Tesla: Top Gear

Modern businesses might be highly profitable but remain just a breath away from terminal decline. There is competition biting at their heels, the flagging of entrepreneurial energies and the finite depth of markets. Once everyone has a mobile phone in their hands, there needs to be something more on offer to buy another. The coming of smartphones was not as much innovation as inevitability. Businesses can’t afford to remain static. They have to relentlessly grow to survive. Once one market has been saturated, others must be found. And so India is now going to see the coming of Tesla, a company that changed the automobile sector in the US by making electric vehicles not a statement of environmental virtuosity but style and utility.

We know because this week Tesla, which does not advertise its cars, did put up advertisements for jobs in India. There were also reports that it is looking for land for a factory. These are only the latest signals. It has been in talks with both the Centre and some state governments for years now for domestic manufacturing. With its founder Elon Musk presently the right hand of US President Donald Trump who is browbeating the world into tariff submission, imported Tesla cars might probably be on Indian roads much before the ones manufactured here. And it won’t be ridiculously marked up to make it an absurd proposition for Indian buyers who are wealthy enough.

This is not bad news for the auto sector because we anyway have numerous foreign companies from Honda to Hyundai. A disruptor entering the mix forces others out of complacency. The last few years saw traction in electric vehicles in India but it is still far behind other global markets. Tesla cars now more or less have the ability to self-drive and that is clearly the future, but where are Indian auto companies on that front? Chinese auto companies like BYD, on the other hand, are already matching Tesla in technology. Tesla’s arrival would shake up the sector but competition is good for both competitors and consumers.

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