Tesla Motors at the moment as the company revealed its latest product

The world of hashtags and social trends are flattering Tesla Motors at the moment as the company revealed its latest product — the Model 3. Tesla’s co-founder and CEO, Elon Musk, during the reveal event at the company’s design studio in Hawthorne, California, said that the car will have a driving range of about 215 miles — that’s just shy of 350 kilometres; and a 350 kilometre-range from an all-electric vehicle is marvelous, if nothing more. The Model 3 will be ready for delivery by the end of 2017, according to Musk, and it’s coming to India, too. Bookings for global deliveries have started and Tesla had 1.15 lakh pre-orders for the car already. So, an electric-only vehicle manufacturer readying operations in India sounds like another one going down the rabbit hole? It’s not quite as simple as you’d imagine.

In the last quarter of the previous year, Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, visited the headquarters of Tesla Motors but that wasn’t to express interest in Tesla Motors’ fancy wheeled examples, but to discuss and understand Powerwall — a compact battery system with an energy storage capacity of 6.4kWh that feeds off solar power and, if implemented on a large enough scale, has the potential to change the electricity consumption dynamic of the world. In fact, going beyond this, Elon Musk had indicated in one of his tweets that building a Gigafactory in India will be favourable — but this is a topic of discussion for another time.