MUMBAI: To address the concern of a lack of public charging infrastructure for electric vehicles, Tata Motors announced a partnership with another group company Tata Power to set up public charging stations at key locations in five cities.
To be operated by Tata Power, the companies plan to set up 300 charging stations across Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad by the end of the fiscal year 2019-20. The stations will be commercially available to the users of electric vehicles of all makes but Tata Motors EV users will attract lower tariff, the companies said in a joint statement.
This comes days after N Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Motors announced that the company has plans of launching four electric cars for the retail customer. The company will relaunch the Tigor EV, which has so far been sold exclusively to government and private fleet operators.
Following that, the company will launch the electric variants of the Nexon SUV and its upcoming hatchback Altroz. The name of the fourth electric car has not yet been announced.
“We remain committed to the sustainable mobility mission and will continue to work towards bringing aspirational e-mobility solutions for the customers, leading the drive towards faster adoption of electric vehicles in the country,” said Guenter Butschek, managing director and chief executive of Tata Motors.
While the first 50 stations will adhere to Bharat Standard, which supports slow charging up to 15kW capacity, the remaining chargers will adhere to the European CCS2 (Combined Charging System 2) standard which supports direct current fast charging of up to 50kW.
Tata Power’s current EV infrastructure presence in Mumbai is 42 charging points and its mobility infrastructure footprint is in multiple cities including Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Delhi with a total of 85 charging points set up across various usage scenarios.