The largest two-wheeler manufacturer in India – Hero MotoCorp is already present in the electric scooter segment in India. However, the presence is very small. Hero is now planning to increase the footprint in the electric scooter market. The company has decided that they will launch at least two new products every year for the next couple of years including 2017.
Hero Electric has tied up with Bosch to offer better technology and speed up the work in assembly lines. There is an estimate that electric two-wheeler market in India will double this year. The government has launched the FAME 2 benefit scheme and GST that will enable electric two-wheelers to be priced very competitively against the petrol scooters.
Hero is working on better battery power and higher performance for the electric scooters. The newer electric scooters will be at par with the petrol scooter in the terms of performance. Hero currently uses lead acid battery in their electric scooters, going forward, the batteries will be upgraded to lithium-ion batteries.
Electric scooters will still cost around Rs. 80,000 to 90,000 post the subsidies given by the government but Hero says that there is negligible maintenance cost and the operation cost is very low.
Interestingly, there are plenty of start-ups in India who are planning to launch electric two-wheelers. The most noted ones are Tork and Ather. Tork is developing India’s first fully electric motorcycle and plans to launch the bike by the end of this year starting from the Pune city. The Ather scooter will be India’s first electric smart scooter and come with futuristic features like riding behaviour analysis and data storage in cloud computing system. India plans to be a fully electric automotive nation by 2030.