India's EV race with China depends on trains

The road to faster adoption of electric vehicles in India will pass through the railways not the romantic train travel that stirred the imagination of writers for over a century and continues to inspire Bollywood, but efficient highspeed journeys.

- ANDY MUKHERJEE

If linking trains to EVs seems odd, that's only because the complementary nature of the two modes of transport has gone unexplored. That's changing. A recent study of 328 cities in China shows that there may indeed be a connection.

The research covers the period from 2010 to 2023. Those were crucial years, both for China's world-beating EV penetration-48 per cent currently, including hybrids and the expansion of its high-speed rail. What began with a single line in 2008 now covers 96 per cent of areas with 500,000 or more people. Meanwhile, Tesla Inc arrived in China in 2014, and by 2023 the country had 22 million plugin cars on its roads, more than half of the global total.

However, EV adoption rates weren't the same everywhere. Cities that got newly connected to the rail network saw an extra bump. "HSR connectivity significantly increases EV market share and sales (volume), with average increases of 1.22 percentage points and 91.39 per cent," the researchers from University of Pennsylvania, Fudan University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong conclude. An extensive and well-integrated high-speed-rail system, they note, serves as a "reliable complement to EVs."