Electrifying India
Trelleborg
The client:
Trelleborg is a world leader in engineered polymer solutions that seal, damp and protect critical applications in demanding environments.
The task:
Motorcycles and rickshaws are relatively cheap, popular and have low power requirements, making them ideal candidates for electrification at scale.
For the February 2022 edition of T-Time magazine, Patrick Gower interviewed Moushumi Mohanty, head of the Electric Mobility Programme at India’s Centre for Science and Environment, to find out how the government plans to phase out the combustion engine.
Kent Nordic was appointed to work with Trelleborg by Stockholm-based content agency Appelberg.
The role:
Content writing
Read the full story here, or check out a snippet below.
The electric vehicle revolution has arrived in India, but not how you might think
“Electrification is here, but it’s on two and three wheels, not four,” says Moushumi Mohanty, head of the Electric Mobility Programme at the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a New Delhi-based think-tank. “The government is providing large subsidy support to these segments and together they will lead the country’s electric mobility goals in the short- to medium-term.”
Motorcycles and three-wheelers -- mostly constituting rickshaws -- are relatively cheap, popular and have low power requirements, making them ideal candidates for electrification at scale. More than half of the Indian government’s subsidy package designed to speed up the manufacturing and adoption of electric vehicles is aimed at three and two-wheelers.
The government isn’t short on ambition. It wants 30% of new vehicle sales to be electric by 2030, a target that would require the EV sector to expand at an annual rate of 46% right up to the target date.
At first glance, that looks plausible, at least for two- and three-wheelers. Between 2011 and 2019, the electric two-wheel market grew at an annual rate of 19%, while the electric three-wheeler market expanded at a rate of 73%, according to the CSE. However, these gains were from an almost standing start and get harder to reproduce as the market gets larger.
Despite all that rapid growth, the market for EVs remains tiny relative to that of its combustion engine cousins. Two-wheelers constituted more than 84% of EV registrations in 2021, for example, yet they hold just a 0.15% market share. That makes reaching the government’s 2030 target a tall order.
“The numbers aren’t quite so impressive yet, but we do expect them to take off over the next two to three years,” says Mohanty.
Rising take-up is partly about product availability – one of the many “chicken and egg” situations that have bugged the expansion of the electric vehicle sector globally. Producers often want guarantees that a deep pool of demand exists before they’ll ramp up production, while consumers need choice to be able to purchase in large enough numbers. The same has historically been the case for charging infrastructure, with stakeholders reluctant to invest for small numbers of EV owners, Mohanty says.
“It requires the producer and the consumer to spend on the new technology for it to gain traction, then the momentum kicks in,” she adds. “There have been some big commitments made to charging infrastructure and clearly the numbers have to be much larger, but India is working on it.”
