The Model 3 will be Tesla’s first vehicle in the Indian market. Only when preparing to launch the model on this very market, the company faced an unexpected difficulty.

As it turned out, the car’s clearance is simply not enough for local roads. The agency testing the car recorded that during the tests the Model 3 touched the bottom of the road bumps or objects in 160 cases out of 200. That is, most of the bumps, speed bumps and other similar objects Model 3 is not able to drive normally.

That being said, the Model 3’s suspension uses springs that cannot simply be adjusted to increase ground clearance. That is, they need to be changed. Moreover, the same agency recommended increasing the ground clearance by 25 mm, which is a lot.

As a result, the Model Y may become the first Tesla model on the Indian market. Its ground clearance is 170 mm, which should be just enough.

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Buyers of Mercedes-Benz cars are faced with the need to wait for ordered cars for more than a year due to production disruptions caused by a shortage of microcircuits. This was announced yesterday in an interview with the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by Ola Kallenius, CEO of Daimler, which includes Mercedes-Benz.

“The demand for Mercedes-Benz is huge, and at the same time, unfortunately, there are serious restrictions,” he said. “For some models, the waiting time is longer than we would like, in some cases more than a year.”

Källenius echoed a previous forecast that the chip supply problems plaguing automakers around the world will persist through 2023, as structural problems persist, as well as pandemic-related restrictions in key supplier countries.

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Thailand is a hub for vehicle manufacturing with a complete supply chain, home to major international car manufacturers such as Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Great Wall Motors and Mercedes-Benz.

More than 2 million vehicles were produced annually in Thailand in 2018 and 2019, according to Statista. In 2020, the pandemic dropped that number to 1.4 million, and COVID-19 remains the biggest contributor to the decline in car production and sales in Thailand in 2021.

As global automakers move towards electric vehicle production, Thailand is realizing the need to move in this direction. According to the Bangkok Post, the National Committee for Electric Vehicle Policy aims to produce only electric vehicles (buses, cars and motorcycles) in the country by 2035, with a total of about 18.4 million units. In the short term, the committee aims to produce 1 million electric vehicles by 2025 and 6 million by 2030. The production of electric cars and pickups alone in Thailand is planned to be increased to 400,000 units by 2025, to 2.94 million units by 2030, and to 8.63 million units by 2035.

According to Nikkei Asia, investments in the production and construction of infrastructure for electric vehicles reached $ 2.5 billion in 2017-2019. The Board of Investment of Thailand (BOI) is expected to increase the budget for the construction of more auxiliary equipment for electric vehicles in the coming years. Data from the Electric Vehicle Manufacturers Association of Thailand (EVAT) show that there are now about 2,200 chargers in the country at 664 stations, and the number of electric vehicles registered in Thailand reached 100,000 as of April 2021. The government hopes there will be a million electric vehicles on the country’s roads by 2025.

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