India's first new electric car in more than a decade will be launched on March 18, ushering in what may be the first earnest and well-financed competition to petroleum-powered cars in the world’s second-largest country.
The Mahindra E2O is a four-seater hatchback targeted at upper-middle-class families in need of a second car in congested cities like Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore, where it expected to first go on sale. It is expected to have a range of 100 kilometers (62 miles) and a top speed of about 80 kilometers (almost 50 miles) an hour.
Unlike the U.S., Europe, China or Japan, all of which have multiple automakers building electric cars and pushing for the infrastructure that supports them, India has just one: Mahindra Reva. The entity came about in 2010 when Mahindra bought Reva, a small electric-car company that over a decade sold less than 5,000 models of its tiny electric car, the REVAi. India has millions of cars on its roadways but only a few thousand electric cars, and almost no public electric car chargers.
I got the chance to to test drive the E2O in January at the Reva factory in Bangalore. At the time, Reva General Manager Kartik Gopal told me that simultaneously with the E2O’s rollout, the company would introduce components to support electric vehicles, including a fast charger intended for public parking spaces and businesses that can fully charge the battery in 70 minutes, as well as the Sun2Car, a 10-meter-wide car canopy covered with solar panels that could partially replenish the battery even if India is suffering from one of its frequent power outages.
At the time, Reva founder Chetan Maini also told me that the company wouldn’t launch the car until it got a promise from the Indian government that it would offer a rebate on each E2O to the tune of at least 150,000 rupees ($2,790). The government has long been planning a $4.13 billion scheme to subsidize electric vehicles in order to reduce the country’s emissions of both CO2 (which warms the atmosphere) and smog (which hangs in a cloud over most large Indian cities).
The government hasn’t made any comment on its electric-car bonanza since January, but given that the country’s flagship electric car is about to roll, an announcement may be forthcoming.
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