Tesla sees slow India sales after July launch

Tesla Inc.’s long-awaited entry into India has delivered underwhelming results so far, with tepid bookings fuelling fresh doubts about the company’s global growth outlook.

The Elon Musk-led electric

vehicle maker has received orders for just over 600 cars since launching sales in mid-July, a number that’s fallen short of the company’s own expectations, according to people familiar with the matter. That’s roughly the number of vehicles Tesla delivered every four hours globally during the first half of the year.

Tesla now plans to ship between 350 to 500 cars to India this year, of which the first batch is slated to land from Shanghai in early September, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential

matters.

Deliveries will initially be limited to the cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Pune and Gurugram, they said. The size of the shipment is based on the full payments it has received for the cars, as well as Tesla’s ability to deliver outside of the four cities it currently has a physical footprint in.

The company had originally aimed to utilise its full 2,500-car annual quota this year, Bloomberg News reported earlier.

While the company was banking on its brand power and its chief executive officer’s once-cosy

ties with Donald Trump to break into India’s nascent EV sector, Musk’s public fallout with the US President, deteriorating bilateral ties, high local import taxes and the harsh reality of a price-sensitive market have unravelled that equation.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comments.

Due to high import tariffs, Tesla’s entry-level model in India is priced north of 6 million rupees ($68,000), well above the 2.2 million rupee mark where most EV sales occur, according to data from auto intelligence firm JATO

Dynamics. That effectively places the base variant of Model Y out of reach of the vast majority of Indian consumers, in a market where EVs still account for just over 5% of total car sales.

The tepid reception in India underscores the headwinds Tesla faces while chasing new growth markets, as challenges mount in China and the US — its two largest markets. Sales fell 13% last quarter, and the company is under pressure to avoid a second consecutive year of decline.

Tesla had bet that India’s import

tariffs, which rise as high as 110%, would be lowered over time in trade negotiations with the US. But that looks increasingly unlikely after Trump slapped 50% tariffs on Indian exports, punishing the country for buying Russian oil.

Even the India-Europe free trade agreement involving preferred duties, which would have allowed Tesla to bring in cheaper shipments from its factory in Germany, has yet to be clinched.

To be sure, Tesla’s order tally is respectable by the niche size of India’s high-end EV market. Just

over 2,800 electric cars priced between 4.5 million rupees and 7 million rupees were sold in the first half of 2025, according to data from JATO.

While Tesla has drawn crowds to its glassy showrooms — foot traffic hasn’t translated into sales at the scale Tesla had envisioned, they said. The company generally avoids aggressive marketing globally, banking on a brand name that was once synonymous with EVs. But that’s put it even more on the back foot in a local market where automakers tend to flood consumers with advertising.

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