‘Reducing lithium-ion battery cost is top priority at Hyundai’

In the global market, we sold over 45,000 units of Kona Electric till last month. We have received good feedback from countries such as Norway, South Korea and parts of Europe. Some customers were surprised to know that the real driving range of the vehicle was more than that of the certification range number (under test conditions).

It is because of the different test modes in various countries. India, too, has a different driving certification. Our whole engineering team was surprised to hear that. We did a test run and got around 460 km range in one charge.

Actually, there are two different driving tests — the Worldwide Harmonised Light Duty Driving Test Procedure (WLTP) and the Modified Indian Driving Cycle (MIDC). The Indian test conditions have an easy driving cycle while the WLTP tests done globally are close to real life conditions. India’s weather is also generally on the hotter side which means that the batteries do not drain quickly and helps gain more range.

Generally, EVs cannot charge vehicle-to-vehicle but we developed our own equipment to recharge a car. Hyundai was the first to come out such an idea and now others, too, are adopting that.

Calculating the distance of how far a charging station is, the charging vehicle charges the amount required to reach there (for instance 50 km). In India, we have tied up with MapMyIndia, to display Kona Electric compatible EV charging stations on the Hyundai Motor India website and mobile app. In Korea, we have three kinds of such service vehicles – Ioniq Electric, Kona Electric with 64KWh, and a big van with multiple batteries that we call ‘Mother Pig’ to supply electricity to the stalled vehicle.

We do not do that and maintain as we control the battery lifecycle…it will be zero per cent. We have over 10 years of experience in working on more than a million batteries to control their electricity. In case of lithium-ion batteries, many think it means we have to throw them out but we cannot. For example, in the case of Kona Electric, it is impossible for the whole energy to be exhausted.

As top priority, we are trying to cut the cost of the lithium-ion battery. All over the world, there is research around the battery, but they are not thinking to reduce its cost for mass production.

It will not be possible. There are many companies who tried (including some in China), but they all failed. It is not technical problems, but the question of ‘who will own the battery?’, so making such models is difficult. It cannot be adopted for ‘real cars’. There are a lot of safety issues for such models.

Before we prepare for using fuel-cell vehicles in India, the first thing to do is ready the infrastructure for them. Perhaps next year we will set up some charging stations to carry out tests in our endeavour to produce pure eco-friendly vehicles.

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