Reva founder to make electric vehicles affordable
Chetan Maini’s new venture plans to offer batteries as a service
Chetan Maini, the man who gave India its first electric car, the Reva, is now looking to give the country its first real chance of replacing gas guzzling vehicles with zero emission electric ones by making them more affordable.
Maini’s new venture is planning to make modular batteries for electric vehicles that can be swapped out in 20 seconds at stations similar to today’s petrol pumps. The company's battery as a service model could help reduce the initial cost of buying electric vehicles by as much as 50 per cent.
“While the cost of an electric car is more than a conventional car, if you remove the batteries and all the electronics around the batteries, you can bring the cost under control. So electric vehicles could cost the same as gasoline powered ones,” said Chetan Maini, vicechairman at Sun Mobility.
Sun Mobility's core innovation is a smart modular battery that can be fitted in two-wheelers, cars, trucks and busses quickly, serving as a more efficient option than charging these batteries over several hours. Maini says the company will solve the biggest challenges of electric vehicles today: high battery costs, high charge time and limited range.
A 50:50 joint venture between Maini’s Virya Mobility 5.0 and SUN New Energy Systems, the company plans to run pilots of the system in Bengaluru by January 2019. Sun Mobility will partner automobile makers to build vehicles that can accept its battery pack and providers of renewable energy to operate its stations in a truly green way.
Sun’s model will revolve around owning the batteries and essentially charging users for the energy stored in them, similar to how vehicle owners pay for fuel today. The upside for consumers is that electricity used to power cars will cost significantly less than what they pay for fuel today.
“It allows you to have a very quick interchange, faster than what it would take to fill gasoline. It is going to be lowcost, less than what it takes you to fill your tank, and it is going to be more convenient, being fully digitally enabled,” added Maini.
Sun Mobility, with the backing of SUN New Energy Systems, says it is well capitalised to take the concept to pilot stage after which it will require a few hundred million dollars to deploy the solution. Uday Khemka, vice-chairman of the SUN Group, said the company was in talks with investors, but declined to share details of the investments.
Maini is setting himself a two-year deadline for rolling out the service in a big way. The batteries themselves will utilise intellectual property that Maini owns, making them versatile enough to be used in different vehicle models and on different platforms.
Having worked in the field of electric mobility in India for the past two decades, Maini believes it is the right time to introduce such a service in the country. Not only is have the technology and battery costs hit critical mass, but even the government is proactively looking at ways to promote electric mobility.
With 80 per cent of the country’s fuel today being imported, mass adoption of electric mobility will allow India to significantly reduce foreign exchange outflows. The government has set a goal of 100 per cent electric vehicle sales by 2030, making the business case for Sun Mobility stronger.