Tesla opened the doors to its first showroom in India this week, and among the first visitors was Vishal Gondal — a longtime Tesla and Elon Musk loyalist who pre-booked a Model 3 in April 2016, just hours after reservations went live. But despite showing up on day one, Gondal says he has no plans to buy a Tesla now.
“I felt a little bit underwhelmed,” said Gondal, founder and CEO of fitness-tech startup GOQii, after visiting the maiden Tesla showroom in Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla Complex.
Over the better part of a decade, Gondal held out hope for Tesla’s debut in India. But his excitement soured when he had to chase the company for a refund in 2023 — sending multiple emails just to get his $1,000 reservation fee.
“Trying to get the money back was a problem,” he told TechCrunch. “And the joke was, had we invested that money in Tesla IPO stock, we would have made more money.”
Gondal is among the earliest backers of Tesla in India — someone who pre-booked a vehicle long before there were any guarantees. But nine years on, it seems many of those early believers are not celebrating the launch and have instead made up their mind not to go with Tesla, at least on its debut.
Those backers never got their Model 3s, for which they paid the reservation fee soon after Musk promised to launch the car in the country. And some, like Gondal, even waited and tried hard for years to get the refund, while some got it in May, just a couple of months before Tesla’s formal debut.
“It is frustrating to see Tesla take so long. I mean, our government and processes and red carpet are hard, but it’s hilarious that even Starlink has gotten approval in a shorter period,” said Varun Krishnan, who runs tech blog FoneArena from Chennai and is also one of Tesla’s early backers in India.
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Tesla did not invite these loyalists to visit its Mumbai showroom, nor did it give them an update on the launch.
The 6,000-square-foot Tesla showroom is located in Maker Maxity Mall, near Apple’s first store in the country. Nonetheless, Gondal said Tesla’s store was nowhere near similar to that of the Apple store launch.
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