ET GBS 2019: Electric-mobility needed to charge up India’s cities
Any technological innovation in the transportation sector has to be both high-volume and low-cost, said Nandan Nilekani.
NEW DELHI: Innovations in electric mobility across categories such as cars, flying vehicles and hyperloop are needed to address growing transportation needs of India’s rapidly expanding cities, said speakers at the Global Business Summit in New Delhi.
Any technological innovation in the transportation sector in a populous country such as India, however, has to be both high-volume and low-cost, said Infosys cofounder Nandan Nilekani. “Silos won’t work. We need a way to create interoperable seamless rider services across multiple modes,” he said.
He was participating in a discussion on ‘Driving Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Radical Transformation’, along with Tesla cofounder Martin Eberhard, Kitty Hawk Corporation CEO Sebastian Thrun and Virgin Hyperloop One global CEO Jay Walder.
While Eberhard pitched for electric vehicles as a means to address vehicular pollution, Thrun said that his company was making efforts to address the problems of congestion in urban centres with flying vehicles, and Walder spoke about his company’s agreement with the Maharashtra government to build a hyperloop that would reduce the travel time between Mumbai and Pune to around 30 minutes from more than three hours now.
‘PROUD OF TESLA’S SUCCESS’
Eberhard, who originally founded Tesla in the early 2000s, said that though sceptics often raised questions on the environmental impact of manufacture, disposal and charging of batteries used for powering electric cars, he had found the mode to be most effective. “I did not start as an electric car enthusiast but as a non-fossil fuel enthusiast. But electric cars worked a lot better than the other ones in terms of the energy consumed to move a vehicle per mile.”
Candidly admitting that he had fallen out with his former partner Elon Musk — “I’m not a huge fan (of Musk)” — he said he was nonetheless proud of Tesla’s success. “I pitched the idea and he saw the vision and understood it. But I watch Tesla succeed, and it makes me very happy because it is my baby. No matter who my baby married, I am happy to see her succeed.”
Thrun, whose company makes electric aircraft, struck a chord with the Delhi audience when he said, “I was stuck in traffic for four hours today. If I could give you a magic technology to take you across Delhi in five minutes, what would you say?” He said prototypes of his ‘vehicles’ — which can fly at 150 miles per hour — are being tested, although he admitted that his company was some years away from launching them “in scale”. The vehicle — an oversized drone, according to him — uses an electric propulsion system and is easy to operate.
Asked about the Mumbai-Pune hyperloop corridor, Walder said, “We should break ground by the end of this year.” He said, “This (hyperloop) is a mass transportation system which will change the way we connect cities… It is ideal for distances up to 750 km.”
The company has projected a business case of 150 million rides per year once the corridor is operational. “One of the reasons why infrastructure projects fit in is because the market is right there. You don’t have to look at induced demand,” said Walder.
Nilekani said India needs high-volume, low-cost options across categories such as ride-sharing, self-driving vehicles, electric cars and mass transit given the rapid population growth and expansion of cities.
Terming India the “ground zero of internet competition”, he said India was uniquely poised for disruption because American companies such as Amazon, Facebook and Uber were battling it out with Chinese rival Alibaba through Paytm and also home-grown companies including Flipkart and Ola.
Source: economictimes.indiatimes
