Tata motors made its first electric vehicle for the consumer market, by repurposing an unused shop floor at its plant. Here, there’s no fancy assembly line – Nexon SUV bodies designed for gasoline models are wired and fitted with battery packs by hand.
This area, initially built only eight SUVs a day. But demand has shot up over the two years since the Nexon EV’s launch. Tata now makes more than 100 a day though much of that is now handled at another plant nearby. Even with this humble start, Tata dominates the country’s fledgling electric car market.
This is contrary to other major automakers which have poured billions of dollars into EV tooling and technology from the get-go, though Tata’s success also owes much to government subsidies and high tariffs that keep out imports from rivals like Tesla Inc.
Going into India’s untried market for EVs, Tata knew it had to make an affordable car for an extremely cost-conscious population. Instead of building an EV plant or line which would be expensive and take time, it decided to pick an existing successful model and work on outfitting it with a battery pack.
An EV plant for a nascent market would have been “a huge amount of investment sitting on the potential of emerging volumes. We didn’t want to do that,” Anand Kulkarni, vice president of product line and operations at Tata Passenger Electric Mobility, told Reuters.
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