Tesla coming to India next year, confirms CEO Elon Musk

New Delhi: US-based electric car major Tesla is coming to India next year, the company's CEO Elon Musk confirmed via a tweet.

Responding to a question on the company's expansion outside North America, Europe, and China, Musk said that the company is looking for ‘partial presence’ in India, Africa, and South America next year followed by a complete foray in 2020.

Recently asked service team to expand locations to all population regions (not just major metros) in North America, Eastern Europe, China & Japan by end of next year. We are completely missing vast geographic regions in some cases. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2018

Hopefully, partial presence in India, Africa & South America end of next year, with broader expansion in 2020 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2018

This is not the first time that Musk has expressed his interest to enter Indian market. In a tweet last year had hinted about the company's plans to enter India in the summer. Prior to that, Tesla had stated that it planned to enter India with its Model 3 in 2017 while it began global rollout of the vehicle in late 2016.

The Indian government had last year said it plans to have 100 per cent electric vehicles in public transport and 40 per cent in personal mobility by 2030. However, earlier this year it changed its stance and decided against formulating an electric vehicle (EV) policy saying technology should not be trapped by rules and regulations.

In September 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had visited Tesla's facility in San Jose and showed keen interest in some of their path breaking inventions, particularly in the renewable energy sector which can have multiple applications in remote rural areas.

In 2014, Tesla had said it was keen to enter the Indian market and even identified the country as one of the possible locations to set up a manufacturing plant in Asia.

It, however, said high duty on imported vehicles and lack of a separate category for electric cars prevented it from selling vehicles here despite having a huge potential.

Tesla's portfolio includes products like Model S and Model X.

With PTI Inputs