Mahindra is currently, the only car maker in India to sell EVs to regular customers and has a full-blown racing team in Formula E. Naturally then, for all that learning, they must have amassed quite a bit of knowledge about the technology which goes into building modern electric vehicles. Their endeavours boosted by the Indian Government’s announcement to go all electric by 2030, Mahindra Electric has announced that they will be launching three new high-performance cars by 2019-20.
Speaking at a seminar in Delhi, Mahindra Electric Mobility CEO, Mahesh Babu said, “We will have three new products in the EV space which will be high-performance vehicles. The three new cars will have top speeds of 186 kmph, 150 kmph and 190 kmph and will go from 0-100 kms in 9, 11, and 8 seconds respectively. The range of these cars would be 350 km, 250 km, and 300 km.”
He mentioned that the company is also working towards making charging faster. “What would take 1-1.5 hours earlier would now take about 40 mins,” he said. With a belief that battery costs will tumble down further by 2020, Mr Babu believes that Electric Cars will become affordable in the coming years. Currently, e-vehicles in India are expensive owing to the fact that lithium-ion batteries are costly and have to be imported. Stressing on the need for a big policy push from the Government, Mr Babu said, “India is very sensitive to value for the cost. We have been trying for the last seven years to push e-mobility, but have only achieved that much.”
In the month of October, Mahindra’s Managing Director Mr Pawan Goenka had revealed that one of the three new models that will roll out of the Mahindra factory in next couple of years will be the electric version of the KUV100. The other two new vehicles in the electric space will be from the SUV and crossover segment. Mr Goenka had also mentioned that all future SUVs and crossovers from Mahindra will have an EV version.
Although manufacturers are pushing hard to introduce cleaner technology at an increased pace, our country still hasn’t even started to build the infrastructure required to accommodate the additional load on our grids. While building facilities on the ground like charging stations and battery manufacturing units won’t take much time, the challenge is to find enough current which is reliably available at all points. Unless that happens, something as primary as transportation simply cannot take the electric route.
Source: ET