You have to fasten your seatbelts for our today's article the gap of two days as we were off for domestic task - upgrading our system
Ready? Let's go. What happens when Tata and Reliance vie for the same piece of the pie? Whatever answer you have, it probably won't be this.
Both the titans of Indian business want to expand in the electric vehicle (EV) and sustainable transport space in India. They're borderline at loggerheads over this. And yet, both have tied up with the same Delhi-NCR-based company—BluSmart.
BluSmart has over 600 EVs plying in the national capital region It has seven charging hubs: It's an all-EV fleet serving customers It started in 2019 as a 50-EV experiment (by clean energy entrepreneurs Anmol Jaggi and Punit Goyal) BluSmart today owns all its cars and has a “zero-cancellation, zero-surge” policy
How is this relevant? Well, BluSmart is the only scaled-up player in the B2C segment. This means it's competing with the Olas and Ubers out there. This means it's a potential goldmine with its existing, organised setup for both Tata and RIL. BluSmart signed an MoU with Tata Motors to add 3,000 EVs to its fleet in October 2021. And to ensure these EVs have somewhere to charge, it tied up with Jio-BP—a joint venture between RIL and BP— the month before to set up “Superhubs” across the country.
It has also raised $13 million from the UK-based mobility investment firm BP Ventures—BP's first investment in India!—for its latest $25 million Series A round. With this, BluSmart will be able to expand its full-stack operations—fleet and charging hubs—to newer metros in India over the next two years.
But expansion is actually where BluSmart could struggle. Since its EVs aren't driver-owned, they need to be booked at least 30 minutes in advance (potentially 20 minutes going forward, but that's a lot too). Also, India's EV infrastructure isn't robust enough to have charging points at convenient spots—BluSmart vehicles are monitored so they come back to hubs in time.
But the bigger challenge is the leasing system itself. BluSmart has a burn rate of Rs 20,000 ($267) per EV every month in Delhi-NCR—thanks to operational expenses like monthly driver payouts and lease payments—which would also multiply with scale. Jio-BP plans to solve that with the "Superhubs", which can charge 60-100 cars each. It also plans to foot the Rs 15-20 lakh ($20,000-26,000) bill for setting these up. That's just one of many plans.
Where does this leave Tata Motors, which has been dedicatedly building out public charging infrastructure for 4-wheelers and more?