These thoughts are shared by Mr. Ananth from M.M.Technologies, Mysore. He owns an electric bicycle company and recently showcased his products in Bangalore International Auto Expo 2010. He is EVHUB's regular visitor.
This is in response to EVHUB's post “Is the country ready for Electric cars?”
Definitely our country is ready for Electric Vehicles, to my knowledge following are sections that are willing to for electric vehicles:
1. The one who is really concerned about the negative effects of pollution, but there may be very few who are really concerned about the pollution.
2. Then the major market comes from the lower middle class segment that is bent upon savings from the mobility. This market is two-wheelers predominantly and this is basically an urban market.
3. Then we have the rural market segment which is highly price sensitive and bent upon the durability of the product. Again this is also for two-wheelers and the durability of the product in this segment is very essential.
All of us have been watching that the number of electric two-wheelers manufacturers is more than the bicycles or three wheelers or the four wheelers. This is a clear cut indication that the demand and essentiality of the electric two wheelers falls in the third category.
Many manufacturers are ready to cater to the need of this segment but why no one is able to dominate this particular segment due to the following reasons.
1. All of us are dependent on the import of majority of the components, while importing components there are lot of hurdles, the majority of the efforts goes into the time consumed to bring the material from China to India.
2. Under the above circumstances it is only the trader who can survive the situation and not a manufacturer.
3. We don’t have many manufacturers who are equipped with in house manufacturing facilities. We are all dependent on import of components from China.
4. Batteries and motors are the two main components that our manufacturers are totally dependent on the China manufacturers.
5. If some manufacturer in India targets this market, they will have a very huge and encouraging market, but at the same time Chinese motors may drop their prices, even if we manufacture the motor here, again we are dependent on China magnets for the motors
6. Then the batteries are definitely imported from China, Taiwan or Korea. We don’t have any facility to manufacture the batteries. Depending on the Chinese Batteries results in higher landing cost of the product.
