Rumors of a Tesla plant coming to India are intensifying as a local chief minister appears to confirm Tesla’s plan to build electric vehicles in Karnataka.
Tesla has a long history of flirting with the idea of entering the Indian market.
In 2016, CEO Elon Musk said Tesla had plans to enter the Indian market, but those plans were postponed.
Tesla apparently did some investigations on how to establish a presence in the country, but there was some confusion about Tesla’s ability to import its vehicles into India at that time due to regulations that forced it to have production capacity in the country before it could import its vehicles. .
Prime Minister Narendra Modi even met Musk during that time and, later, India’s transport minister visited Tesla to offer land to establish a presence in India.
Nothing resulted from these efforts to bring Tesla to India until more recently.
In recent months, more rumors have emerged that Tesla was looking to establish manufacturing and / or research and development in India.
Local government officials revealed conversations with Tesla executives, and last month Tesla officially incorporated an Indian company in Bengaluru, the capital of the state of Karnataka in southern India.
Now, as part of a list of benefits promised to Karnataka in the Union Budget, the chief minister of state, BS Yediyurappa, seemed to confirm Tesla’s plan to bring some sort of manufacturing effort to India (via The News Minute):
American company Tesla will open an electric car manufacturing facility in Karnataka…
However, it is not entirely clear whether this “manufacturing unit” will actually be a factory.
Yediyurappa had already tweeted that Tesla would establish a research and development center in his state before deleting the tweet.
Previously, during conversations reported with the government, several locations for a Tesla plant to produce electric cars and batteries were proposed.
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