Recently I had the pleasure to join the Smart Energy Councils delegation to India. Apart from watching the first day of the fourth test in Ahmedabad ;) my mission was to understand the Indian EV ecosystem and what might be learnt for Australia and other countries.
India is now on-roading around 1 million EV’s per annum, compared to around 30,000 each year in Australia. That's a massive number, however, the key thing is that in India EV really does mean “Electric Vehicle”. The vast majority of EV’s hitting the road are scooters “2 wheelers (2W)” and to a lesser degree “3 wheelers (3W)” AKA auto rickshaw or tuk tuks. Each month a cluster of EV 2W manufacturers including OLA, TVS, HERO and ATHER are putting around 100,000 EV scooters on the road. These are truly affordable, with the India sticker price of around $2,500 each! This is mass manufacturer of affordable EV’s and the manufacturing capacity is scaling at an audacious rate.
Ola is the most ambitious enterprise operating in this space. Ola started as a rideshare platform similar to Uber. Over the last few years it has pivoted dramatically to manufacturing EV’s. We visited their “Future factory” in Pochampalli. This facility was constructed and was delivering completed vehicles after just 11 months. Using a high degree of automation and precision engineering their current facility is delivering a vehicle every 40 seconds. The factory has expansion plans to increase production out to an EV every 2 seconds! That's around 10 million EV’s per year from a single factory. However even at this rate it would take a single factory 140 years to produce an EV for every Indian! That's why they are working on plans to build further factories for different 2 wheelers and 4 wheelers as well as a battery manufacturing Gigafactory , all this at a scale I’m not sure considered yet in Australia. It’s an amazing vision being delivered.