In a months’ time, India will see lithium-ion battery powered trucks of the brand name ‘Rhino’, playing on its roads.

Gurugram-based Infraprime Logistics Technologies (IPLTech), which has been running a couple of hundred battery-retrofitted Tata Signa trucks, carrying freight for Tata Steel and Bhushan Steel, will now bring production of its own trucks-branded ‘Rhino’.

For starters, it will use its own facility at Faridabad, from where it will produce at least a hundred buses a month; but in a few months, the company would scale up production to about 600 trucks a month, from a leased facility in Manesar, the company’s CEO, Subodh Yadav, told BusinessLine .

In the middle of 2020, IPLTech took about 10 old Tata Signa trucks, pulled out the engines and put Li-ion batteries in their place. The number of trucks was gradually ramped up, to about 50 in the following few months. “In the last six months, we have been running 200 trucks,” Yadav said.

How was the experience?

There were some issues with the battery management systems, but they were soon fixed, he said.

But the meat is in the savings. When the company began its operations, it was saving about ₹15 a km, compared with diesel powered trucks, at the then diesel prices. With the prices having gone up manifold today, the savings have increased to ₹ 35 a km, Yadav said. Unsurprisingly, the customers are delighted.

“Today, we have an order book of about 2,000 trucks,” he said. Hence, the move to larger facilities at Manesar. He did not wish to name whose facilities IPLTech would lease, given that the deal is yet to be sealed.

In June 2020, IPLTech tried out a few Sodium ion batteries in its trucks, with mixed success. These batteries were supplied by Faradion, the UK company that has just been taken over by Reliance Industries.

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