An autorickshaw drives through Kolkata, India, on May 10, 2012.
BLOOMBERG NEWS
India’s push for electric vehicles is likely to get a new momentum with app-based ride-hailing company Uber announcing that it will launch electric autorickshaws in a few Indian cities in the coming months.
Uber has partnered with battery-maker SUN Mobility, a joint venture between solar power company SUN New Energy System and selectric car maker Virya Mobility 5.0, both companies said.
India is home to some of the most polluted cities in the world, and a switch to electric would not only help cut some of those emissions (and help the country meet the climate change targets it pledged to fulfill in Paris in 2015), but it would also help to trim some of its fuel import costs.
With that aim in mind, New Delhi has laid out $1.4 billion in subsidies over three years for electric buses, three-wheelers (locally known as autorickshaws), four-wheelers that are registered as commercial vehicles as well as private motorbikes and scooters. The majority of Indians still travel by those modes rather than personal cars. It also plans to order Uber and its homegrown competitor Ola to convert 40% of their fleet to electric by 2026.
Like elsewhere, EVs are expensive in India and out of reach for most drivers mainly because of the prohibitively expensive batteries needed to power them. SUN, which makes swappable lithium-ion batteries, says the only way to make EVs affordable for the masses is to separate the cost of the batteries from the price of the vehicles. It works with manufacturers of electric autorickshaws (such as the Piaggio Group), where a driver can buy the vehicle at a reduced price because SUN still owns the batteries inside of it. When those batteries run low, the driver can head to a SUN station and swap the depleted batteries for charged ones, paying only for the electricity consumed. That’s the strategy it’s deploying in its deal with Uber as well.
“This is a very important milestone for us,” said Chetan Maini, SUN’s cofounder. The relationship, he said, will help create an EV landscape “at scale.”
Uber currently has autos on its platform in 24 cities across the country. It doesn’t disclose the number of autos or drivers on its platform. Maini, a veteran in the EV industry that helped to build India’s first electric car, the Reva, in 1999, expects to roll out the e-autos in the next three months, but declined to say how many and in which cities. The Reva never really took off, and Maini sold it to India’s Mahindra Group in 2010, which has since discontinued the product. Mahindra now makes its own EVs, including an electric scooter called GenZe that it sells in the U.S.
To be sure, the jury on swappable batteries is still out. Before Maini, an Israeli company called the Better Place tried its hand at making cars with swappable batteries in the late 2000s. It had raised more than $800 million and partnered with French car maker Renault to make one model using swappable batteries, but that business also struggled until it eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2013. Having said that, there have also been some recent successes. In 2015, Gogoro launched scooters that ran on swappable batteries in Taiwan and has since expanded to Japan, France and Germany.
SUN has already tested its current model as I’ve written previously elsewhere. It’s currently in the process of supplying batteries for 500 autorickshaws to SmartE, a startup that runs electric autorickshaws from metro stations to neighborhoods within a few miles. SUN also makes swappable batteries for buses and has a contract with Ashok Leyland to provide batteries for 18 buses to be used in Ahmadabad in the western state of Gujarat.
