Week 35 (Aug 23 - 29)
In this week's round up - Delhi to have 2000 ebuses by 2021, Gadkari encourages private e-buses for cities, TaMo holds a 62% share in Q1FY21 EVs sold, Okaya+ BluSmart and European EV Sales > China EVs
2000 electric buses in Delhi by end-2021: Govt. Delhi looks to become the EV capital of India after the announcement of Delhi’s Transport Minister that the Central Government will approve subsidies for another 700 e-buses. This will take the tally of proposed e-buses in Delhi to 2,000 by March 2021. 1,000 e-buses, which were first committed by the Delhi government over two years ago, are at different phases of delivery that got delayed due to pandemic and the lockdown. Apart from these, Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) will procure 300 e-buses after it got the approval for subsidies under the FAME II scheme.
Union Minister encourages the pilot project to run private electric buses. In a bid to reduce the shortfall of buses with STUs, Union Minister Shri Nitin Gadkari opined a public-private model where Capex, operations & maintenance is done by the private player while the transit authority pays the operator on a per KM basis. Despite India’s bus per capita being among the lowest in the world and a declining bus share, 70M commuters use the bus every day.
Tata Motors held a market share of 62% in EVs in Q1 FY21. Tata Nexon EV with its 200+km range and Ziptron technology seems to be the EV Indians bought the most in the first quarter. It was followed by MG ZS EV, Kona and the Tigor EV. eVerito has been discontinued since March 2020 and such sales were 0. There are many exciting new EV launches expected but the pandemic followed by Indo-China tensions seems to have thrown a spanner in the works.
Okaya & BluSmart partner for electric charging stations. It has been a busy year for Okaya - after providing PGCIL chargers in Meghalaya, partnering with Prakriti E-mobility for charging network, it has now partnered with BluSmart Mobility to build its charging network across the country. Okaya Power Group is one of the largest manufacturers and suppliers of electric vehicle charging stations, lithium-ion batteries and lead-acid batteries in India. It has already deployed more than 500 EV charging stations and 250 MWh Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) solution across the country.
European Electric Vehicle Sales Surpass China’s
Image Credit: Bloomberg
According to a report from Bloomberg, around 380,000 electric vehicles were sold over the 16 main European markets in the first six months of the year. A combination of new subsidy schemes for purchasing electric vehicles, as well as the rollout of a number of new models, was responsible for the increase in European sales in spite of the coronavirus pandemic. The moves also support the EU’s so-called “Green New Deal”, which aims to make the bloc climate neutral by 2050. Meanwhile, in China, which is widely considered the world’s largest market for such vehicles, sales dropped 44% to around 330,000 models.
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