EV revolution in India still work in progress

Tech trends are usually first noticed and picked up—besides, of course, being pioneered—by the geeks. And, if Bengaluru is indeed the Silicon Valley of India, you would be tempted to believe that many Indian tech and internet businesses would have attracted their early adopters from the Garden City—from ecommerce (Bangalore in 1999 was home to India’s first ecommerce startup, Fabmart) and ride-sharing to edtech and software as a service. This claim isn’t backed by data, but it’s a trend that has typically played out in Palo Alto and Mountain View, the two main cities of the original Valley, when the latest computing devices have been launched—and, when electric vehicles (EVs) became the latest gizmo in town, courtesy of Tesla.

In the middle of 2012, as Ashlee Vance writes in Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future, “Tesla Motors stunned its complacent peers in the automotive industry. It began shipping the Model S sedan. The all-electric vehicle could go more than 300 miles on a single charge. It could reach 60 miles per hour in 4.2 seconds…”

There was more, for the technophile. The Model S had an internet connection (almost a decade ago). “While the owner slept, Tesla’s engineers tapped into the car via the internet connection and downloaded software updates. When the customer took the car out for a spin in the morning and found it working right, he was left feeling as if the magical elves had done the work.”

Unsurprisingly then, writes Vance, the first people to notice what Tesla had accomplished were the technophiles in Silicon Valley. “…the early adopters proved willing not only to spend $100,000 on a product that might not work but also to trust their well-being to a startup”.

The much-anticipated EV ‘revolution’ in India is still a work in progress, with the country lagging the big markets like the United States and China by a bit. And most of the EVs sold in India are two-wheelers and three-wheelers. Clearly, the revolution would be truly on us when more and more sedans and SUVs are running on electric motors and electric battery packs.