India’s $70,000 Tesla

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 15, 9:45AM EDT

India’s $70,000 Tesla — © PamelaJoeMcFarlane / Getty Images

While the average price of a car sold in India is $13,000, Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA | TSLA Price Prediction) will sell its Model Y there for about $69,770, according to Reuters. India is the world’s fourth-largest car market. Its annual sales of 4.4 million light vehicles puts it behind China (25.1 million), the United States (15.4 million), and Japan (4.5 million). Clearly, Tesla is aiming at the highest-priced segment in the world’s second-largest nation by population.

One of Tesla’s major hurdles in India is tariffs of over 100%. If the Trump administration improves those tariff numbers, the price of the Model Y could drop considerably. It would still be expensive by local standards.

Tesla aims to compete with high-end brands. These will be, at least, Mercedes and BMW. Since they are entrenched, it is hard to say how difficult it will be to dislodge them. And, they have gasoline-powered engines.

Tesla also has to figure out the charging station challenge. Unlike the U.S., India will not have thousands of chargers.

Tesla may start to manufacture cars in India. That will help its relationship with the national government, much as it has in China. However, that will not be enough to offset the high price and the need for a national infrastructure of charging stations.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.