New Delhi Tarun Mehta, Co-Founder and CEO, Ather Energy said that entrepreneurs looking to enter the electric vehicle space should focus on commercial vehicles as in the current circumstances it does not take time for newcomers to build strong electric two-wheelers.
“If you’re starting a company in India today, there’s an opportunity to go after fundamental value creation. And maybe don’t start in scooters anymore. I think it’s a different place now, and you have to do it in a very different way.” You can’t start by saying I want to build the platform now. It’s been a while. So maybe start in commercial vehicles,” Mehta said at the Mint Mobility Conclave 2022.
Bengaluru-based Ather Energy, backed by Hero MotoCorp and the quasi-sovereign wealth fund National Investment and Infrastructure Fund, was one of India’s early electric two-wheeler manufacturers to design and develop battery packs and vehicles for the local market.
However, despite having an early mover advantage, it replaced rivals who later entered the market with imported batteries and vehicle designs. According to Mehta, the decision to expand gradually has been part of Ather’s plan and helped the company avoid some of the setbacks faced by the new entrants, including fire incidents on their scooters.
The incidents of the fire, in which a father and daughter died, have raised safety concerns, and prompted a government investigation and a new set of battery-safety guidelines, which are likely to be announced soon.
As per the vehicle dashboard of the government, more than 38,000 Ather scooters have been registered so far.
“We have invested 70% of the capital raised so far in product development. Even today, 45% of the company is still engaged in research and development at a scale of about 1,700 people. So as far as electric two-wheelers are concerned, we continue to run the largest engineering research and development operations in the country. So it would be a mistake to think that this is just a sham (that Ather scooters are not involved in any fire incident). It is billions of engineering hours that are making this possible. Also, I think we are lucky that we started this journey many years ago. So when the market was not ready we got a lot of free run of about 3-4 years. But we had started building the platform, so we continued to respect it. We could keep getting it done. We had poor quality before, but we could have come out of it without becoming a public relations disaster, and we could have taken as much time as we could to fix it,” Mehta said.
“So when we started to scale, the quality was already on a good track. I don’t think there is that buffer in the market today. If you start an electric vehicle company today, you can’t say I will spend the next three years building a platform and two years building a product…
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