Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India (HMSI) will introduce its first electric scooter by March 2024, the company’s President, Managing Director and CEO, Atsushi Ogata, said at a press conference in New Delhi today.
According to Ogata, “We are locally developing our electric two-wheelers in close coordination with Honda’s teams in Japan and we aim to be ready with the first scooter around the same time next year, definitely within FY23-24.”
The first of Honda’s all-electric products is likely to be introduced around March 2024 and is going to be based on the existing Activa with a transplanted e-powertrain replacing the IC engine. It will be a mid-speed scooter having a fixed-battery setup and offering a maximum speed of 50kph, Ogata revealed.
Following the Activa EV will be a second electric scooter from the company which is being developed as a ground-up electric scooter on a completely new platform. This ‘futuristic Activa’ concept will boast a swappable-battery setup and offer high performance in line with other electric scooters available in the market.
“For the last few years, it was not an urgent matter for the company to invest into an EV programme from a business point of view, but with market expectations growing, we are going to get into the EV segment next year,” Ogata said.
“While we have successfully restructured our business over the last couple of years, we now think it is the right time to have an additional business opportunity,” he added.
Explaining to the gathered media, Ogata said that HMSI could have served the Indian market earlier with any of Honda’s EV products from China, but it chose to cater to the specific requirements of the Indian customers by working on India-specific products.
Over the last six months, the company has been focusing on making arrangements to localise the e-motor in-house as well as the battery in India and the bulk of its investments in FY23-24 will go towards making its manufacturing infrastructure compatible to produce IC two-wheelers and EVs within a same plant in a hybrid format.
“The capex will be aligned towards the preparation of start of manufacturing of the electric scooters, to meet the timeline of the first mass-production model in March 2024. We will need additional investments in some of our manufacturing locations as hybrid manufacturing of ICE and EVs is very complicated,” Ogata said.
While the company didn’t disclose which of its four plants — Haryana, Rajashthan, Gujarat and Karnataka — having a combined capacity of seven million units will be tasked to manufacture the e-scooters, it will manufacture the electric motors in-house and retain control over one of the key components of an EV drivetrain.
The company will also brace the EV infrastructure by setting up battery-swap stations across all its 6,000 consumer touch points in the country before the second e-scooter is rolled out shortly after the first mid-speed product in March 2024.