Shashank Srivastava, ED – Marketing and Sales, Maruti Suzuki told on Friday that Maruti Suzuki expects to launch their first all-electric vehicle by 2025. Further stated that they expect 8-10 percent of the overall market will be all-electric by 2030. Talking about the EV launch timeline he stated, “We announced a couple of months back that we will be bringing in our first electric vehicle some time before 2025 and that is all that I can tell you at this moment.”
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Talking about passenger vehicles, he said, “Most analysts are projecting about 8-10 percent in the passenger vehicle space; 8-10 percent of the market coming to electric by about 2028-2030 and at that time the expected volumes in the industry will be roughly 6 million. In India, we will probably be selling about 70 million cars- even if 10 percent are electric vehicles, we will have 63 million cars which will be non-electric.”
On EV charging, he mentioned that the infrastructure is still in its nascent stages, which is proving to be a hindrance in the EV push. Elaborating on it, Srivastava explained that there is a need to reduce the battery cost which forms 55 percent of the cost of an EV. He said, “This year, EVs in the passenger vehicle space, we will be selling about 13,000 units in the country which is roughly 0.3 or 0.28 percent of the overall industry. The barrier seems to be the battery cost because for EV’s overall cost, the battery is the big chunk, about 50-55 percent of the cost in the EV vehicle is the battery. So we do not have that battery cost in the range which can make the cost of acquisition of EVs less.”
Increasing costs
On surging raw material prices, he mentioned that the company has taken a hike of 9 percent, which did not suffice to cover the high cost of inputs. “We have taken a price hike of almost 9 percent in the last one year and that is not sufficient to cover the increased commodity prices that we have seen, but we have to look at both topline and bottom-line. So we are always monitoring the commodity prices and the profitability to make appropriate decisions,” said Srivastava.
Recently Maruti also announced its plans for India. Maruti Suzuki chairman RC Bhargava said, that India’s macroeconomic landscape is different from the US and Europe. The per capita income of Indians was just 5 percent of that of Europeans and 3 percent of that of Americans and electric vehicles are far more expensive than two-wheelers and small cars that Indians tend to buy. On why EVs won’t deliver the intended results sooner here, he said India uses coal-fired thermal stations to produce 75 percent of the energy used. “Therefore, the reduction in the greenhouse gases using electric cars becomes much less than what is generally thought and electric cars in these circumstances are not clean cars at all,” he said.
