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Mahindra & Mahindra is planning to increase its electric vehicles (EVs) production to 4,000 units a month by December 2019.
The company has a capacity of about 400 EVs a month, said Managing Director of the company Pawan Goenka on Monday.
He was interacting with the media persons on the sidelines of the summit.
Goenka said that 4,000 EVs target would be scaled up to 5,000 EVs a month. The company already has invested about ₹600 crore on EVs in the last six years.
Recently it has also announced its plans for investing ₹400 crore in Karnataka and ₹500 crore in Maharashtra over the next five years.
It is a leap of faith, as today the demand for three and four wheeler EVs is 200 to 300 units a month. But M&M is taking that leap with a much higher capacity.
On the recent statement made by NITI Aayog CEO, Amitabh Kant about the country not requiring an EVs policy, Goenka said that the company was not waiting for any policy for implementing its plans.
“To be a pioneer, you cannot wait for the road to be laid with a six-lane highway. You have to create your own road and make it happen,” he said.
He pointed that the statement made by Kant about India not needing an EVs policy is over-analysed.
The statement should be taken positively as already a lot of developments are going on in the EVs space. India is not going back on its commitment to EVs.
Every week State governments are announcing their EVs policies, recently Maharashtra announced its policy, which is one of the most aggressive ones, these are not signs of diminishing interest in EVs.
He said that the current level of subsidies are needed for the EVs to be price competitive and the infrastructure required for charging needs to come up a lot more rapidly.
If these happen then in 2022, there will be a consumption of two lakh EVs vehicles in the country.
Goenka said that the cells for the EVs will not be made by M&M, but all other components would be made by the company.
Making of cells, require much larger scale to justify those costs. All other parts and components will be made by M&M locally in the next two years.
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