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Terming this the end of the ICE-age, Ola Electric‘s founder Bhavish Aggarwal said that consumer of today wants more electric automobility options while calling for the incumbent players to warm up to the future or risk getting extinct.
“If the ICE folks only make noise like their vehicles, they will just be stuck and become like dinosaurs. It is time for them to adapt and move forward with the times,” Aggarwal said in an interview with ET Now on Friday. ICE vehicles, or internal combustion engine, are those that run on fuel like petrol and diesel.
Aggarwal also called for more companies to work towards making India a bigger player in the electric vehicles (EV) space.
“It is not about either, or. I alone cannot do it. Everybody has to be along towards that ambition. And it is a nation-building ambition. India can become a real answer to the world instead of China in this journey if everybody puts their shoulder to it,” he said.
The Bengaluru-based firm this week raised INR 3,200 crore from Temasek-led investors and the State Bank of India as a part of the latest funding round. The funds raised would be utilised towards the expansion of Ola’s EV business and setting up India’s first lithium-ion cell manufacturing facility at Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu, the company said in a statement.
Ola Electric was selected by the central government under its ambitious cell PLI scheme, receiving a maximum capacity of 20 GWh. “We have been given a target of 20-gigawatt hour and incentives against that. We are starting with five, we will scale up to 20 very soon after that and at that point we will also start selling ourselves to any other automotive companies as well as deploy them in energy storage across the country,” Aggarwal said.
The company is looking to link more with Australia, following the free trade agreement with the Indian government which will help in the imports of energy elements including lithium, graphite and others.
“There is a lot of work ahead of us but if we do this well, if we partner with the right global partners across the world, we can build an alternate supply chain to China and have our own supply chain security for the future,” Aggarwal said.
Aggarwal said that scooter penetration of EVs is getting closer to 20%. In some cities like Bengaluru, it is actually touching 40, 50%. “In China for example, once you get to 10, 15, 20% in a particular category, then from there to much higher is a very fast journey because you can also think of the consumer’s mindset, the one who is buying a scooter, if today he can see that almost everyone around is buying EVs and if I buy ICE today, then four years later, my ICE’s resale value is zero,” he said.
Indians have been warming up increasingly to EVs, especially in the two-wheeler space. Electric two-wheeler (E2W) sales volume rose 20% on an annual basis and 2% on a monthly basis in September this year, BNP Paribas India EV report showed.
Yet despite leading the segment by volume, Ola Electric continued to lose market share on a monthly basis, dropping to 29%, as per the report.
