Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Building commercial EV for Bharat | Inderveer Singh @ EVage Motors
172 Plays1 year ago
EVage Motors stands at the forefront of innovation in the electric vehicle sector, positioning itself to be a significant disruptor, much like how Tesla revolutionized the global market. Inderveer Singh discusses the visionary approach to crafting the next generation of four-wheeled EVs.
Read more about EVage at:
1.Chandigarh-based EVage is driving towards a greener future with its made-in-India four-wheeler
2.EVage's Singh On India’s Commercial EV Revolution
3.Inderveer Singh Panesar Steers EVage’s Global Growth Vision After Highlighting Specialized EVs
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to EVH and Industry Disruption
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I am Inderveer, founder and CEO of EVH. We manufacture a full wheel commercial vehicle, electric vehicles.
00:00:20
Speaker
Every couple of decades, there comes a moment when there is such a fundamental change in technology that the existing giants end up getting disrupted and a new set of giants are created. In the 1920s, television was a technology change that disrupted the radio companies. In the early 2000s, streaming was a technology change that disrupted traditional broadcasting companies to create giants like Netflix.
00:00:43
Speaker
Currently, we are going through a similar era where electric vehicles are disrupting traditional internal combustion engine vehicles and will create new giants. We have already seen that Tesla is the most valuable car company in the world despite the presence of large legacy automotive giants. In India, EVH is one of the disruptors that is building an innovative four-wheeler electric vehicle platform that would likely emerge as one of the automotive giants of the future.
00:01:09
Speaker
In this episode of the Founder Thesis Podcast, your host Akshay Dutt talks to Indraveer Singh about building the four-wheeler EV of the future and why EDH is poised to emerge as a winner in the market. Stay tuned and subscribe to the Founder Thesis Podcast on any audio streaming platform to learn from founders chasing large market opportunities through technology disruption.
00:01:39
Speaker
So I grew up in a business family, essentially. And there always was a desire to create. You sit within family members. What's the next thing they want to create? What they want to build? Those are standard conversations that you end up having as a kid or listening to or eavesdropping on, if I may say so.
Inderveer's Background and Entrepreneurial Journey
00:02:03
Speaker
And so that is what my childhood was like.
00:02:07
Speaker
You know, pretty happy childhood and always motivated by what I saw happen in the family business. And I'm talking about 80s right when you had.
00:02:20
Speaker
few industry, sort of, you know, large scale industry set up in place and also the license charge was taken on, I think, during my kid as a child. So it was, it was good. Also, a sense of responsibility to take the family name forward always was there because, you know,
00:02:39
Speaker
It was, you know, from a government jobs slash defense job to sort of, you know, starting your own successful startup and in those three independence actually. And so that was always a motivating theme factor slash and always wanted to what our ancestors did. And how come you didn't join the family business like
00:03:06
Speaker
I was part of it for quite some time, but around 2014, when I gained enough experience, been around the world, did business around. What part of it were you in? Were you in sales or in operations? I was managing one of the facilities, actually. So that included a lot of doing everything, little of everything, nothing of large.
00:03:36
Speaker
But, you know, so that was the core idea, but around 2013, I realized that we, this is the time before to have a startup.
00:03:48
Speaker
be the world needs sustainable transportation. And 2014 was the year, if you remember, when smog started engulfing cities. And it was disheartening to see these things happen. And I always
00:04:12
Speaker
As an entrepreneur, you need to have a larger societal impact. I mean valuation numbers are just one part of it, which you outlive for a decade after that. That doesn't turn out to be so important. What is ultimately important is
00:04:31
Speaker
What is the impact you created on the society? What is the change you were able to make? And again, it sort of goes back to what my grandfather or my sisters would do. They not only did build a factory or a profitable business, but they provided employment in a city which was unheard of until little lines came in, actually.
00:04:59
Speaker
I have seen with my own eyes how a small venture like that could impact the economy of a small city or a small town.
00:05:11
Speaker
So similarly, you know, that's what I always wanted to do to sort of bring an impact and help in nation building or the area we are in building that up. So that's how I ended up looking at EVH and that mobility was something close to my heart. You know, born in a technical family, doing technical machines, you know, and I still remember late 80s, early 90s, you know,
00:05:41
Speaker
Indian automobile industry was not so mature. Maruti was just putting it, or Suzuki as we call it now, was just pushing its feet into the Indian ecosystem or Indian automotive landscape. And we had the old horse, Hindustan Waters.
00:05:59
Speaker
such vehicles around, which needed a lot of repair, you like it or not. And reliability was something that started to seep into India post that. So, you know, you're always tinkering with the car, you see somebody doing that, because that was all the option, you know, radiators going over. The standard side in those days, I don't know, you've seen those things, but people would remember 80s, 90s, you know, you have to stop your car, you couldn't go 300 kilometres without stopping and sort of changing the radiator water or something.
00:06:29
Speaker
People tinkering over to make it work. Regulations were not strict. People trying to put a bigger engine, smaller engine, trying to get away with such millions. That's how I grew up. So essentially, I ended up
00:06:45
Speaker
requiring a lot of the skills to put a car together, as a kid, subconsciously seeing things happen. I made an electric vehicle, sort of a toy project. It was a scrap, 800, to those days we used to have the 800, right?
00:07:03
Speaker
And so it was a scrap of vehicle and I managed to, I think after 10th boards and I managed to run it for 30 kilometers range. But that was the excitement I had that, hey, you know, we can actually make a difference. And this I'm talking before Tesla was even Tesla hit the car.
00:07:22
Speaker
So that was always there. So around 2013-14 is when I decided this is what I love to do, honestly. And I would want to pursue this as a hobby, profession, startup, whatever we call it.
00:07:39
Speaker
Because it ticked a lot of the right boxes. I was passionate about creating automobiles. I was passionate about automobiles as a whole. I enjoyed working on them and the society created a major impact.
00:07:57
Speaker
That was, you know, electrification was one way forward in that case. And lastly, you know, it's time to create something. So it sort of converged all together and always, you know, join the dots looking back, which is what the actual thing is for me. So that was my call to arms and start this company.
00:08:18
Speaker
You must have gone through a journey of finding the right product to build. You might have multiple versions of different products you would have tried. Tell me about that journey. Did you start by trying your passenger vehicle first? Because as an auto enthusiast, you typically tend to gravitate towards passenger vehicles rather than commercial vehicles.
00:08:43
Speaker
So, okay. You see, vision builds over a period of time you can't say that you're born with a sufficient you have to be in the ecosystem to realize where the world is at it. You know, being from a family that was slightly B2B in nature, if you can ask me so, you know, my initial thought process was to create a powertrain or something which could be then used by
00:09:05
Speaker
people at large be the Maruti's of the world or Dada's of the world. Okay. But what's a powertrain for people who are not. Powertrain would be motor gearbox and the axles which will sort of drive the vehicle forward. So that's a powertrain because it provides power. The base of the car with the wheels. The propulsion system. Yeah. Okay. So that's a propulsion system. The base would be of course the chassis. So, so we,
00:09:36
Speaker
So our idea was to then build a powertrain and then try to sell it to a few OEMs and so forth.
00:09:47
Speaker
make money and it was a very simple idea and how we wanted to start it. But India was not ready, I guess. There was no push from the government side to go to electric. And people were still struggling to convert from BS2 to PS3 those days. And that was a struggle. Nobody even cared about an electric powertrain at that time.
00:10:16
Speaker
So then we said, okay, did you actually build the powertrain?
Challenges and Decisions in EVH's Early Years
00:10:19
Speaker
Did you hire customers for it? Okay. Of course. That was our disappointment. We thought of, we build the powertrain, selling it would be the easy part, you know, that was the assumption you start with, right.
00:10:35
Speaker
So that's the moment where you take a pause and relook at what you're doing. Are you wrong? One quick question. How did you build a power trade? I mean, because you're not from that industry. It's all first principles. Most of it is physics and you have got a founder who's running a pretty boring industry that aspect. It's just physics that you have to put together.
00:11:06
Speaker
The basic physics says that if you were to push a payload of 100 kgs, 500 kgs, this is the amount of power you need. And from where you generate the power, how you generate it efficiently is the iterative process. And you sort of learn as you build it. So I guess it was just simple physics in that sense to make a power train. We, as people, try to overcomplicate things.
00:11:33
Speaker
The reality is, it all boils down to the basics of overcoming friction and gravity to move forward. But you must have hired some automotive engineers or so on to actually... Actually, our startup is slightly an outlier. We don't have an automotive engineer in our company.
00:12:00
Speaker
So we have engineers, of course, mostly aerospace people working in the space industry, but very few in the automotive. And now, as we have grown, of course, we are expanding our version of engineering. But when we started off, it was all aerospace engineers working with us and trying to do it.
00:12:20
Speaker
Yeah, so it was getting the team together. Of course, nobody believed me at that point of time. Making the first hire was the most difficult one to be honest. You know, people thought it's crazy, right? I mean, when we started off today, it's a no brainer. Anybody making a startup or running a startup within the.
00:12:38
Speaker
automotive or electric mobility landscape, people would actually motivate you because it is actually an in-thing or the fad these days. But back in 2014, it was slightly crazy if I may say so.
00:12:58
Speaker
So nobody believed that, A, why would I enter into an industry which doesn't have a future we don't know? B, who would want to risk on an unknown startup in their career? But once you struggle, you strive, you tend to find people who are as busy as you are and as interested as you are to create something for the world. And that's how we started getting the team together.
00:13:28
Speaker
Yeah, but it was very few people. We had 3 or 4 engineers to put the powertrain together. And it took us almost 2 years to get it right. So you left your family business and got into this full-time? You can't do both. You can't ride on two boats at the same time.
00:13:50
Speaker
But that was a no-brainer for me, honestly, because this is what I wanted to do. I was passionate about it. This is a hobby, passion, profession, whatever you call it. But that was the whole journey, actually. And you were building it in Jamnagar only. No, no. I shifted here after college, I think. I was here.
00:14:16
Speaker
2012 onwards. We are based out of Chandigarh. Chandigarh is slightly easier for access of talent, I guess, and likely low cost than a metro city. So 2016, you must have been ready with your prototype and you must have started going to OEMs and you must have started hearing the noise from them.
00:14:40
Speaker
No, it was even difficult to get an appointment. But in 3 months I realised that if I get an appointment, there is sort of interest to them. Otherwise they would have given us that necessary time. So around 2016 we sort of reassessed the situation. But 2016 also was a monumental year for India.
00:15:01
Speaker
You know, and then anything that happens, you know, we say this specific thing made it happen, right? But there are a convergence of factors that need to it.
00:15:13
Speaker
Much like mobile telephony, early 2000s, the projection was that there will be 50,000 users in Delhi alone over 10 years. People were able to do it in two years, I guess. But that's because a lot of convergences take place at the same time. It's just not one factor.
00:15:33
Speaker
And 2016 was, I believe, one of the most portable years in the sense that GEO came in and we saw a lot of e-commerce, but it certainly was. You had almost a billion people having accessible internet. People who can't even afford computers were now being able to access the net, which changed the landscape of how consumers behave, how they work. And that's when I realized that
00:16:03
Speaker
The largest six networks will change with this because we are a mobility company. A lot of things may happen at the top layer.
00:16:10
Speaker
But our focus will be our industry. And that's when it was crystal clear to me. India needs a new age vehicle which can cater to the mobility or logistics landscape. You interestingly asked cars and not trucks and as an author enthusiast to try to make cars. And this was pivotal to us because if you look at pollution and that's what we are a problem that we are solving.
00:16:38
Speaker
Pollution is primarily a factor based on ground transportation, chimney emissions or coal plants emissions. Ground transportation would be 45 to 60% depending upon the economy how it performs. Every year that's their share in creating pollution.
00:17:01
Speaker
And out of that, out of that 45% to 60%, 45% is attributable to commercial vehicles, which incidentally form at least 5% to 7% of the installed population of total vehicles. And honestly, electrification, by then Tesla had become mainstream.
00:17:22
Speaker
was also highly segmented. It was for the rich people who can put $100,000 in a car or $80,000. And honest to God, if you go from your home to your office and back, this is what you would do most of your week. Going on an electric car will not save the environment. It may make you look like you will save the environment, but it will not have a major impact. A major impact is where this 40% can be looked at. And that's the problem we were out to solve.
00:17:51
Speaker
And the answer was obvious. You would do the same if there was the other object. So it was an obvious answer. And then the other convergence, of course, was the fact that geo happened, broadband happened to India, low cost broadband, e-commerce suddenly started to pick up because people had access to a mobile phone which could then work as a computer.
00:18:12
Speaker
And it became shockingly clear that the logistic networks also need to change. Because India as an economy was a hub and spoke. Essentially, in the olden days, we call it the subgenuity model. There will be aggregation happening coming to a subgenuity. It will go from one subgenuity to the other. And that's how the Indian logistics network developed. But with this, it would become not a hub and spoke model.
00:18:41
Speaker
it will become the fulfillment-based model wherein last mile will become the most critical function and India did not have a delivery van. If people look around globally, there are specifically delivery vans doing these last mile, mid-mile deliveries.
00:18:59
Speaker
We just have trucks to carry on till today. And that's when we decided that we're going to make an electric van ourselves, because anyways, there's no takers for our powertrain. And if we have built 30, 40% of the vehicles, why not do the rest? And so the journey to build a delivery van started, essentially.
00:19:22
Speaker
There must be a reason why India doesn't have or did not have a delivery van. Because you did have like Omni as an option. But probably people did not prefer to use the van. They preferred. There was no need. No, as I said, it was a subject Monday model. People used to aggregate stuff and bring it to the subject Monday from the rural areas.
00:19:42
Speaker
And if I look the reverse side of it, FMCG was the core driver in this case. And FMCGs generally would have one large truck delivering to 15 other villages. Now, suddenly consumption became higher, concentration, you know, area of consumption in a single radius of five kilometers became towards three times now population increase.
00:20:03
Speaker
So it would not be viable to send large trucks to two or three villages for the FMTG side of it. And similarly, I guess the choice of either last track or the three wheelers. Three wheeler honestly was not an option because three wheelers would not actually see the globe uses the counter thesis to what the world is doing today, of course. But in reality, if you look at it,
00:20:33
Speaker
The whole world, you know, which are the countries which are actually using a 3-wheeler? Only, I think, Asian countries. And 70% of them are still, or 80% of them are still passengers.
00:20:46
Speaker
For a passenger carrier, I understand there's a need for low cost transportation from point A to point B, where your bus would drop you off, then to go to home, auto three-wheeler, the manual driven rickshaw at some point of time. They were good alternatives, right? But how on earth can you just carry 200 kgs and then make a delivery? The cost of a driver would still remain the same, you know, then the safety issues, because the minute you start loading a three-wheeler, there is no balance, right? There's no fourth wheel to create balance in that.
00:21:18
Speaker
That is the reason why it did not happen. And people always say that the future is forward looking, not backward looking, but these are certain physics problems which are so easy to understand.
00:21:30
Speaker
So you will just maybe go for quicker deliveries, things you want to deliver in one hour, two hours, three hours, you know, like perishables or something, because they can do that job quick and easy and cheap. But I didn't see a huge potential. And again, how much would I save in terms of carbon emissions? Again, the arbitrage was so low that to us it never made a sense. We always believed that a four wheel delivery van would be something that India needs and the world needs.
00:22:01
Speaker
That is how our journey of sort of developing this started. Okay. Okay. So tell me how you developed from a power train to a working four wheel delivery van prototype.
00:22:14
Speaker
Hey, I need your time for seven years because it took us seven years. It's a long journey. There are so many things that go into this. Integrating the battery pack, getting the BMS right.
00:22:35
Speaker
What is VMS? It's a battery management system. So you have like, you know, a few hundreds and thousands of sales, depending upon the battery pack, of course. All of them have to charge and discharge at the same time. How do you manage it? And these are complex. So
Engineering and Manufacturing Innovations
00:22:50
Speaker
if you make a vehicle, essentially, you need to have all the kind of injuries that are taught in college.
00:22:57
Speaker
So that's the complexity. You need electrical, electronics, computer science, you need mechanical, you need what not to get it right.
00:23:08
Speaker
So, you know, it's a major monumental task to sort of put wheels to the powertrain and then sort of serialize with why the car companies are big car companies. Every city has a car company. Because the kind of R&D and the effort that goes to build this is immense. And also, if you look at most of the startups, which are either
00:23:35
Speaker
you know, D2C or maybe tech companies or SaaS companies, you know, it's about two or three people building one small unique code. It's unique for sure. They use their brains to do it. And then sort of scaling it up is more of a question of putting it on the server and how many users can you get to.
00:23:55
Speaker
But in our case, it needs a lot of thorough engineering to get it right. And beyond that, it dawns upon you that safety of your occupants, people around the vehicle, is also your responsibility as a result. I mean, you can't just say, we can't do it again. It's life of people that would be at stake for an automobile in case accident happens or something.
00:24:20
Speaker
And that's a pretty heavy responsibility to carry right and to sort of ensure that you do justice because people will put your trust, they will give you their money because
00:24:33
Speaker
They believe that you have done the right kind of engineering and that is something they can't do. And that's how trade actually started, right? Otherwise, farmers were growing something and they were watering. Life was amazing, right? We didn't have ROI to rush after 1000 years back. So that's a trusted place on you as a brand, as a manufacturer, as a customer, as a producer.
00:24:57
Speaker
To achieve that kind of performance on paper takes a lot of time. It is no joke. It is where the shaft and the wheat are separated. That's what you have to put a battery BMS together.
00:25:14
Speaker
Then we realized that EV, then you need to have a native EV platform or a chassis, which is native to EV. Retrofit is not a solution in this case. Retrofit was a better, we had six months thought about retrofitting instead of three wheelers. But we realized that that's not a solution that will last longer. What does retrofit imply here? I take a truck, change the engine and put a powertrain there.
00:25:42
Speaker
Which would have been the easy way out for us, you know, would have shown revenue, I think six years before anybody did sort of tamed a lot of kudos, but that is something which is not the right value proposition for the customers we realized.
00:25:57
Speaker
And as a startup, we always need to pause and think about it. What do you stand for? And are you consistent with that? Do you stand for making a quick buck? Then this would have been the right answer, is what we call it. We stand for providing a quality product, a viable product with high performance to our customers. And that would not be it. So we decided, OK, it may be difficult. It may be hard. We may question our existence. But if you have to do it, you have to do it right, or you don't do it.
00:26:27
Speaker
And paint me a picture of those days. Like, did you have like, we worked in a 1212 feet or we still have pictures in case we get big, we'll show, you know, EVH was this and now it is that. So.
00:26:44
Speaker
Yeah, so it was a small garage, 12 people team. I didn't have an office. I was the Jayavana. I was the accountant. I was the salesperson. I was a lot of things.
00:27:00
Speaker
Uh, but I guess that's the story of every startup. I mean, nothing unique to us in this case. Uh, but yeah, it was, uh, I have welded out the first few chances with my hands because it was better to do it yourself. Then outsource that can save money, which will last you longer. Maybe. And that would be the difference hindsight. Uh, you survive for three years or six years. You had like a small team with you. Yeah. We were six or seven people doing.
00:27:28
Speaker
Okay. Okay. And this was so far funded through, I guess your family must have been supporting you. No, no. So I quit the family business, whatever accruals I had, she had put together. And that lasted you.
00:27:46
Speaker
Our first round was 2020, just before COVID. Luckily, we raised before COVID. Seven years, seven years. But we were frugal. Of course, I didn't lead the lavish life. I was used to it. Once in a lifetime, you get an opportunity to build a car company. You see, all these things happen.
00:28:15
Speaker
In centuries, there are certain things which would change every decade. But building a car company happened in centuries, and there are major events that lead to it. For example, Ford started in 1902. Between 1902 to 1920, there were 3,000 start-ups in the US making cars. By 1932, they became three, which we call the big three.
00:28:39
Speaker
So that's when the car companies were formed. Then the next big change came when the oil crisis started to hit in the 70s and fuel efficient cars became global. That's when you see Toyota and Honda. Suzuki was even later, but Toyota and Honda became global in nature as brands.
00:29:03
Speaker
And then China is now taking over because of electrification. But there are these fundamental tectonic shifts which breed in new car companies slash brands to sort of take you forward. And electrification was one such thing where you could get to form a car company. Otherwise, I can do it in this life. Beyond that, I could not do it. So yeah, it was all worthwhile in hindsight.
00:29:32
Speaker
So how much time did it take you to make your first prototype? And I was reading one of your interviews about you choosing a modular approach. Can you understand what that means? Yeah, I'll come to what are the innovations we are doing for the sake of not being a publicist for my company. I'm trying to not bring in, but I'll give you the details. I want to hear. So our first prototype was ready.
00:29:57
Speaker
only part of 2019, late 2018 and 2019. That was our first prototype.
00:30:07
Speaker
So yeah, I remember working for the innovation. Tell me those also. But yeah, finish what you were saying. The first thing was to get the vehicle running innovations. We can't think of innovations until you have the confidence that you can run a vehicle. And interestingly, one of our potential customers were to visit our facility to see that it was a big customer.
00:30:30
Speaker
We had pulled three or four all-nighters, I remember, to get it ready so that we can at least demo the product. And this was literally handmade, like every piece of handmade. And only six people building a car. First time ever. First electric commercial vehicle. And that's the story of first electric commercial vehicle. They were to land at 8 AM or 7.30 AM. And the car actually started at 7.15 AM.
00:31:00
Speaker
So yeah, those were some interesting anecdotes if you like. So that was the first prototype and since then it has been done without any stock. So yeah, so we did that.
00:31:16
Speaker
So that was the first time ready twenty nineteen. And then is when you hit the refresh button again and understand now you can make a vehicle or a car you are confident of it. Now what would you want to add to the car you know.
00:31:33
Speaker
Between 2016 to 2019, once we decided to get into a delivery truck, we spent a lot of our time, effort and resources in collecting the voice of the customer. What the customer exactly wants? What are the pain points? What are the needs?
00:32:00
Speaker
In a truck, the spare wheel is right below the load body.
00:32:09
Speaker
So if, what for when your tyre punches while you are carrying the load, you have to empty the load body first, take the tyre out, change it. But these are the small pain points, you know, small, small things that matter, right? If you have to make deliveries, why you need purpose-built vehicles essentially? You know, a driver or a delivery partner, as you call it, would open and close the door, maybe 200 times in a day.
00:32:39
Speaker
you would press on the brake or a clutch, maybe three thousand times. And if a door sort of weighs 15 kgs, you are pulling three tons of load in a day, which is what human biomechanics are not made for or designed for, honestly. So, you know, these are small inputs that we sort of gathered over a period of time. And it's a list of some 150 improvements, of course, some we have done somewhere in the process of doing.
00:33:11
Speaker
So we had to make it work properly and bring these changes as asked for. Essentially, we have to get these improvements in and also understand what kind of a company can be.
00:33:31
Speaker
to make a car plant or an automobile manufacturing plant. It takes a lot of serious resources. You can't just make it out of thin air. And we realized that it's a big boys game. It's not that, you know, it's good to have a hobby. That's when your hobby is over, actually. But now, into serious business, we are very sure we needed to innovate a lot.
00:33:59
Speaker
And we can't just follow the same principles, how the vehicle was made 100 years back with us. That's not going to work simply for us until we can raise a billion dollars, honestly. That's what it takes to set up a car plant. So we took a pause and realized what we can do, improvements in terms of what the customer wants and how we can manage or merge our products with others. So what we were able to do was essentially
00:34:31
Speaker
First was an analysis of how vehicles are made. You have a press shop, you have a welding line, you have a paint shop and assembly line. So there are some four or five core operations pushed into different stations around the car plant. I don't know whether you visited a car plant ever.
00:34:50
Speaker
If you look at a car park, you're welcome, you can visit ours, you'll like others, but you'll visit a car park. So essentially, we realized that the biggest investments would go into a paint shop, welding line and a press shop.
00:35:10
Speaker
And one way is also so that your unit cost economics don't come into play. And the other way is to think out of the box. And thanks to the aerospace engineering skill sets that we were able to acquire over a period of time, we managed to eliminate these processes completely. There's no brush shop in our car or in our vehicle plan. There is no building line. There is no paint shop.
00:35:40
Speaker
And yeah, I'm coming to that. So that's why the modularity and exoskeleton structures come into play. And essentially, if you're making a sustainable vehicle, you cannot hope to deforest thousands of acres of land, and then we build a factory. You're not sustainable from the word go, essentially. There was also no work for us. So all these factors put in. So we eliminated this, and now we are building our vehicles in what we call modular micro manufacturing.
00:36:07
Speaker
M cubes which are small cubes of shields which are 150,000 square feet max where we build the whole vehicle ground. Manufacturing is done in house 70 to 80 percent of it. It's not that we are assembly shop to be honest and these things we have been able to pull off because of our exoskeleton structure.
00:36:29
Speaker
Generally, if you look at a chassis or vehicle, it's one long paper. We have a built-up chassis. It's all aluminum. There are a lot of patents, which I can't disclose, of course. But there are a lot of patents around it to get it to work in this form. We have a built-up chassis inspired by aerospace structures. We look at biomimicry as an option.
00:36:54
Speaker
To get all those things done, we had to work towards building this vehicle and that whole thing came together in the form of a modular micro manufacturing setup. Exoskeleton, which then is ultra modular, you can increase the length of the vehicle, the breadth of the vehicle.
00:37:13
Speaker
at the height of the vehicle without having to change a lot of things, which in a car plan would mean investing at least a few 10, 15, $20 million just to pull up the line to change the vehicle. We don't need to do that. We can build it on the same line, on the same platform. We can add strength of the chassis, reduce the strength of the chassis, increase the powertrain, change the suspension, modularly without changing the whole core. It's like a Lego piece.
00:37:41
Speaker
if you can imagine, you know, expandable or a contractable lego piece. That's what our vehicle is. So once we made it, this all came by design. This was thought through by design. And through design, if you are able to achieve these things, then we can manufacture them or create a product which can be industrialized with limited investment.
00:38:06
Speaker
So what we have ended up doing now is we can build these vehicles at one tenth the area required, one tenth the manpower and one tenth the investment required to do vis-a-vis a traditional car. And that's what we are doing right now at producing vehicles.
00:38:25
Speaker
So you are not welding together the exoskeleton, which is the traditional thing. The exoskeleton is mass produced in a way that it is easily interlockable. Yes, the joinery details are of course pitiable. But that's the pitons we have. We have almost 30 plus pitons awarded to us. Another 40, 50 are still being
00:38:51
Speaker
They have applied for awaiting confirmation. So that's a kind of IP that we have printed out our vehicle. But how does the exoskeleton manufacture? You would need a press machine for that. We don't have one. You have to visit to visualize it, right? Now do I explain it without? I mean, it's a very technical jargon to put. Amazing. Amazing.
00:39:16
Speaker
So essentially, you have worked a lot on the exoskeleton design. So it is one single design which can create multiple form factors. We just had one opportunity to make it right. And I hope we made it right. Amazing. OK, got it.
00:39:40
Speaker
In 2020, when you raised your first round, at what stage were you? Had you made this exoskeleton? MVP was ready and we were developing, getting it ready for mass production.
Impact of COVID-19 on EVH and Market Adaptations
00:39:55
Speaker
Also, there's a lot of reliability testing that has to occur before you launch the vehicle. You have to check for...
00:40:05
Speaker
The vehicle has to run for one lakh kilometers without a feel. You would not love to get off in the middle of a road in heat and say that your car is not going to work well. The same things would work through for any automobile. We don't want it to be down in the middle of the road for some issue or the other.
00:40:26
Speaker
So, yeah. Do you also need some sort of regulatory approvals, some license to make a car and all, like there will be some role of government approvals in this? Of course, of course, of course.
00:40:42
Speaker
what we call the homologation certificate. It's a central motor vehicle at CMVR guidelines that, you know, you know, take through the safety, reliability of the vehicle. So they do a bunch of tests at government approved centers. So it's not that you can privately get it done. And our homologation was completed in 2020. It's very, very close to when we released.
00:41:12
Speaker
And did you have any early customers in place, like potential customers who kind of gave a soft commitment? Yeah, we had soft commitments in 2019 itself, and we showcased the concept. So that's what the whole thing is, you know, there's a saying which I always thought was until then, you know, it's just a good thing on paper, right? You know, nothing can stop an idea of what time has come. Because that sort of holds true in a way that
00:41:38
Speaker
It was difficult, yes, it was difficult to convince people that a startup can build a vehicle, but also the world needed such a vehicle, essentially.
00:41:48
Speaker
So people were ready to risk at least. Back then, now, of course, they have a confidence that we are building to deliver vehicles. We can produce vehicles that confidence is built into them. But those things were earlier, at least for big, large aggregators to have confidence in us or talk to us. A lot of the customers could develop all these changes after 2019 that we have been pushing out over the last four, five years.
00:42:14
Speaker
They have participated in the design process to make a product that fits the requirement. Amazing. You had Amazon signed up by the time you got your seed funding. And that happened later. It was around the same time. I don't know what was before, but I mean, it's almost four years now, but it was around that same quarter, everything happened.
00:42:36
Speaker
Wow, amazing. That was a big quarter for you. So, like, what's COVID hit? What happened? Tell me, like, 2020 onwards the journey. COVID was a challenge in terms of how we've worked, right? Like a software company, you can still work from home. You can't build a vehicle sitting at home.
00:43:02
Speaker
But we double down on our R&D during that phase. We spent a lot of our time on a daily basis trying to understand how further we can improve the vehicle for us.
00:43:15
Speaker
We were not into mass production at that point of time. So we did not have a lot of people. So as to say, the team had grown up to 30, 40 individuals, I believe around that time, and 50. But it was not a whole large team that we had to take things forward.
00:43:35
Speaker
And most of them were working on the design and improvement. So we doubled down on our efforts to find out where else we can improve. It was pure, of course. It's not going to be locked down, which will last forever. Once the lockdown sort of eases off.
00:43:54
Speaker
We can then go to work on making the vehicle even better. And I guess that's what we did. We fine-tuned our manufacturing processes. We fine-tuned our design processes. We improved a lot. We reduced our weight by another 20% on the vehicle. So those are the activities we undertook during that initial phase of two to four months with the first lockdown.
00:44:16
Speaker
And after that, it was always a hybrid working continually, even during the second lockdown and so on. So essentially, that's how we managed to create some value during that phase. But also, it helped us from their perspective that people saw blue skies after a long, long time. And then people realized that they also need to be using greener vehicles to help restore the planet.
00:44:45
Speaker
A lot of the people realize that sustainability and green environment is a mandate. You can't just use it as a buzzword, but you actually have to change and it's only for the better. The whole planet will feel better.
00:45:02
Speaker
So I guess those are the kind of realization which sort of push demand for, you know, e-covers companies were the ones which made the most during that time. So the demand for our vehicles kept on getting stronger. So I guess that was the COVID period.
00:45:18
Speaker
But the world went through a lot of suffering, and I really pray that we don't have to go through that phase collectively as a civilization again. It was really painful. India, the first and second lockdown were horrible. Globally, we saw so many people lose two corners. I really hope that those things will repeat like this.
00:45:41
Speaker
So where did you get your factory for mass production ready?
Scaling for Mass Production and Technological Features
00:45:47
Speaker
It was ready last year, mid of last year or 2022. That's when we were ready. What is your planned capacity? Currently, we have demand for tens and thousands of these vehicles right now as we speak.
00:46:06
Speaker
So we are making a factory that will meet these demands and reach the production that our customers are demanding from us. We have a few large customers who are supporting us.
00:46:21
Speaker
So you spoke of your customers helping you build features that they want and you also told me you had the list of 150 features which were needed in a new generation delivery van. What are some of those features? Can you talk about? First was the delivery van itself.
00:46:49
Speaker
And also made for last month. That was the first one. The second and most important factor was.
00:46:57
Speaker
how we can have the height of the vehicle to match the warehouse loading heights. If there's an offset, if you load something at the same level, it's easy to load from one to the other. So we have to optimize it to get it as close as reality so that it's much easier for people to load and load the vehicle. So that was one of the biggest ones.
00:47:24
Speaker
Secondly, the rear door of the, nobody provides a complete body in India because it's just chassis that are sold. So then the rear door has to be covered in some cloth material. No, they get it fabricated outside. Then the other thing was that the door has to open
00:47:53
Speaker
70 degrees. So you are selling the complete thing, right? You're not selling the body. Okay. Yeah, of course.
00:48:01
Speaker
You can build the powertrain in the chassis. The door had to open to 70 degrees so that it can backup and join at the loading bay again as I said. Beyond that, there are trade secrets. I can't disclose too much to you.
00:48:25
Speaker
I'm sure it will become public coverage soon, like once people see the vehicles. Yeah, once people use a thousand of our vehicles, you'll be able to see that. This is a thoughtful feature. I hope they appreciate it. What about features for like, you know, round?
00:48:43
Speaker
telematics, the IoT related features. Yeah, those are given these days. I mean, I don't even need to see anything. That is something which is an obvious demand in terms of the fact that they need control of the vehicle, understand how it performs. Please need to manage it better. That's a very basic feature these days, I guess.
00:49:09
Speaker
Like you have dashboards for fleet owner, they can see utilization. Yeah. Utilization charge level, which is the nearest charger for their people. Driver behavior, for example. These are all basic features, I guess. Standard now these days. Okay. Amazing. So what is a vehicle price chart?
00:49:32
Speaker
We'll, we'll, we'll let you know. But how does it compare with? It will be, it will be expensive than the ice. It will be extremely expensive than the ice alternatives, but the per kilometer cost is going to be so efficient that, you know, fleet owners are going to absolutely love the returns. Will it be cheaper than the ice also per kilometer cost? No, no.
00:50:04
Speaker
3 wheeler ice. We never did that comparison. Interesting question. But it would be close, very close. I can't comment whether it's cheaper or not, but it will be extremely close. 3 wheeler ice will be 400, 500 kgs. We do one ton of payload, almost two times the size of that. So that may not necessarily be a right comparison.
00:50:31
Speaker
So what are the current challenges in front of you that you currently working to solve? So the biggest challenge I believe is you know
00:50:45
Speaker
Producing these numbers with the right to reliability. I mean, you know, producing 20, 30 numbers. And that's a challenge that, you know, our team is up to it. We have the right people from, from greedy automotive companies. Now we're focusing on making reliable manufacturing processes. But the challenge remains to create a product, you know, product number one to product number one lakh should have the same quality. You can't have a variance in the quality that takes place. We have to maintain the variance.
00:51:15
Speaker
We're doing a pretty good job of it right now as we speak. But you know, we have to still produce in large numbers for us to get there.
00:51:23
Speaker
But our focus is to get the quality right. I mean, you cannot produce a vehicle that does not work. Simple as that. So our effort is to get the... Right now mass production is the challenge. We have already mass production, but maintaining the quality in mass production. So we have to be very careful. We're taking each step in a measured environment. We're going from one vehicle at 8 to 5 at 8 to 15 a day.
00:51:49
Speaker
although we can go straight away to 50 a day. But would that actually solve a problem or create a problem with something you do? So that is one. Second, we are looking forward, working with the government also, to ensure that the financing of the EVs sort of becomes more viable. Currently, the cost of finance for the EVs is much higher than that of a normal vehicle.
00:52:13
Speaker
So even if it's a TCO positive vehicle, eventually the benefits will be taken away by higher cost of financing. And by TCO positive, you mean total cost of ownership? Cost of ownership. Yes, affordable. It's never cheap. Yeah, right. So why is financing a challenge
Financing Challenges in EV Adoption and Future Ambitions
00:52:35
Speaker
for you? You're selling to enterprise customers, right? Like you would be selling to the Amazons and these... No, no, no. So it's the largest exp providers who work for
00:52:43
Speaker
the big retailers but you know most of the vehicles are financed nobody invests a lot of money in their assets right so if the financing becomes a more viable alternative then suddenly the transition will sort of shoot up
00:53:03
Speaker
So that becomes critical for the mass adoption of EVs. And eventually, what is our aim? Not to produce 2,000, 3,000 vehicles. That's an easy job, 5,000. The job is that we improve the environment. For that, India needs to change very fast in terms of number of EVs on the road. And making financing at least accessible will help in the transition much faster. Because it is a clear TCO benefit. It's a profitable vehicle for the fleet owners.
00:53:30
Speaker
is going to add value to the beats they work for. All those benefits are given. It's a check mark on the box. But financing is something. But we are working. The government is pretty positive. And I hope very soon these issues will sort of work out. And any new industry that comes up, faces some structural challenges. Just imagine Henry Ford making a vehicle when there were no roads to the NATO.
00:53:59
Speaker
So financing will help you offset the initial high upfront cost. So that high upfront cost can be converted into a lower monthly. Cost of ownership remains neutral because you would spend less money on fuel and that can go. We are only helping the nation build by reducing the cost.
00:54:22
Speaker
All this pollution and all has an economic cost also. We don't discuss about it. It's extremely difficult to quantify. But I read a McKinsey report maybe five years back. There's an interesting story, which I'll share. But the report stated that due to congestion pollution,
00:54:45
Speaker
it has a societal impact on the people living in the country. And people become less creative, they become less family-oriented, which directly leads to reduction in spending or qualitative spending, which would help like one. And I believe if you improve the quality of life or happiness index within a nation, it would lead to a 0.2 to 0.5
00:55:20
Speaker
It has some things which we can relate to everybody. If you get home early, you are happy, you have time to spend with your family, you can go out any time of the day without having to worry about pollution, about congestion.
00:55:35
Speaker
It would definitely make your life better, my life better for sure. And similar would be the case, I guess, we can sort of change the transition faster. Just imagine a billion people feeling better in India. How much impact we can create on the economy as a whole. And what a story you wanted to? Yeah, so 2014-15 when I was on the powertrain journey and all.
00:56:05
Speaker
There was a report published by some of the big management consulting firms, which stated that India would be the last in transition for EVs because there is no preparedness from a India perspective to move in that direction.
00:56:21
Speaker
A lot of my friends showed this report to me, sent it to me, and they said, you should rethink your career choices. So it's interesting, the journey. And now you see the management reports, they're saying that they would be the next fastest or third fastest mission to move towards electrification. So yeah, it's funny how time changes. I think in commercial vehicles, India is really going faster and easier option.
00:56:51
Speaker
Yeah, actually two wheelers and three wheelers are still the major mean state. But then again, I would sort of slightly differ on this commercial vehicle. There is hardly any serious numbers being put out. Three wheelers is also a commercial vehicle. Yeah, but how many three wheeler goods vehicles are sold? Commercial in nature, right? They are mostly passenger rickshaws which are selling.
00:57:20
Speaker
Got it. Small sliver of the market, which is seeing a weird option. Absolutely. Bulk of the market. So what's the winner, of course? Two winners, of course, is a major shift. You can see a visible pie of the chart went out. Which is why all the traditional two-wheeler companies are also getting it. Moving towards it. So what's your roadmap? You know, a couple of years down the line, help me understand where you see yourself. What all would you be doing? What kind of numbers would you be doing?
00:57:50
Speaker
So if you look at us as a company, we were the pioneers to have a native EV four wheeler commercial vehicle for electric vehicles. Interestingly, if you look at EVH from a global, and I'm dispassionately talking about EVH, that's why I say EVH, at a global level, what is the competition we have? We are a small commercial vehicle manufacturer. The kind of vehicles we manufacture
00:58:21
Speaker
There are one or two global players who are actually doing this. Like Rivian is doing it. Rivian is the most arrival, the most obvious thing and then there's nobody else doing this.
00:58:36
Speaker
So we are bullish about in the first few years to capture the immense demand that is there. Every day we talk to customers, every day people are asking for more and more vehicles. The idea is to fulfill the demand in the next two to three years, which could run into tens and thousands plus. So right now sales is not a challenge for you. That's a short term goal for one and a half years. Beyond that, we see ourselves as a global player.
00:59:06
Speaker
There are a lot of developing economies who have not developed this technology. They want electrification. And EVH would be there. I mean, you know, the whole globe is our playground, essentially. And we would want to help nations that want to go electric, go green, create roadmaps to help them go green. Because we've done it. We've done it in one of the most challenging economies in the world. You see, in India, no major global OE could mass produce.
00:59:35
Speaker
Buying a few high-end players. And nobody has been able to sustain in India. And if we are able to produce vehicles which are in demand, are solving the problems, both from a price perspective and a performance perspective, we would be in a very special place. We would want to take these expertise to countries that actually need electrification.
01:00:03
Speaker
So essentially you want EVAs to be a global four wheel delivery van vehicle. You want to focus on that niche and be a global player in that niche. You recently raised a pretty big 28 million funding round.
01:00:23
Speaker
I always say we just reached only 28 million to look at the money raised by car companies. Tesla had spent $280 million before they unveiled their first vehicle. The Rivian ran into a few billion dollars. So we are still starting off from that perspective.
01:00:44
Speaker
And like this money is for setting up. This is to set our production facility and of course spend on sales and try to create sales channels, service channels for our vehicle. So what is the way you'll do sales? Will it be through the regular dealer model, like you'll appoint dealerships? No, we are doing direct sales. We will be a direct brand in that sense. Okay.
01:01:17
Speaker
And that brings us to the end of this conversation. I want to ask you for a favor now. Did you like listening to the show? I'd love to hear your feedback about it. Do you have your own startup ideas? I'd love to hear them. Do you have questions for any of the guests that you heard about in the show? I'd love to get your questions and pass them on to the guests. Write to me at adatthepodium.in. That's adatthepodium.in.
01:01:32
Speaker
So you'll only need to set up service centers and you'll not need to set up those delicious food sales.