Auto recap, August 11: Tesla's Delhi debut, KTM 160 Duke launch & more…
Tesla debuts in Delhi with first experience centre and charging station at Aerocity
Tesla has inaugurated its second experience centre in India at Delhi's Aerocity, alongside the city's maiden Tesla Charging Station. The facility, located at Aerocity's Worldmark 3, comes less than a month after the brand's official entry into the country, signalling its intent to grow rapidly in one of the world's fastest-evolving EV markets.
Also check these Cars
Find more Cars
UPCOMING Tesla Model 3 82 kWh
82 kWh 555 km
555 km
₹ 40 Lakhs
Alert Me When Launched
BYD Seal 82.56 kWh
82.56 kWh 650 km
650 km
₹ 41 Lakhs
Compare
View Offers
Tesla Model Y 75 kwh
75 kwh 622 km
622 km
₹ 59.89 Lakhs
Compare
View Offers
UPCOMING Tesla Model S 100 kWh
100 kWh 570 km
570 km
₹70 Lakhs - 1 Cr
Alert Me When Launched
Mahindra XUV 400 EV 39.4 kWh
39.4 kWh 456 km
456 km
₹ 15.49 Lakhs
Compare
View Offers
Mahindra BE 6 79 kWh
79 kWh 682 km
682 km
₹ 18.90 Lakhs
Compare
View Offers
Also Read : Tesla debuts in Delhi with first experience centre and charging station at Aerocity
KTM 160 Duke debuts as brand's new entry-level naked bike in India, paves way for RC 160
KTM India has launched the new 160 Duke in India at ₹1.85 lakh (ex-showroom), which comes as the new entry-level motorcycle from the brand. The KTM 160 Duke is the most affordable motorcycle from the Austrian two-wheeler major in India. The naked bike sits right below the KTM 200 Duke in the company's India product lineup. It is expected to pose a tough challenge to the Yamaha MT 15 V2.
Also Read : KTM 160 Duke debuts as brand's new entry-level naked bike in India, paves way for RC 160
2025 Triumph Thruxton 400 First Ride Review: Return of the icon?
The Triumph Thruxton is one of the most iconic names in the cafe racer world. It was a bummer then, when Triumph announced that the Thruxton 1200 would be discontinued last year. Nevertheless, the British bike maker has decided to keep the name alive in the form of a new and more accessible cafe racer in the form of the new 'Thruxton 400.' The new Thruxton 400 is not only the spiritual successor to the iconic cafe racer but is also the sportiest iteration to come from Triumph's 400 cc range. Does it live up to the legacy? We rode the 400 cc cafe racer recently to find out.
Also Read : 2025 Triumph Thruxton 400 First Ride Review: Return of the icon?
Get insights into Upcoming Cars In India, Electric Vehicles, Upcoming Bikes in India and cutting-edge technology transforming the automotive landscape.
First Published Date:
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Economic Times
24 minutes ago
- Economic Times
SpaceX gets billions from the government, gives little to nothing back in taxes
ANI SpaceX's Axiom-4 mission SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket and satellite internet company, has received billions of dollars in federal contracts over its more than two-decade existence. But SpaceX has most likely paid little to no federal income taxes since its founding in 2002 and has privately told investors that it may never have to pay any, according to internal company documents reviewed by The New York Times. The rocket maker's finances have long been secret because the company is privately held. But the documents reviewed by the Times show that SpaceX can seize on a legal tax benefit that allows it to use the more than $5 billion in losses it racked up by late 2021 to offset paying future taxable income. President Donald Trump made a change in 2017, during his first term, that eliminated the tax benefit's expiration date for all companies. For SpaceX, that means that nearly $3 billion of its losses can be indefinitely applied against future taxable income. Tax experts consulted by the Times said that not having to pay $5 billion in federal income taxes was substantial and notable for a company that has relied on contracts with the U.S. government to an unusual degree. SpaceX works closely with the Pentagon, NASA and other agencies, giving it a vital role in national security. In 2020, federal contracts generated almost 84% of the rocket maker's revenue, according to the documents, a figure that had not been previously reported. Larger tech companies -- including some that have taken advantage of the tax benefit -- often pay billions in federal income taxes. Microsoft, for one, said it expected to pay $14.1 billion in federal income taxes in its last fiscal year. SpaceX can use the tax benefit even if its business thrives. By one measure of corporate profitability, the company had roughly $5 billion in earnings from its core operations last year, up from $2.6 billion in 2023, according to what the company has privately told some stakeholders. Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a group that investigates corruption and waste in the government, said the tax benefit had historically been aimed at encouraging companies to stay in business during difficult times. It was "quaint" that SpaceX was using it, she said, as it "was clearly not intended for a company doing so well." Musk has built SpaceX into one of the world's most influential companies, which dominates the space industry through its rockets and its Starlink satellite internet service. It has been a jewel in the crown of his business empire and an essential source of his wealth and power, along with his electric vehicle company, Tesla. It has also given Musk a perch on the world stage, allowing him to weigh in on geopolitics. Like many tech startups, SpaceX lost money as it plowed billions of dollars into building its business. Uber, Amazon, Tesla and other tech firms were also not profitable for years. As SpaceX has grown, the firm has been valued at more than $350 billion, crowning it one of the world's most valuable private companies, according to startup tracker PitchBook. Several news organizations have reported on aspects of SpaceX's finances, which the company discloses to its investors and other stakeholders. But the documents reviewed by the Times -- including income statements and balance sheets covering 23 years -- offered new insight into SpaceX's revenue sources, investors and taxes. SpaceX appears to have paid some income taxes over the years, though likely not to the federal government, according to the documents. In one document, the company said it expected to pay $483,000 in income tax to foreign governments and $78,000 in state income tax in 2021. Separately, it reported paying $6,000 for income taxes in 2020 and 2021, but did not disclose if the payments were for federal, state or local governments. SpaceX and Musk did not respond to requests for comment. Musk has often trumpeted SpaceX's role in carrying out missions for NASA and other agencies. In June, he proudly posted on social media that the company had reached a milestone, as its "commercial revenue from space will exceed the entire budget of @NASA next year." Musk, who left his role as a close adviser to Trump in late May, founded SpaceX with the goal of shuttling humans to Mars and colonizing the Red Planet. He owned 44% of the company as of 2022, according to the documents. Getting to Mars is an expensive endeavor, and SpaceX's losses piled up from the start. In its first year of operation in 2002, the company lost about $4 million, the documents show. The next year, it lost $14.5 million. Those losses ballooned in subsequent years, reaching $341 million in 2020. In 2021, it lost $968 million. All the while, Musk and Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, pushed the company to grow. It began developing and testing Starship, a reusable rocket that Musk hopes will one day reach Mars. By the end of 2021, SpaceX had accumulated almost $5.4 billion in tax losses, according to the most recent figure in the documents. Those losses generated the tax benefit, known as a net operating loss carryforward. It enables SpaceX to avoid federal income taxes on an equivalent amount of future taxable income. The benefit is available to all companies, including startups that lose money for years before turning a profit. In one document, SpaceX told investors that it was "more likely than not that some portion or all of the deferred tax assets will not be realized," meaning it might never pay taxes. The company cited, among other things, its past losses. Such language can be common for companies with a history of losses, and this outlook can be revised if their finances improve, said Robert Willens, an accounting analyst who runs his own firm. SpaceX also benefited from a sweeping package of tax cuts Trump signed in 2017. One change was eliminating a 20-year limit on the use of tax-loss carryforwards, meaning that losses generated after 2017 no longer expired. That change allows SpaceX to apply nearly $3 billion in carryforwards indefinitely. In addition, the company had $227 million in carryforwards that could offset state income taxes, the documents show. It had more than $1.1 billion in other federal and state tax credits. "Given the size of its net operating loss, the company almost surely didn't pay any federal tax for years," said Gregg Polsky, who teaches tax law at New York University School of Law. "And it's so large, it's unlikely it has paid taxes even if it has had positive taxable income in recent years." The tax benefits may have come in handy in recent years as SpaceX's finances have improved, at least by one measure. The company has privately said its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization nearly doubled to roughly $5 billion last year from 2023. That figure, known as EBITDA, is one way of measuring corporate profits but is not the same as the bottom line and does not mean that SpaceX is paying taxes. Starting in the mid-2000s, SpaceX began landing hundreds of federal contracts, including one with NASA to deliver cargo to the International Space Station and another with a U.S. intelligence agency for $1.8 billion to provide spy satellites. Some contracts are expected to generate substantial revenue for years, according to the documents. The documents, reviewed by the Times, provide the first insights into how heavily SpaceX depends on federal contracts. In 2020, they generated about $1.4 billion, or 83.8%, of the company's total revenue that year. The next year, federal contracts brought in about $1.7 billion, or 76%, of the total revenue, the documents show. Musk said in June that he expected SpaceX's revenue to reach $15.5 billion this year. That is up from about $7.4 billion in 2023, the documents show. (Revenue includes sales of the company's products.) A big part of that growth stems from Starlink, which has 6 million subscribers, according to the company. The documents showed that SpaceX told investors that Starlink had 2.5 million users in 2023 and generated roughly $8 billion in revenue last year, more than double the previous year's revenue and outpacing SpaceX's rocket division in both years. The documents do not include SpaceX's net profits or losses for the past two years. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company generated $55 million in profit on $1.5 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2023. Companies can simultaneously report profits to shareholders and tax losses to the IRS in any given year because of the differences in how certain items are treated. To fund SpaceX, Musk has relied on longtime investors such as Fidelity and Google and friends such as Antonio Gracias, who is also a SpaceX board member. The documents reviewed by the Times identified others who had not been publicly associated with the company. A company called AI RT SPX Holdings is listed as an investor on a 2020 document. It appears to be affiliated with Access Industries, an investment firm founded by Len Blavatnik, the billionaire investor who was born in Ukraine and raised in Moscow and made his fortune in the privatization era in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed. Now a British and American citizen, he has become a prolific philanthropist and investor in American and European companies. The document was signed by two Access executives, including Blavatnik's brother Alex Blavatnik. It is unclear whether Access Industries remains a SpaceX investor. Through a spokesperson, Blavatnik declined to comment. Chris Anderson, the entrepreneur who is the head of the organization behind TED Talks, appears to have invested in SpaceX through a company called Excalbians. He did not respond to requests for comment. Musk has delivered several TED Talks in the past.
Hindustan Times
2 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
The Man Tasked With Nailing Ford's Next Model T Moment
Doug Field sounded a lot like Elon Musk when unveiling Ford Motor's strategy to compete against the rise of Chinese electric cars. At an event this week in Louisville, Ky., Field detailed the thinking behind Ford's affordable electric vehicle program, which promises a midsize pickup priced at around $30,000 in 2027. His ambitious plan boils down to implementing hardcore engineering to take down costs, while keeping performance; and upending 100 years of manufacturing practices to go faster, including through more automation. All of which rang familiar to anyone following Tesla's announcement in 2023 to slash the cost of building its next-generation cars by 50%. 'Physics isn't proprietary,' Field, Ford's EV chief, told me after his event Monday when I noted the similarities. Musk sent a shock wave through the automotive industry in early 2023 when he touted Tesla's strategy to build on its cost lead and dramatically reduce things even further. That focus, though, seems largely abandoned as Musk now chases robot dreams. Instead Ford Chief Executive Jim Farley is warning about the threat of Chinese rivals making more affordable EVs. He called this week's announcement Ford's new 'Model T moment.' In an industry known for hype and hyperbole, there is, perhaps, no single engineer who has been attached to more fantastical personal transportation projects in the past 20 years than Field. The Segway scooter; the Tesla Model 3; the Apple car. And, now, the Model T of tomorrow. Field is basically being asked to save the company from irrelevance—at least in the minds of Wall Street investors who think China has already won. After Monday's event, however, investors didn't seem sold on Ford's latest hype-mobile. Shares finished the day down slightly—not the sort of reaction one would expect for such a game-changer. One factor in the apparent apathy may have been that Ford didn't display an actual vehicle. Rather it showed video of employees supposedly looking at it off camera. ('That's awesome,' one employee said.) Or maybe it was Ford's timeline—2027. When Field joined Ford in 2021, it was with the promise that he would infuse the stodgy old automaker with Silicon Valley juice. He was leaving behind the Apple car project, which was stalling out. He still wore the halo of having been a big part of bringing out the Model 3 for Tesla in 2017, Musk's original dream for offering a more affordable EV to the masses. That vehicle, along with its Model Y sister, helped revolutionize the automobile industry, proving electric cars could be both desirable and profitable. It also set off a race among rivals to catch up. 'Like probably a lot of people, I came in with slightly unrealistic expectations of how quickly [things could be changed], but that's an industry thing, not just a Ford thing,' Field said. What he's doing at Ford is harder than Tesla, he said. Doing something new at an established company requires overcoming inertia, and a culture that has developed over generations. He has hired a team, including a former key Tesla engineer named Alan Clarke, that's eager to change. 'The knothole that you have to go through is to transition from that model of operation to the big industrial machine of Ford,' Field said. 'We really do have to work with the teams so that there's mutual respect—there's respect for being naive and trying new things, and there's also respect for the practicality of running a plant.' Still, he remains optimistic, even as Ford burns through cash on its EV efforts. It lost $5 billion on the EV business last year alone and has dramatically scaled back its ambitions—recently delaying an announced full-size EV pickup until 2028 and reducing plans for a new electrical architecture important for software features. The market isn't what Ford thought it would be just a few years ago. The batteries required for a large vehicle would make them too expensive. And the Chinese have figured out how to make appealing, lower priced EVs. Now, Field's $30,000 truck—which is said to have the acceleration of a Mustang and more interior room than a Toyota RAV4—is the new play. Key to his effort is a vehicle that has a smaller battery—the most expensive part of an EV—while finding ways to make the body lighter and have less drag so performance isn't diminished. Their vehicle reduces the number of parts by 20%, according to Ford. To achieve that, Field's team looked at the overall goal of the project rather than each member's own individual assignments. More expensive brakes, for example, might help lower costs in other parts of the vehicle. 'In our old systems, a chassis engineer might be actually penalized for spending an extra $5 on brakes and in cases like this project that $5 could have saved us $20 in batteries,' Field said. These were classic hallmarks of Field's work at Tesla when he was pushing development of the Model 3 to be much cheaper than its predecessor, the Model S, which regularly sold for around $100,000. Or, as Field told reporters before this week's event, his team brought to Ford product development 'first principles thinking'—a favorite Musk-ism for analyzing problems to their most basic levels. Manufacturing speed and automation have long been a focus for Musk. In 2023, Tesla began talking about its new manufacturing system that it dubbed 'unboxed,' a process to improve efficiencies that moved away from a single line to build the vehicle in sections. A key part of Field's plan, too, involves changing how the car is manufactured, updating practices as old as Ford itself. The project calls for giving up a single manufacturing line for three parallel lines that, the company said, will allow for greater speed. Ford's plans also call for massive castings of the front and back of the vehicle's frames—again similar to advances that Tesla has implemented to its vehicles. It was an idea that Musk drew inspiration from die-cast toy cars, thinking it could reduce the number of parts required. At the event, as Field talked about the changes coming, he even borrowed an old engineering axiom from his former boss. Musk, as he posted on X just this week, often preaches simplicity. And Field used Musk's exact words: 'The best part is no part.' Field obviously knows the playbook; now he just needs to score another big win. Write to Tim Higgins at
India.com
4 hours ago
- India.com
After Elon Musk's Tesla, another US company enters Indian market, to make..., these things to get cheaper because...
After Elon Musk's Tesla, another US company enters Indian market, to make…, these things to get cheaper because… Electronics contract manufacturer Optiemus Infracom Wednesday, announced the launch of locally made tempered glass screen protectors for mobile phones, manufactured in collaboration with US-based Corning. The screen protectors will be sold under the brand name RhinoTech. Global companies are understanding the potential and opportunities in the vast Indian market and that is why they are entering it. Recently, Elon Musk's EV car company Tesla made its debut in India, giving a tough challenge to automobile giants. Following this, another American company is about to enter the Indian market. Bharat Innovative Glass Technologies is a joint venture of America's glass technology company Corning and Optimus Infracom. The company is expected to start its operations in December this year. Under this venture, the company will manufacture high-quality cover glass for electronic items such as mobile phones. Now the question in people's minds is whether this will reduce the price of smartphones in India. First Of Its Kind Plant This will be first of its kind of plant in India and will manufacture glass covers in large quantities. Notably, the demand for glass cover is increasing in India and the company will play a crucial part in meeting the demand. Cover glass is a safety layer which is applied on the screen of the photo protect it from scratches and damage. These glass covers or popularly known as Corning Gorilla Glasses. The covers have been used in over eight billion devices of more than 45 big brands like Samsung, Xiaomi, Motorola, Oppo, Google Pixel and Huawei. The RhinoTech Optiemus Infracom has recently launched a new range of tempered glasses – RhinoTech . It is 'Made in India'. Optiemus' chairman says that global technology and innovation have been combined in it. Will Smartphones Become Cheaper? After the announcement of this new initiative, many are wondering this will lead to lower smartphone prices in India. However, no details have been revealed on this matter so far. It is expected that producing glass protection locally could lead to a decrease in overall phone costs, potentially resulting in lower prices for consumers.
