Electric vehicles in India: Miles to go, but the journey has begun – EQ Mag Pro
Powering India’s EVs will be the challenge as adoption rates rise. Power supply, charging stations, and the slow growth of battery manufacturing in India could all hold the sector back.
Of these challenges, the setting up of new charging stations is the easiest to fix. The union ministry of heavy industries has sanctioned 2,636 charging stations, expected to come up in 62 cities across India by 2024, in addition to the 1,800 currently operational.
Just to put this in perspective, though, that would take India’s total number of charging stations to just under 4,500. India will need about 100 times that many — at least 4 lakh charging stations — to match its stated target of 2 million EVs on the roads by 2026, according to estimates from a joint study by research firm Grant Thornton and industry body FICCI (the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry).
The charging stations are vital given how intermittent power supply is in large parts of India, and given the limited range of all EVs. They’re also vital because they offer fast-charging facilities that can charge an electric SUV in under an hour.
Currently, most EV buyers must work out the vital last link by themselves. Each EV comes bundled with a charger, but those living in flats, for instance, may face opposition from housing societies.
“It took the longest time to get an approval from my housing society to install a charger for my car in the parking bay,” says Vishal Gondal, 45, an entrepreneur and founder-CEO of fitness tech company GOQii, who replaced his Audi Q7 SUV with an Audi e-tron all-electric SUV in November.
Market forces can be expected to alleviate some of these issues over time. Indian EV-charger manufacturers such as Kazam are already working with real-estate developers to try and ensure that new buildings contain charging points for EVs. Seeing Gondal’s success with his new car, which costs him about ₹1 per km to run, he says his housing society is now on a mission to install some more EV chargers on the premises too.
But the scale of the challenge cannot be denied. “Our ratio of fast chargers to EV four-wheelers is 1:100, while in China it is already 1:11,” says Praneet Gupta, partner at management consultancy Bain & Company. According to research firm Statista, China already had 8 lakh public EV chargers as of end-2020.
“The amount of infrastructure needed to achieve scale adoption of EVs in India is unimaginably high,” says Anirudh Ravi Narayanan, co-founder and CEO of EV makers Boom Motors. “We don’t feel the problems much now, when we’re in <1% adoption, but we’ll start feeling them soon.”
SHARING THE LOAD
In some good news, the private sector is stepping up with some solutions. Tata Power is working with Tata Motors, MG Motors India and Jaguar Land Rover for wider compatibility, so that all their EVs can use common public charging points.
“The company has already installed fast-charging stations in Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Bengaluru and Hyderabad,” says Anand Kulkarni, vice-president and product line head for passenger electric vehicles at Tata Motors.
In not-so-good-news, India is still so heavily reliant on the import of Li-ion batteries for EVs that, in the last couple of years, the country spent ₹9,000 crore on imports of these.
Vikram Handa, managing director of Epilson Carbon, is working to turn coal tar into graphite so that India can make its own EV car batteries, and make them so cheap it can become exporter to the world.
“When you buy an electric car, 50% of the cost is just for the battery pack. Of that pack, 40% of the cost is for the cells, and 15% of that is the graphite anode,” Handa told Wknd earlier this year. “So making an electric car cheaper is largely a matter of lowering battery costs. We need to make our own batteries, not import them. And that’s what we’re hoping to do.”
IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT
‘The 8-year warranty helped us pick’
Sheetal B Naphade, a homemaker from Aurangabad, her husband, a professor, and their two children make a determined effort to live green.
They have solar panels, for instance, on the roof of their duplex home. And outside it now stands a Tata Nexon EV, bought for about ₹16 lakh in December 2020. The family had two diesel-powered cars before this, one of which was traded in for the EV.
“It has become the primary car of my family,” says Naphade, 36. The car can travel about 250 km on a single charge, which takes about eight hours if they use the charger installed in their garage. The family uses the power from their solar panels to charge the car, adding to its green quotient.
“I studied range and charging time, environmental and economic benefits, potential savings on fuel, Maharashtra government subsidies and the income tax benefits carefully before we made the purchase,” Naphade says. She adds that Tata Motors’ vast network of dealers across India played a role in her decision, as did the idea of supporting an Indian company.
It helped that Tata Motors offers an eight-year warranty on the battery and the car, Naphade says.
‘I’m paying less than a rupee per kilometre’
Vishal Gondal is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and founder and CEO of fitness tech company GOQii. He’s also now proud owner of an EV. He replaced his Audi Q7 SUV with a new Audi e-tron all-electric SUV for about ₹1 crore in November .
What Gondal didn’t expect, he says, is that he’d start saving thousands on fuel immediately. A full charge of his e-tron’s battery consumes 71 units of electricity. With the separate electricity metre that the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company provided for EVs, the rate is about ₹5 per unit. That less than ₹500 to fully charge a luxury SUV with a range of about 463 km. “I’m paying less than a rupee per kilometre,” says Gondal, 45.
On a recent trip outside the city, he used a fast charger at a Hindustan Petroleum bunk and paid ₹20 per unit of electricity used; it took 30 minutes to charge the battery to 80%. “You would only need that for a top-up purpose,” he says.
What did take time to sort out were the approvals from his housing society to install the car’s charger in the parking area, Gondal says. Things are changing even here, though, he adds. Having seen his success with his EV, other residents are considering the switch and the housing society is now looking to install a few more EV chargers on the premises.
‘It’s become the car we both prefer’
Entrepreneur Ammar Sulia was considering buying a Skoda Octavia vRS, the high-performance version of the sedan. “My father said, ‘Let’s try an EV’. I wasn’t sure about it,” says Sulia, 24. He didn’t know what to expect from the EV options. There weren’t that many, for one thing. For another, he didn’t know anyone who drove one. “I had never noticed any EVs on the road,” Sulia says.
He and his father tested a couple of options and settled on the MG ZS EV. A year on, Sulia says it’s become the car they both prefer.
By his calculations, he is paying less than a rupee per kilometre to run the EV. An outstation trip from Mumbai to Panchgani saw him drive about 633 km in a single day, with the cost of running the vehicle, including charging top-ups along the way, amounting to ₹800 (against about ₹4,500 if he’d been using a petrol vehicle). “When it comes to running costs, there is no comparison,” he says.
The thing that concerns Sulia is that there is little clarity on battery replacement costs, other than the five-year warranty from MG Motors India. “From what I understand, the battery cost is half the price of the car,” he says. “In that sense, being a first mover can be an advantage and a disadvantage.”
Source: hindustantimes
