‘Currently we do not have infrastructure to support electric vehicles’
Published on : Monday 30-11--0001
Shivakant Pandey, Managing Director, Menza Motors Pvt Ltd. This is one from a series of interviews on Mobility 4.0 – The Early Trends, the cover story of February 2019 edition of Industrial Automation.
The future of mobility is said to be electric, autonomous and a fleet model without ownership. Is this feasible?
Yes this is feasible but we have to do lots of tasks to achieve it. The future of mobility is said to be electric as we have seen from last decade when prices of petrol and diesel (non-renewable resources) touched the zenith and some time in future these sources are going to turn dry. Another most important issue is pollution, which is mainly contributed by the traditional vehicles/internal combustion engines.
The future of mobility is also said to be autonomous as the technology is now maturing rapidly and these are predicted to be available for commercial use soon.
What are the impediments in this process?
The impediments in the process are as follows:
- This industry is new so we have to search thoroughly the pros and cons about the market trends.
- Customer awareness is top priority as of now they are not aware of all the implications.
- Cost of the peripherals is also a factor.
- Availability of charging stations and distance travelled on full charge are the major issues.
- Charging stations are developing with limited or no consideration for energy issues, or without exploiting a full range of digital technologies, overcomplicating the customer experience. Their locations will also inevitably change as we make a transition to shared and autonomous mobility.
Do we have the infrastructure to support this?
Currently we don’t have infrastructure to support this but as this industry is new, but going forward many companies are engaged in creating the infrastructure. We are also deeply involved in this process and hope that by 2020 we will have at least 30-35% of infrastructure. The government is also committed to make policies to support infrastructure creation and the goal is reachable.