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September 3, 2020

Electric Vehicles can now be sold without Batteries in India

Filed under: Emerging Tech,My Thoughts,News/Articles — Suramya @ 11:51 PM

One of the biggest constraints for buying an Electric Vehicle (EV) is cost as even with all the subsidies etc the cost of an EV is fairly high and upto 40% of the EV cost is the cost of the batteries. In a move to reduce the cost of EV’s in India, Indian government is now allowing dealers to sell EV’s without batteries and the customer will then have the option to retrofit an electric battery as per their requirements.

When I first read the news I thought they were kidding and what use an Electric car was without a battery. Then I thought about it a bit more, and realized that you could think of it as a dealer not selling a car with a pre-filled fuel tank. We normally get a liter or two of petrol/diesel in the car when we buy it and then top it up with fuel later. Now think of doing something similar with the EV, you get a small battery pack with the car by default (enough to let you drive for a few Kilometers) and you have the option to replace it with the battery pack of your choice. This will allow a person to budget their expense by choosing to but a low power/capacity battery initially if they are not planning on driving outside the city and then later upgrading to a pack with more capacity.

However some of the EV manufacturers are concerned about the safety aspects of retrofitting of batteries and possibilities of warranty-related confusion. Plus they also have questions about the how the subsidies under the Centre’s EV adoption policy would be determined for vehicles without batteries. Basically they feel that they should have been consulted in more detail before this major change was announced so as to avoid confusion after the launch.

The policy was announced mid August and I think time only will tell how well the policy works in the market.

More Details on the change: Sale of EVs without batteries: Ather, Hero Electric, etc. laud policy but Mahindra has doubts

– Suramya

1 Comment »

  1. […] energy and the increased push for Electric Vehicles are part of the effort. Earlier this month I talked about how they are trying to make EV’s cheaper by allowing consumers to purchase without a battery. […]

    Pingback by Govt mulls mandating EV charging kiosks at all 69,000 petrol pumps in India « Suramya's Blog — September 7, 2020 @ 2:34 PM

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