Indian Electric Cars on the Rise
India emerges as an important hub of electric car development and it seems there’s no stopping it. British government announced a 10 million pounds ( more than $16 million) loan to help funding Tata’s courageous plans of building electric cars on British soil.
Business secretary Peter Mandelson expressed determination “to help the car industry to exploit fully the opportunities offered by green manufacturing”. It is hard to see how exactly electric car manufacturing is green. In fact, it is as carbon intensive a process as manufacturing petrol cars. Or maybe Tata has a new special approach to building cars?
Tata is no stranger to Britain. They opened TMETC (Tata Motors European Technical Centre) at Warwick University back in 2005. The company estimates it will need another £15 million on top of the low-interest loan provided by British government to roll out local operation.
It is expected that the car that is going to be built in Britain will be Indica Vista EV - labelled as the first four-seater electric car to have a range of 124 miles (200 km).
TMETC has the sights set on other European countries too. They obtained a 50.3pc share in Norway advanced technologies company Miljo and it is expected that Indica Vista EV might appear in the land of trolls before the end of this year.
Meanwhile another Indian manufacturer Reva has won public attention at Frankfurt Motor show. They are building a new plant in Bangalore - predicted output - 300,000 a year. Current demand - no more than 50,000 a year, however, Mr Maini - the co-founder of Reva - is convinced that electric cars will be very big in a couple of years.
In eight years since Reva opened their production lines they have sold 300,000 electric cars to 24 countries across the world.
In the UK Reva is marketed as G-Wiz (you must have seen one in London) and sold for whopping £15,795 (in Costa Rica the same car goes for just $12,000). The new plant will probably make the price go down.
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