Ride-hailing company, Ola, is all set to rollout electric vehicles by next year. Ola will pilot a few thousand electric vehicles in several Indian cities this year and will be scaling that operation in a major way. Chief Executive, Bhavish Aggarwal said that the company will also invest in setting up charging stations in the pilot cities but did not provide any figures about the investment that will be made.
In India's $12 billion taxi market where Ola vies with ride-hailing giant Uber, the push into electric vehicles is also a way for the Indian start-up to lower the cost of car ownership, once battery costs start to come down. In the next few weeks the first wave of electric vehicles under Ola's pilot scheme, including two-wheelers, rickshaws and cars, will roll out in the southern state of Telangana and Nagpur city in central India.
The sale of electric cars has not really grown in India
The electric car market in India has not really picked up. Though there has been a push by the government by providing incentives under the Fame scheme, the sale of electric cars hasn't really grown. In FY16-17, only 22,000 electric cars were sold in India. Compare that to the 20 million units of the conventional fuelled cars and the picture becomes clearer.
It's the lack of infrastructure and the high battery costs and of course limited range that has been keeping electric cars away from the Indian buyers as also plug-in hybrids. But car makers like Volvo, BMW have not shied away from bringing their plug-in hybrid cars. We'll soon see even Volkswagen joining this bandwagon with the Passat GTE. Ola's push to introduce electric cars into its fleet is one that should be welcomed but clearly we'll have to see what the infrastructure will cost and though the company says that its biggest investor, Softbank, is backing this idea, we can't wait to see the results of the pilot project.
