Considering that three decades have passed since the last time an Indian Prime Minister made a similar visit to the US, it’s fair to call Modi’s journey to California historic. The Indian official met Tesla Motors CEO at the automaker’s headquarters in Fremont, California, where they discussed the country’s EV market and its demand for the company’s solar battery.
Like other countries of that size, India too has a big list of “the most”. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous with over 1.2 billion people, and most populous democracy in the world. If you’d ask this editor, I’d say the last aspect is what tackles the interest of the big tech companies in the US.
As a matter of fact, India’s PM was looking for that precise outcome, meeting the big players in the game for future collaborations. So, does that mean Narendra Modi wants his fellow motorists to switch to Musk’s premium EVs? He wants the e-juiced machines alright, but most of the drivers in the South Asian country still see the Tesla Model S as a luxury vehicle. They’ll probably wait for the cheaper, more affordable Tesla Model 3 for that move.
Modi was, however, quite interested in Tesla’s battery technology and how it could help farmers. After all, missing one step to align to Western economies has happened before in the country’s history. It would appear switching straight to solar energy could be a way around connecting everybody to the grid power first. According to Fortune, they did it with cell phones, skipping over the landlines.
Could this influence the automotive market in any way? Well, let us recall that the Indian economy is the world’s seventh-largest by nominal GDP ant third-largest by purchasing power parity. Ever since the early `90s, it became on of the fastest-growing major economies and is considered a newly industrialized country.
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