Remember the Toyota Qualis? The “bread box with wheels”, as many reviewers called it at the time – the motoring website BHP.com dubbed it “the worst looking car ever sold in India”. The Qualis was Toyota’s entry play in India which, until then, had seen most competition try to loosen Maruti Suzuki’s iron grip on the small car market.
The multi-utility vehicle was launched in 2000 at a ‘touch and try’ price 4.6 lakhs. This put it at par with the only other MUV in the market, the Tata Sumo, which was at least a generation old in terms of quality. Toyota raised the prices of the Qualis within a few months, but by then the boxy MUV was discontinued and was running. By the time of its closure in 2005, it would go on to register lifetime sales of over 142,000 units, the year the Indian car sector broke the 1 million units barrier. This paved the way for the higher priced Innova, which remains a top seller for Toyota to this day.
Tata Motors could do well to beat Toyota in the electric car market with the aggressive launch price of its electric hatchback, the Tiago. Priced at Sensational Starting Price of 8.49 lakhs and going up 11.79 lakhs (ex-showroom), Tiago Electric is an inflection point in the history of electric car market in India. For the first time, the price a buyer has to pay to go electric is in the same range as what a buyer would pay between the base and top variants of a car powered by a conventional internal combustion engine.
Feather For example, 8.49 lakh, the electric version costs just 36 per cent more than the base petrol engine version. But it’s not really a true comparison. Even the base electric model gets an automatic transmission. The cheapest Tiago variant with automatic transmission and petrol engine costs just 25 per cent less than the electric model. Compare this with Tata Motors’ own sedan Tigor, where the base electric variant costs twice as much as the base petrol engine variant. Mahindra e-Verito, the electric version of the Verito sedan, debuts 9.13 Lakh, as compared to the starting price of 5.28 lakh for the petrol variant – a difference of 73 per cent.
To be sure, there are riders. The biggest challenge will be the price. The starting price is limited to the first 10,000 bookings only, of which 2,000 will be reserved for existing Tata Motors Electric Personal Vehicle customers. This is largely the same as what Toyota did with the Qualis decades ago – it hiked prices after selling about 8,000 units.
Then there’s the range. The cheap Tiago with a 19.2 kWh battery pack has a claimed range of 250 kms, though motoring experts expect the real-life range to be around 165-175 kms. Charging infrastructure is non-existent in most Indian cities, limiting its use to small towns running less than 50 km per day or as a second vehicle for occasional use.
But with this launch, Tata Motors has managed to break down the biggest hurdle for the adoption of electric cars in India – the intimidating price differential. Even though prices have been hiked, the entry price gap between Electric and ICE has narrowed decisively. and selling petrol 100 per litre, running costs can be as low as one-tenth that of a comparable petrol car, making the total cost of ownership even more attractive.
And if the sales volume grows as expected by Tata Motors, it may be possible to bring down prices across the board. Quantity, after all, makes a huge difference in average per unit cost. Take China, the world’s largest electric car market. In 2021, China sold more electric cars – 3.3 million units – than the rest of the world.
China is the world’s largest electric car market, with electric cars now accounting for about a fifth of all new car sales.
Massive sales have also made it the cheapest electric car market in the world. The world’s cheapest electric ‘car’, the Electriccar K5, costs just . Is equal to 1.5 lakh. But it is not a true car, like Bajaj’s quadricycle in India. However, the Hongguang Mini EV, or Cherry’s QQ Ice Cream, are true micro hatchbacks, and retail at around starting prices. 3 lakhs. According to the International Energy Agency’s Global EV Outlook 2022 report, in 2021, the sales-weighted average price of EVs in China was only 10 percent higher than traditional offerings, compared to 45-50 percent in other major markets.
If Tatas and other carmakers manage to move towards China’s prices is anything to go by, the age of electric cars in India would have well and truly begun.
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