Electric scooter rental company, Bounce, has recently announced that the company plans to invest around $100 Million or over Rs. 740 crore for manufacturing its electric scooter, and expanding battery swapping infrastructure. The announcement came from the company's co-founder and CEO Vivekananda Hallekere, who told PTI that Bounce will be making the said investment over the next 12 months. The company says that it will unveil its first e-scooter towards the end of the month, with deliveries expected to start by February 2022. The new Bounce electric scooters will be sold online as well as through a network of about 200 dealers.
Speaking with PTI, Hallekere said, "We want to make EV mainstream. When we're talking about transition to EVs, we want to make sure millions of vehicles can actually practically look at it and not worry about charging infrastructure, range or battery-related issues. We will have two variants and by November-end, we will start pre-booking and deliveries will start February-end." The Bounce CEO further added that the company is confident about getting over one lakh pre-bookings of its upcoming electric scooter.
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Bounce says that it will unveil its first e-scooter towards the end of the month, with deliveries expected to start by February 2022
Photo Credit: Bounce
Hallekere has revealed that the company will offer two options - one will be with battery and one without battery, and the pricing will be different for both. Vivekananda says that the company should be able to keep the price under Rs. 70,000 for the scooter with the battery and expects to price the one without the battery, for less than Rs. 50,000. So, while customers who go for the former can will be able to charge the batteries at their homes using the portable charger that would be made available to them. For the without batteries variant, users will be able to use 'batteries as a service.'
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The 'batteries as a service' programme will see Bounce set up swappable charging stations across the city, and a user would be able to go to these stations and swap their batteries and move on. Hallekere said the company is working on building battery swapping infrastructure for 1-2 million scooters in the next 24 months. Investment in battery swapping infrastructure over the next 12 months will be $50-75 million, and a large part of this is being debt-financed, he added.
Bounce will be investing $50-75 million towards battery swapping infrastructure over the next 12 months
As for electric scooter production, the company says that it already has a plant in Bhiwadi, Rajasthan and is now scouting for a second location. In the first phase, the plant in Rajasthan will have a production capacity of 1.2 lakh units per year, and over the next 12 months, Bounce will invest $25 million for production. The company says that the plant will create employment opportunities for over 1,000 people in the next 3-4 quarters. Right now, the unit has around 100 employees.
Hallekere also said that while the entire industry has been impacted by the global chip shortage, Bounce had planned it well and has the capacity for meeting the demand. The company is also looking at international sales of its e-scooter. Hallekere said Bounce has already signed an agreement for supplying about 30,000 scooters in Turkey over a period of one year and those will start shipping by March-end.
