Is it Good to Own an EV in India now

India has set a very lofty goal of achieving the complete electrification of its entire vehicle fleet by 2030 but the initial push just does not seem to be happening. Even the 2020 target of 6-7 million hybrid and electric vehicles looks like wishful thinking at the moment, given the paucity of economically viable EVs and the lack of a charging infrastructure. Currently, the Indian state hardly has any charging points for its EVs most of which have been built by private EV makers such as Mahindra. There are also some EV charging points in Delhi which have been built by companies for DLF to promote a carbonless society.

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In other cities, the lack of charging points is a huge hindrance to the adoption of EVs even if some people are willing to pay more money for going green.  The current range for most EV cars in India such as E20 and electric bikes is around 100 km which is not that great. Even this range would not be a problem if there were enough charging points for people to charge their cars and not face the problem of getting stranded in the middle. There is almost a complete absence of a public charging network in India with just 206 charging points.

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This compares with more than 30,000-50,000 charging points in countries such as China, USA and Japan. The mobility is highly limited if you own an EV in India right now, as you can travel to very limited places with this kind of charging network. The INR 20 crores which have been given by the government to build out a charging network is too low for having a comprehensive network of charging points across the country.

Apart from the problem of not finding charging points, Electric Vehicles in India also have the problem of the time that is wasted in charging up a car. It takes almost 8 hours for a Level 1 charging to power up a car and even Level 2 charger takes 3-4 hours. This is too much time and can only be done at night mostly. It is very hard to do this in the daytime.  There is a massive need to scale up the charging infrastructure in India in order to solve the chicken and egg problem with Electric Vehicles.