Debate: India should allow only electric new cars from 2035

Advanced

8 min

An industry forum. You are defending the mandate; your opponent runs supply chains for a car maker.

An advanced-level session of about 8 minutes. 3 rebuttal rounds against an opponent. Each round runs up to 75 seconds.

2035 is the whole argument. Everything you believe about electric cars can be true and still not explain why new petrol sales should stop in that particular year rather than fall away on their own. Your opponent moves supply chains for a living, so the pushback arrives as dates, volumes and plant lead times, and it is specific in a way that generalities cannot meet. The work is keeping the deadline attached to a reason: what a fixed cut-off does that a target does not, while granting the parts of the objection that are simply true. A grid question conceded badly takes the motion with it. Conceded precisely, you are still standing, because you have said what the date is for.

Angles worth taking

Say early what a mandate does that a target cannot: let suppliers commit capital against a date that will not move.
Treat grid capacity as a real constraint and argue about sequencing and investment, rather than disputing the number itself.
Volunteer one concession you have thought through, because a point you give away costs less than one taken off you.
Use the years between now and the deadline as material; what gets built in them is your strongest ground.
When three objections arrive together, answer the hardest one first and say aloud which ones you will come back to.
Notice if you slip into arguing that something must be done, since this motion is about a date, not urgency.

Who is in the room

You play

A student defending the motion

You speak with

A supply-chain executive who supports electrification and thinks a fixed 2035 mandate would strand capital and hurt buyers

Ready to speak?

Free to start. You need a TalkDrill account to speak — reading this page does not.

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The format

The motion you defend

India should permit only electric new-car sales from 2035.

Rebuttal rounds

Time per round

75 seconds

Modes

Learn (guided) · Mock (exam-real)

How a roleplay session works

Read your brief

Your role, the situation, and what a good outcome looks like. The counterpart has their own brief, and you do not get to read it.

Open the conversation

You speak first in most scenarios. How you open sets what you can ask for later, which is most of the exercise.

Handle the turn

Somewhere in the middle it stops going your way — a refusal, a counter-offer, a rebuttal you did not prepare for. That moment is the scenario.

Read the report

Outcome, the phrases you used and the ones you missed, fluency and clarity, and the specific line worth rewriting.

What you're scored on

Across every roleplay, the report looks at the same four things — because they are what makes a real conversation work or fail.

Your objective

Defend a hard deadline against grid, cost and supply-chain objections without retreating to "we must do something".

Task outcome

Whether you got what the brief asked for: the refund, the extension, the concession, the point conceded.

Appropriacy

Whether the register fits. A complaint that is too soft gets nothing; the same complaint too hard gets a manager and no refund.

Recovery

What you do with the unexpected turn — repair, rephrase, push back, or stall. This is where most of the marks move.

Delivery

Fluency, pronunciation and pace, judged in conversation rather than in a prepared monologue.

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