Evs Are Nowhere On The Horizon Yet!

The policy thrust in favour of electric vehicles may have rattled the ICE automakers to some extent, but a major disruption in the industry and the mainstreaming of EVs are nowhere on the horizon yet

- Avishek Banerjee

Building a gasoline-powered car, a complicated affair at best has always been the prerogative of big brands with deep pockets that have been adept in assembly line operations. But all that is set to change as a young breed of emerging players and startups are coming up with zero-emission vehicles and governments are going head over heels to woo them with of sops and subsidies. The key distinction between conventional fossil fuel-guzzling vehicles and new-age electric vehicles (EV) is that an internal combustion engine (ICE) car has around 10,000 moving parts whereas an average EV has around 20. This means that the intricacy of technology and engineering required in making a car has fallen by 5,000 percent. This simple fact alone will be responsible for the tidal wave of transformative change that is about to hit the global automobile industry including India’s.

As the various stakeholders formulate their responses to the imminent change, a debate has already ensued as to the modalities of this transformation. Saurabh Kumar, MD, Energy Efficiency Services (EESL) believes that India should leapfrog directly from ICE vehicles to battery electric vehicles (BEV) just as we switched over to LED lights for energy conservation. He also makes a case for discarding intermediate technology like hybrid vehicles in the same manner that CFL was given the nudge in the lighting space. To kickstart the whole process, EESL has completed the procurement of 10,000 e-cars under the National e-Mobility Programme and the same is at various stages of deployment. It is also planning to set up around 1,000 public charging stations in the current financial year, across the country.