India Prime Minister Narendra Modi was talking a big game about electric vehicles a few years ago, even claiming that India would be the first country to reach 100% electric vehicles. That made no sense, since it was far behind other countries in EV adoption, but it at least indicated that India wanted to grow EV adoption quickly — or perhaps the country’s politicians just wanted some good press. Since those grand statements, India hasn’t done much to actually stimulate a lot of EV adoption.
Indian manufacturing juggernaut Tata Group is now making a big move into the space, reportedly investing 130 billion rupees into a lithium-ion battery cell factory in the country. At the moment, only 1% of Indian auto sales are EV sales, but Tata Motors is the leader in the sector. Perhaps it sees an opening now to really scale up production and sales.3 years
. So, again, India is not going to be ahead of the crowd on electric vehicles, let alone #1. But at least there’s serious movement! This battery factory would initially have an annual production output of 20 gigawatt-hours , and that could later grow to twice as much, 40 GWh.