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India
This Week in AsiaEconomics

India’s electric vehicle owners turned off by country’s lack of charging stations

  • A survey found that 51 per cent of India’s EV owners want to switch back to gas and diesel powered vehicles

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A charging point for electric vehicles at the Fairmont Hotel in Jaipur, India. Photo: Shutterstock
Sonia Sarkar
When Rajiv Khattar, 60, was driving more than 450km from Amritsar to Delhi, his main concern was keeping the battery of his electric car charged. It was May, the peak of India’s summer, his battery was exhausting quickly, and it wasn’t easy for him to find a charging station along the highway.
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The first charging station that he could find was 314km away, but it was not operational. He had to drive another 35km before he finally found one he could use.

“Electric vehicle owners need to be extremely calculative about their route, especially on the highways, because many charging stations do not work,” Khattar, a business strategist, told This Week In Asia.

A recent survey by app-based platform Park+ found that more than 51 per cent of Indian electric vehicle owners want to go back to diesel and petrol-powered internal-combustion engine (ICE) cars. Of the 500 electric car owners surveyed in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi and its neighbourhoods, 88 per cent stated that they are forever anxious about charging facilities.

At present, India has nearly 25,200 public charging stations, but it plans to have 46,397 stations to be set up within nine cities by 2030. Currently, there is one charging station per 135 EVs, which is far lower than the global ratio of one charging station per 6 to 20 EVs.

An electric vehicle on the road near the India Gate in New Delhi. Photo: Reuters
An electric vehicle on the road near the India Gate in New Delhi. Photo: Reuters

In India, two-wheelers and three-wheelers account for 90 per cent of the total fleet of electric vehicles. A report by Climate Trends and JMK Research estimated the country would need around 3.9 million public and semipublic charging stations to facilitate its target of having 80 million EVs on the road by 2030.

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