Why has Ambani bought a Tesla Model S second hand? We explain!

Mukesh Ambani, the richest businessman in India has a garage that can envy most car enthusiasts in the country. Almost all the modern exotics like the Rolls Royce Cullinan, Lamborghini Urus, Bentley Bentayga are a part of the Ambani’s garage. However, that’s not all. The Ambani family also owns a Tesla Model S 100D.  The car owned by the Ambani family is a ‘second-hand’ Tesla! Yes, you read that right. We’ll explain how, and why.

The vehicle was spotted by Nirmeet Patil in Mumbai recently. The details of the vehicle that we pulled online show that the Tesla Model S100D is registered to the “RELIANCE INDUSTRIES LTD”. However, it also mentions that Reliance Industries Ltd is the second owner of the vehicle. How is that possible? Well, it’s simple. Since it is an imported vehicle, it first gets registered in the name of the importer.

For example, if you are privately importing a vehicle and doing all the legwork and documents by yourself, the vehicle will be imported in your name. It requires a lot of running around but will save you some money. Unsurprisingly, “super-rich” people do not have the time to do much of running around. This is why they go through a car importer, who will do all the legwork and documentation for you in exchange for a fee.

If you choose the second method to import a new vehicle from overseas, it will first get registered in the name of the company that imports it. So the vehicle first gets registered in the name of the company that imports it and then it gets transferred to the name of the owners who paid for the vehicle. This is the way most of the car imports work in India.

In fact, even cars like McLaren, which is not sold in India officially are imported in the same way and the real buyers are officially the second owners on the registration paper. While the number of owners matters a lot when it comes to the value of a vehicle in the used car market, it would not matter so much when it comes to exotic vehicles.

The Tesla Model S 100D is an extremely powerful set of wheels. The electric motors powering the vehicle generates a maximum of 423 PS of power and a massive 660 Nm. The power goes to all the wheels and it can do the 0-100 km/h dash in just 4.3 seconds. The Models S 100D can reach an electronically limited tops-speed of 250 km/h while it returns a maximum of 495 km on a single full charge.

It gets a 100 kWh battery and using a fast charger, it can be charged in just 42 mins for a range of 396 km. In the USA, the car costs $99,990, which translates into around Rs 73 lakhs. After importing the vehicle in India, and paying the import tax of more than 100%, it would cost somewhere around Rs 1.5 crores. This does not include the registration cost and insurance. Since it is an EV, it is quite possible that no money was spent on the registration due to the new government policy to promote the EV vehicles.