Swapping Solutions For EVs

Electric vehicles have taken the world by storm in the last half a decade. And Battery Smart is playing an important part in helping India go green. Battery Smart, co-founded by Pulkit Khurana, is India’s largest network of battery swapping stations for electric two- and three-wheelers.

Looking to make the adoption of EVs easier in our lives, Khurana started Battery Smart less than two years ago.

Facilitating EVs: “Battery Smart started almost a year and a half back. We are currently the largest battery-swapping network of India, with the objective of facilitating EVs in India,” says Khurana.

How did this come about? Every EV faces a downtime problem where the vehicle needs to be charged for three to four hours. Additionally, this leads to recurring capital expenditure. Then there is the challenge of finding an appropriate charging location.

“Battery swapping, which is the flagship product of Battery Smart essentially solves this problem.

Think of us a petrol pump for EVs. The user comes to us, swaps the battery in two minutes and is good to go for another hundred kilometres. This also unlocks additional income for users especially if they are doing commercial business,” says Khurana.

Battery Smart is currently present across 150 locations. While the first lockdown saw people retreating to their houses, the second phase saw mobility return to normal. This proved to be a boon for Battery Smart. The time was opportune for them as they themselves are a post-Covid company, who started their operations after the first phase of the lockdown.

Challenges: “Ours is an on-ground operation, with a lot of team members having to go out to acquire more and more new stations and talk to more customers. This became more and more difficult due to the pandemic. But given that EVs are coming in with such a large push right now, we have almost 10,000 customers on our wait list,” says Khurana.

What about some challenges along the way? “Another challenge we faced was the new concept we are working with; it takes time to make people aware of what it does and how it works. But now that awareness around EVs is increasing this issue is getting resolved,” he adds.

An expanding market: The enterprise is doing their share in pushing the EV business forward, by helping more and more consumers adapt to it with greater ease.

And certainly, the EV market has expanded in the last five years due to a variety of reasons including the declining price of the Lithium-Ion.

Customer Base: Today there are 2.5 million electric rickshaws on the road. And this is the largest customer base of Battery Smart. The second is two-wheelers, which is picking up very fast. A 100,000 two-wheelers were sold just this year despite the pandemic.

“In the next five years, two-wheelers and three-wheelers in the EV segment are expected to see a large uptake. Four-wheelers are also picking up despite their smaller volumes especially this year,” says Khurana.

He credits his success to his team, “We stand tall on the shoulders of our team. It is their hard work which drives success.” A novel idea backed by a supportive team is Battery Smart's mantra for success.