BJP Fields Amit Shah To Answer On Prajwal

Good evening!

Today's edition is authored by Amar Govindarajan and Anmol Jain.

Topics:

- Amit Shah responds to Prajwal Revanna case and fake videos on him

- Tesla vs Chinese EV makers

BJP fields Amit Shah in response to Prajwal Revanna case

To the Congress accusing BJP and Narendra Modi over the Prajwal Revanna scandal, Amit Shah has a simple question, "whose government is there?"

Shah, in a press conference, was responding to Priyanka Gandhi's attack on PM Modi and Home Minister over Prajwal Revanna's escape to Germany.

• "The Congress which wants to accuse us, I want to ask a small thing. Whose government is it there? It’s a Congress government."

• Highlighting that "law and order is a state issue", Shah asked Priyanka to question the Karnataka CM and Deputy CM instead.

• "The BJP's stand is clear that we stand with the 'matrushakti' of the country," said Shah, adding that, "we are in favour of an investigation."

Home Minister then went on to flag the fake videos of him and the Prime Minister speaking against reservation.

• He accused the Congress of trying to "cause misconception among people by spreading a lie."

• Shah made it clear that "BJP supports reservation for SC, ST and OBC and will also fulfil its role for its protection" and that PM Modi had said as much in several speeches.

• "If any party has hurt SC, ST, OBC reservation, it is the Congress," said Home Minister Amit Shah.

Elon Musk's troubles in China have just begun

The media narrative on Tesla getting Beijing's approvals for introducing Full Self-Driving misses a key point: Chinese EV makers will catch up.

Three Chinese EV makers already offer 'driving assistance features'. XPeng, Li Auto and Nio sell cars with sophisticated Level 2 self driving features.

• All three companies use advanced computing chips that offer 508-1016 trillion operations per second (TOP) computing power. (iPhone 15 PRO does 35 TOPS)

• These companies even develop their own semiconductor chips! Nio's 5nm Shenji NX9031 chip for autonomous driving has 5bn transistors and offers 32-core CPUs.

• Their products may not yet be mass market and as advanced as Tesla's but they're fast catching up.

There's more. Meet BYD. The Chinese auto giant with over 30% market-share in EV sales, is a R&D giant.

• It spends 10% of their revenue on R&D. It has MORE R&D staff than rest of auto industry outside China.

• The company has the fastest concept-to-market time-frame - sometimes as short as 18 months. (Tesla's best selling Model Y was launched 4 years ago!)

• And BYD's not far away from launching its own autonomous driving systems.

• Tesla's market-share in Chinese EV market is already in single digits (7.5%) - can it really grab more market share?

There's also some cross-industry pollination. Xiaomi, the Chinese phone maker is making EVs now.

• The company's SU7 sells at approx. USD 30,000. The company wants to sell 100k vehicles this year.

• That's not too far off from Tesla's 140k/year units sold.

• Tesla, meanwhile, is working hard to enter consumer robotics space given all the AI capabilities it has built: its Optimus robot will retail at USD 20-30,000 in a couple of years.