier this month, Cybercab rider Dan Burkland asked Tesla to let passengers pull up the rear and repeater cameras whenever they want, “especially for peace of mind.” Evan answered “In development,” as Teslarati reported at the time. About two weeks later, riders have it.
The feature fills a gap created by the Cybercab’s design. With no steering wheel, no pedals, no mirrors and no rear window, a passenger has no natural way to glance behind the car. The eight exterior cameras that feed Tesla’s autonomy software were already on board, so the change only required software.
There is also an AI angle to how it was built. Yun-Ta Tsai, a senior staff engineer on Tesla’s AI team, quoted Merritt’s post and wrote that the “(human) camera view tuning is optimized with Grok and implements part of the algorithm by directly programming the fixed-function hardware, so I don’t even need to check the datasheet.” Tsai did not say which part of the algorithm Grok handled. Grok already plays a bigger role inside the vehicle, with Grok Bot now enabled across every Cybercab and the Model Y Robotaxi fleet after Tesla brought the agent into its cars in September.
The two features join a busy week of changes for riders in Austin, which also brought a redesigned Live Activity for iPhone and Apple Watch and live trip sharing. They also arrive as Tesla prepares the Cybercab for life outside its own fleet. On the third quarter earnings call, Lars Moravy said the company is aiming to deliver Cybercabs to customers before the end of 2026. Tesla has not said whether the camera view and quiet mode will also come to its Model Y Robotaxis.
Elon Musk
Tesla shows what Roadster drivers will see on screen before thruster activation
Tesla’s Roadster video reveals a fighter jet inspired cockpit with a 5,500 PSI thruster gauge.
Tesla has given future owners their clearest look yet at the cockpit of its next generation Roadster. In a 34 second video posted to X on Friday afternoon, the company walked through the car’s touchscreen with a caption: “Inspired by fighter jet cockpits, Roadster’s interface was designed around the pilot.”
The clip opens on a black screen with red graphics and a 3D wireframe of the car, which sits beside the Roadster’s squared off yoke. Tapping parts of the model brings up controls for the rear wing, including low drag and high downforce positions, along with a charging page with a charge limit bar and a small music player. A row of tabs along the bottom reads Home, Vehicle, Listen, Climate and Navigate.
Most of the video is spent in Track Mode. The dashboard shows a live circuit map, a list of session lap times, brake and motor temperatures, and pressure and temperature readouts for each tire. A setup page lets the driver pick Auto, Low Drag, High Downforce or Custom aero modes, adjust aero balance and brake balance, and switch stability and traction control off. Along the bottom, a status bar reads “Thruster · 5,500 PSI” next to a “Boost Ready” indicator.
That gauge ties the software to the hardware Tesla showed off near Waco, Texas on October 15. The Thrust and Rocket versions use cold gas thrusters fed by carbon overwrapped pressure vessels, and Tesla lists 0 to 60 mph times of under 0.9 seconds and under 0.59 seconds for them, as Teslarati detailed in its breakdown of the three Roadster configurations. The base Performance car relies on a fan and ground sealing system for grip, and the aero settings on screen match the active wings and suction setup covered in our look at how the Roadster generates downforce.
The Roadster layout is a departure from the rest of Tesla’s lineup. Instead of a map centered screen, the Roadster puts the car itself at the center of the home page, and Tesla’s Roadster page lists two smaller forward displays alongside the main touchscreen. Tesla has not said whether any of the Track Mode telemetry will make its way to the Model 3 Performance or other vehicles.
The interface could still change before deliveries. Elon Musk said at the event that Roadster production will begin in 2028, and Tesla says the flagship Rocket version is not approved for public road use. Reservations are open with a $50,000 payment, while Thrust is listed as a limited release and Rocket is invite only.
Those who want to see the car in person will get their first chance this weekend. The Roadster goes on display in the lobby of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles from October 24 to 27, according to Sawyer Merritt, the first time the public will be able to view it up close.
Tesla Cybercabs take over Austin’s F1 weekend
Tesla makes good on its Cybercab promise in just two weeks
