Tesla has officially received a business license in India that will allow the automaker to function as a full-fledged car manufacturer in one of the world’s most populous countries. Without a team of highly-experienced executives who are versed in international business, financials, and manufacturing, Tesla wouldn’t have a chance at being successful anywhere, let alone in India. Therefore, the company has called upon three executives to start the operation as they have been listed on India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs website as the three Directors who will lead Tesla into India, an unfamiliar territory.
Tesla has had India in its plans for corporate expansion for several years. Musk met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015, where the politician expressed his support for Tesla’s mission and it’s all-electric products. But since then, Tesla has been met with nothing but roadblocks and delays. It has finally made some headway in its effort to establish a production facility or Research and Development center in the country.
Because of import taxes, Tesla’s vehicles are a rarity in India. Nearly doubling the cost of the vehicle due to getting it into the country from Fremont, California, Teslas are only driven around by the extremely wealthy. With limited charging options available in the country, it makes them even less appealing. However, the coming expansion incites consumer excitement among Indian fans of the electric carmaker, who have pushed for Elon Musk to attempt to drive his company into their country. Now it’s finally happening.
David Feinstein
David Feinstein has been with Tesla for 8 years and 9 months, according to his LinkedIn page. His job title has always been related to Global and International business. When he started with Tesla in 2012, he was the Manager of Global Trade Compliance for its supply chain. After that, Feinstein became the Senior Manager of Global Trade, then the Director of Global Trade & New Markets. He was appointed to the Senior Director of Global Trade & New Markets in February 2020, and now his biggest project yet has been passed onto him: getting Tesla up and running in India.
LinkedIn
Feinstein’s global trade experience will be beneficial for Tesla’s entrance into the market. Since India is one of the few countries with such a heavy import tax, which has really neutralized Tesla’s presence in the country until now, it will be interesting to see what he can do moving forward.
Vaibhav Taneja
Vaibhav Taneja is the Chief Accounting Officer for Tesla, and he has held that position for 1 year and 11 months. He started with Tesla four years ago in February 2017 as the Assistant Corporate Controller and then moved to the Corporate Controller position. Controllers are responsible for the accuracy and timeliness of a company’s accounting department. They control the company’s cash flow and oversee the production of financial reports.
LinkedIn
Prior to Tesla, Taneja acted as the VP and Corporate Controller of Solar City until Tesla absorbed the company, his LinkedIn states. He also has close ties with India, as he is a graduate of Delhi University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Commerce. He also attended the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and is a Certified Public Accountant.
Taneja will likely work to solve financial challenges as Tesla moves forward with its Indian inclusion. His proven track record with Tesla makes him a great fit for the job, and his roots in India certainly don’t hurt, either.
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Venkatrangam Sreeram
Venkatrangam Sreeram is the co-founder of ClearQuote, an app that uses computer vision to assess car damage. Before that, he was Managing Director of Xenon Automotive and spent nearly two years as a Project manager for Tesla’s China operation from July 2012 to May 2014. As a Project Manager, he states that he was involved in the set up of wholesales in retail operations in the country. He had automotive experience before his post at Tesla. He worked as a Project Manager and a VP of Sales Operations for Jaguar Land Rover, and an Assistant General Manager for Tata Motors in Mumbai and London.
Venkat, as he is referred to, is based in Karnataka as well, the southwest state in India that will be home to Tesla’s Indian initiative.
Cartisan.in
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Tesla headlights have caused a recall of over 20,000 of the company’s two most popular vehicles, the Model 3 and Model Y, due to the low-beam bulb exceeding the maximum allowed intensity according to federal standards.
Tesla initiated the recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) this morning, stating that the low-beam output “exceeds the maximum allowed intensity in the outer upper-right and outer upper-left areas of the 10U and 90U zone, as prescribed in FMVSS No. 108.”
Tesla sourced the impacted headlights from Marelli Automotive Lighting, a Mexico-based company. The recall impacts 2020-2023 Model Y vehicles and 2017-2023 Model 3 vehicles. It is estimated that every VIN in this recall is impacted by the defect.
🚨 Tesla is recalling 20,349 2020-23 Model Y vehicles and 2017-23 Model 3 vehicles due to an excessively bright headlamp low beam.
Currently, there is no remedy plan in place, as it is still being developed. pic.twitter.com/y34cIO2U0B
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 11, 2026
Typically, Tesla would remedy recalls of this nature through an Over-the-Air software update, which has been a major focus of criticism by the company and its supporters because the NHTSA still refers to it as a “recall,” even though it requires no action by the vehicle owner. The fix is shipped over the internet and downloaded to the car.
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However, there appears to be a potentially different solution for this problem. Tesla has not developed a remedy for this issue, so it could potentially be on the way. The big issue appears to be the fact that these recalled lamps are out of production, and this is an old body style for both vehicles. The headlights and front-end designs are completely different.
Tesla switched to another supplier when the affected headlight design was discontinued. It plans to begin notifying owners of their remedy options by September 15.
Tesla filed a petition protesting the recall to fix the vehicles’ headlight issue, but the NHTSA denied it. Now, Tesla will come up with a solution to fix it.
Elon Musk
Another Tesla SpaceX merger prediction by ARK Invest has Elon Musk talking
Elon Musk again denies a Tesla China split as new SpaceX merger speculation resurfaces quickly.
Elon Musk restated that Tesla has no plans to separate its China business from the rest of the company, responding to a new round of merger speculation from ARK Invest.
On the firm’s “Brainstorm” podcast, Cathie Wood’s team, including chief futurist Brett Winton and research director Nick Grous, argued a Tesla and SpaceX combination remains likely, with an announcement possible before the end of the year even if the deal itself would not close that quickly. Winton called Tesla’s Shanghai operations a “small ish wrinkle” for a merger rather than a real obstacle, since SpaceX’s national security work with the U.S. government sits uneasily next to Tesla’s manufacturing base in China.
Musk pushed back on the framing directly. “China is awesome. I strongly encourage people to visit,” he wrote on X. He also repeated language he first used in late July, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Tesla executives had been told to prepare for a possible spinoff, sale, or closure of the China business ahead of a SpaceX tie up. Musk called that report “absurdly fake news” at the time, adding that a separation had “never even come up in a discussion ever,” a line he echoed again this week.
The repeated denial has not settled the underlying question, because Shanghai’s role in Tesla’s business is exactly what makes a merger complicated. Gigafactory Shanghai still ships more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries and functions as the company’s main export hub for Europe and Asia. Teslarati previously reported on Musk’s initial denial, and the merger conversation itself has been building since SpaceX’s IPO gave it public shares to use as acquisition currency.
Wedbush’s Dan Ives has pegged the odds of a Tesla SpaceX merger at 80 to 90 percent by early 2027, and ARK’s prediction of a year end announcement adds another data point to that timeline, even as Musk keeps rejecting the specific mechanics reporters have described. Neither position rules out the other. Musk can deny a China spinoff was ever discussed while analysts still expect some form of combination to move forward, since ARK and Ives are both describing convergence at the corporate level, not necessarily the internal restructuring the Journal described in July.
For now, Tesla’s China business remains intact, and Musk’s comments this week make clear he has no interest in publicly walking that position back, no matter how often the merger question resurfaces.
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Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
Tesla headlights cause recall of over 20,000 Model 3 and Model Y
Another Tesla SpaceX merger prediction by ARK Invest has Elon Musk talking
