Telangana based e-trio to start assembly unit soon

Hyderabad: e-Trio, a city-based company, is setting up an electric car assembly unit at Bolarum in the city. This will have a capacity to assemble 1,500 cars per month. This apart, it will also have electric cell assembly unit to cater to the needs of other players, according to its founder Y Sathya.

He said the company is planning to launch a hatchback and sedan into the market shortly. “We are getting ready for the launch. We want to target the fleet segment first,” he said adding that these will be priced lower than the competition. Private user car would be ready in the next 15 months and it is currently under development phase.

Once the assembly plant is readied, e-Trio is hoping to reach full capacity in about four to five months. The Bolaram factory is a fully integrated electric vehicle plant. The company also plans to set up another assembly unit with similar capacity.

Apart from vehicle assembly and integration, it also does battery cells assembling. “We are in talks with a bus maker and rickshaw player in Delhi for supplying the batteries for their vehicles,” he said adding that about Rs 13 crore ($ 2 million) has been spent on the assembly plant so far. Currently, it has a technology tie up with an American company and suppliers of powertrains from Taiwan and China.

e-Trio signed a technological partnership with a Chinese company on quick charging (25 minutes) and advanced battery technology which can handle Indian temperatures.

The company now has about 120 people working, mainly in the research and development. The number will increase to about 350-400 around April, he said adding that the company has already secured some pre-orders for its hatchback model

Creation of charging infrastructure would be a key to success of the electric vehicles, he said adding that based on the order sizes it would contemplate setting up charging stations. A battery swap option would also be considered based on the orders taking into consideration that the battery is the costliest component in an electric vehicle.

Range anxiety (the number of kilometres that the vehicle would ply on a single range) is a crucial in the electric vehicle segment. For the two models, the range is 145 and 180 km under ideal conditions. If we have to take into account the road condition and driving expertise, about 10 to 15 per cent of it could be docked off, he said. However, the cars will be equipped with regenerative braking for increasing the kilometre per charge. They will have battery management system that will monitor voltage, SOC (State of charge and temperature all the time and display them on an instrument cluster for customer View.

“Our plan it to make the cars truly Made-in-Telangana in phases. We will first target the southern states for marketing our cars and later expand to other parts of the country. For now, we are self-funded and will look at fund raising post deliveries of first lot of cars,” said Sathya.