Tesla scraps plan to sell in India, temporarily

15 Jun 2022 , 08:29 AM

A top official who was directing Tesla’s lobbying campaign in India has quit, weeks after the American carmaker put on hold plans to sell electric cars in the South Asian country.

Manuj Khurana, a policy and business development executive at Tesla in India, joined the company in March 2021 and was instrumental in developing the company’s domestic market-entry strategy.

For more than a year, he urged the Indian government to reduce the import tariff on electric cars from as high as 100% to 40%, claiming that this would allow Tesla to test the market with imports from its production centers like China before investing in a factory.

However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government asked that Tesla first commits to producing cars in India before making any concessions. Tesla placed its ambitions to sell cars in India on hold, reassigned some of its domestic team, and abandoned its search for showroom space due to the standstill in talks.

Last month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter that the business would not set up manufacturing in any place where it could not sell and service cars first.

The automaker has also moved its attention to other Southeast Asian regions, including nickel-rich Indonesia, where it is considering a potential battery investment, and Thailand, where it recently registered a local unit to sell cars.