10,000 electric cars highlight steep path to India’s ambitions

Bloomberg

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has kicked off India’s race to turn all new passenger car sales electric by 2030. The largest order has gone to a company that hasn’t commercially started producing the vehicles.
Tata Motors Ltd. hasn’t sold a single electric car yet, though Chief Executive Officer Guenter Butschek says its late-mover status is an advantage at a time when technology advances are leading to a fall in costs. Tata along with Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd.— India’s sole electric carmaker that plans to boost its vehicle manufacturing capacity to 5,000 units a month—underscore the distance to be covered when compared to China and the US.
Ramping up production of electric vehicles in a country where carmakers sell 2.5 million fossil fuel powered units annually is just one part of the problem, finding uninterrupted power supply is another. In addition, non-existent charging infrastructure further widens the gap between India and China, the current global leader. It had 336,000 new registrations in 2016, more than double of 160,000 in the US, while India had just 450 cars hitting the roads, according to the International Energy Agency.
“The government needs to set up charging infrastructure to make this electric business model sustainable,” said Ram Kidambi, partner at consultancy firm A.T. Kearney. “Indian automotive companies may be able to supply electric vehicles meeting the deadline. But the problem is what do the car owners do without the charging infrastructure?”