Tesla has not started making electric vehicles in India yet because of some challenging government regulations, Elon Musk said on Wednesday.
Replying to a user commenting on a map of Tesla Superchargers that Musk tweeted last week, the EV maker’s chief executive wrote on Wednesday:
“Would love to be in India. Some challenging government regulations, unfortunately. Deepak Ahuja, our CFO, is from India. Tesla will be there as soon as he believes we should.”
In May last year, Musk tweeted “Maybe I’m misinformed, but I was told that 30% of parts must be locally sourced and the supply doesn’t yet exist in India to support that.”
A month later, in June, Tesla’s CEO said that he was “In discussions with the government of India requesting temporary relief on import penalties/restrictions until a local factory is built.”
Fast forward a year, and Musk still thinks that regulations are tough for Tesla to set up local manufacturing in India.
India, like China, has plans for aggressive adoption of EVs, but India’s targets have been considered perhaps too ambitious because of lack of infrastructure. India is said to have scaled back its 2016 plan for all-EV fleet by 2030, and is now aiming for a 30-percent EVs share by 2030, according to Nikkei Asian Review.
In China, Tesla has had some success recently, due to the Chinese relaxing some restrictions on the domestic car market. Related: Oil Prices Could Bounce Back On Geopolitical Risk
Last month, China said that it was removing a limit on foreign ownership of carmaking joint ventures that has been in place since 1994, and that comes as welcome news for Tesla.
Tesla and China were said to disagree over the future ownership of a Tesla factory in Shanghai. China has insisted that all vehicle-manufacturing plants should be joint ventures with local partners, and currently all foreign carmakers must have a Chinese partner to manufacture vehicles locally. But Tesla wanted to have full ownership of the future factory. The removal of the foreign ownership cap for EV and plug-in hybrid car manufacturers as early as this year would benefit Tesla, which registered earlier this month a new electric car firm in Shanghai, waiting for the foreign ownership limit to be scrapped, according to a filing that Reuters has seen.
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By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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