This Week in Tesla: India Incentivizes Tesla’s Arrival, Wider FSD Release Aimed for Next Month

India Incentivizes Tesla’s Arrival -

Recently, Tesla has been building factories all over the world, from Shanghai to Berlin, and the fifth biggest car market, India, may be the next recipient of a Tesla factory and the government loves it. When Tesla opens a new factory somewhere, it creates thousands of jobs from executives to janitors, and many governments want to capitalize on this and thus incentivize Tesla to build a factory there. Most recently, Texas provided massive incentives for Tesla to build their newest US factory there. This week, transport minister of India, Nitin Gadkari told Reuters that, if Tesla were to build a factory in India, they would offer:

“The government will make sure the production cost for Tesla will be the lowest when compared with the world, even China, when they start manufacturing their cars in India. We will assure that.”

In comparison to many European countries as well as China and the US, India sells an abysmal 5,000 EVs a year, and is looking to increase EV adoption. Luckily, India has a blueprint as to what would happen if Tesla built a factory there as the recent Shanghai factory has increased EV awareness and adoption in China while providing jobs.

Wider FSD Release Aimed for Next Month -

In October, Tesla released the first version of FSD Beta, the beta version of what will soon be Tesla’s fully autonomous driver assist system, able to handle any driving situation. The beta is currently and has been a private beta, meaning one needs an invitation from Tesla to join the beta. As of the Q4 2020 earnings call in January, CEO Elon Musk stated that there were “about 1000” beta testers at that time. Over the past months the system has been constantly improving and according to a recent tweet by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the FSD Beta will be “offered much more widely” when the 9th version of the beta is complete, which Musk estimates to be next month. Ultimately, this is a fairly cryptic tweet as “Elon time” has become a running joke among Tesla enthusiasts who have noticed Musk’s propensity to underestimate how long it will take to bring something to fruition. Also, it is unclear what “much more widely” means, it could mean the entire fleet, or it could mean another lucky 1000 will receive the next version of the beta.