Tesla's tryst with India: Apple may have a playbook for Musk to follow

The tech giant learnt the hard way that patience, negotiating flexibility and industry cooperation work better than public statements and tweets when attempting to enter India

Tesla’s tryst with India is clearly not going as smoothly as it may have expected. That is why last week, two years after Elon Musk first announced that his company would come to India, then registering a firm in Bengaluru to import cars and holding discussions on setting up company-owned retail showrooms, the maverick entrepreneur’s terse Twitter response to a query was: “Still working through a lot of challenges with the government.”

Musk has made no secret through Twitter that India’s import duties (60-100 per cent) on electric vehicles (EVs) are the highest in the world among large countries and the