Non-availability of charging stations is always blamed for the slow adaption of electric vehicles in India. However, the limited numbers of EVs running on the road keep charging station companies in limbo. For charging station operators, especially private ones, aggressive business investments are still a big gamble. However, according to Varun Chaturvedi, MD & CEO, Volttic, charging stations’ numbers depend on EVs’ penetration in India. “Instead of discussing the classic chicken and egg problem and comparing the Indian EV market with the western market, we need to understand the penetration of EVs and charging stations will happen simultaneously,” says Chaturvedi.

The electric vehicle charging stations market is expected to exceed more than USD 30 billion by 2024 at a CAGR of 40%. As per a rough estimation, currently, there are around 1,000 Bharat DC001 charging stations and over 1,000 Bharat AC001 charging stations are available in India.

The Indian Government also announced its intention to set up at least one e-charging kiosk at around 69,000 petrol stations across India.

Volttic is a leading charge point operator (CPO) in India running EV charging stations pan India. The company provides complete end-to-end EV charging solutions for home and commercial segments.

“Volttic focuses a business strategy which benefits for all- OEs, EV owners and us,” adds Chaturvedi.

The company is consciously setting up EV charging stations with customised solutions on demand in the country. “Rather than putting charging infrastructures where nobody comes, we are tying up with people who are ready to use our solutions,” he explains.

The company is currently focusing on fleet operators, which Chaturvedi predicts, will have faster growth in India when it comes to the EV adoption. As of now, Volttic’s dedicated charging and public charging stations ratio is 80 percent and 20 percent, respectively.

In the B2B segment, Volttic’s clients are employee transporters, while in the B2C, the company serves taxi fleets.

“We are strategically deploying our charging stations to relieve our customers from range anxiety and carry smooth transportation without breakdown,” he says.

Having a background of electrical engineering, his core expertise is in electrical equipment, chargers, batteries, and the power sector. Elaborating his decision to venture into the EV charging station business, he says, “In 2016-17, there were hardly any players in the EV charging station business, though it was gaining momentum in Europe and the US. The charging station business was relatively new in India then, and everybody had to start from scratch, which provided equal challenges and opportunities. Being an entrepreneur, you should adopt a business where you have the expertise and control over the technologies. We knew the EV charging station will mostly evolve on as a service.”

Volttic’s Co-founder, Surendar Pratap Singh, too comes from the electric background, while the other co-founder, Shweta Chaturvedi, hails from the software industry. “Having the background of hardware and software, we are completely self-dependent in the EV charging supply chain,” Chaturvedi adds.

However, challenges are larger in deploying public EV charging stations compared with dedicated ones. Explaining the challenges further, Chaturvedi says, “Generally, two to three days are needed to set up a dedicated EV charging station in a corporate premise as most of the infrastructure such as power supply, wiring and parking space is readily available. However, when it comes to a public domain, we have to spend months scouting a location, then getting power supply from DISCOM takes time as well.”

EV charging takes more time than gasoline refuelling, and EV consumers expect to have charging station points at their preferred locations, time, and price to avoid range anxiety. Chaturvedi added that public EV charging stations should be deployed in public spaces such as malls, restaurants, hotels, shopping complexes and others where they can indulge in other recreational activities while the vehicles are being charged.

The company provides technology-oriented solutions consist of Bharat DC01 & Bharat AC01, CCS2 Chargers & ChadeMo Chargers to serve the clients’ needs. Currently, it operates around 123 charging points AC/ DC mix and plans to order around 50 double guns fast chargers with 100 charging points in the next couple of months. In the next five years by 2025, Volttic aims to have around 5,000 plus machines with double guns. “So, if we talk about charging points, we will have between 10,000 plus charging points in the next five years,” adds Chaturvedi. The company is in the process of executing an order of USD1 million in the next few months.

On the policy side, he urges a push for private charging players as well. Last year the Government had given in-principle approval to firms, including NTPC, EESL and REIL, to set up 2,600 EV charging stations.

“Last time, under the FAME-II, subsidies were given to EV charging stations operated by PSUs. This time too, an Expression of Interest (EoI) has been invited for highways and expressways.” However, he advocates that the EV ecosystem should not only depend on subsidies. “We need to come out from the mindset of incentives. Once subsidies are stopped, many nights by flyers vanish from the market,” he says.

Volttic focuses on better utilisation of the EV charging machines to have economic viability in the business.

“If my dedicated charging machines are utilised for ten to twelve hours and public charging stations are utilised for around six to seven hours per day, I can achieve economic viability,” says Chaturvedi.

Volttic’s all EV charging machines are manufactured according to government standards by its strategic partners in India. Deployment and maintenance are taken care of by Volttic. “Software is the backbone of our business. Station monitoring, tariff management, booking slots, navigation, payments and app, everything is managed by in-house software team,” adds Chaturvedi. The company provides public EV charging app with all advance feature set for EV drivers. Easy navigation to nearest charging stations, booking, payment and all transaction details just in a click with Volttic mobile application. The app also provides complete details of charging station and availability for charging slots and many more advance features for EV users.

Margins in the business widely depend on the operating costs, which again vary from city to city. EV charging stations charge in both ways- per unit (kWH) or hours or minutes basic, and In India, EV charging stations in use the former way to charge tariffs. “Operating cost and subsequently, tariffs depend on many factors. Many states have adopted the EV policy so there are caps on per unit charge, while states that have not adopted the EV policy charge commercial rates per unit. Besides, location rents and machine cost also determine the tariffs. But yes, the tariff has to be lower than per km costs of fossil fuel-driven vehicles. Commercial viability can be achieved if machine utilisation rates are good,” explains Chaturvedi.

Talking on the feasibility of procuring energy from solar, he says, “Again to install a dedicated solar system, you need CAPEX. Even if it is fitted and the machines’ utilisation remains low, where will we dump electricity or inject in the grid at ever lower net metering? However, our ultimate goal is to get energy from renewable resources in future, when we have good hours of machine utilisation to consume dedicated renewable power energy. Also, within city getting rooftop location to develop a 50-70 KW solar plant will be another challenge, so we are more aligned toward our nationwide renewable integration up to 175 GW by 2022 and subsequent more to the coming year.”

As most EV charging station business is being driven by commercial fleet operators, availing value-added services do not bring more business rather bring more liability, thinks Chaturvedi. “Value-added services are good for personal/ individual vehicle owners, whereas commercial fleet operators think of the total cost of operations,” tells Chaturvedi.

Chaturvedi quotes battery swapping is currently not viable for electric 4W and buses as it needs heavy infrastructure.

Moreover, it is not viable unless battery packs and technologies are uniformed in the electric car and buses by all OEMs, which looks very difficult in coming time as well.

“Since Volttic is using only Government approved EV Chargers standard and that are adopted by all OEM of four-wheeler cars and buses, so most of the client are fleet of electric car and buses. For two and three-wheelers, swapping is a more convenient option as most of them currently available in the market do not have the facility to charge fast with DC chargers. So swapping is the way to get a quick top-up by replacing charged batteries,” adds he.

It requires robust infrastructure such as bulk charging system, a software system to get details on batteries. The business is only successful when fleets run over 200 km per day, and there is a good number of volume of 2W & 3W,” says Chaturvedi. However, the company is also exploring options of getting into battery swapping business with two and three-wheeler fleet companies. (MT)

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Coretura, a 50:50 joint venture between Daimler Truck and Volvo Group, has entered into an engineering agreement with Accenture to accelerate the development of a software platform for commercial vehicles.

The company, headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden, currently employs over 100 engineers. It continues to recruit specialists in system architecture, high-performance computing and cloud infrastructure to support its roadmap, which targets the delivery of its first commercialised products towards the end of the decade.

Coretura intends to create a single software platform, language and standard for trucks, buses and other heavy-duty transport vehicles. The platform is designed to support vehicle lifecycles of more than 15 years, moving the industry away from projects that require custom software development for each new vehicle.

As the engineering partner, Accenture will support development across several areas, including:

• Electrical and Electronic (E/E) architecture
• Software abstraction and hardware integration
• Embedded software, middleware, and cybersecurity
• Functional safety and cloud infrastructure

The platform aims to provide a reusable software stack to lower costs and standardise time-to-market for global manufacturers. For fleet operators, the system is designed to allow for continuous software updates and performance upgrades delivered over the air.

Johan Lunden, CEO, Coretura, said, “Our purpose is to advance mobility at the speed of ideas, and that takes depth. Building a full-stack SDV platform demands expertise across embedded software, middleware, cybersecurity, and functional safety, all designed for vehicles with lifecycles measured in decades. Accenture’s reinvention capabilities let us move faster without compromising the standards our customers depend on. This is acceleration, not course correction.”

Rainer Oder, SDV Embedded Software Lead, Accenture, added, “Helping the industry advance software-defined vehicles is a priority for Accenture. Our landmark collaboration with Coretura is designed to change embedded software engineering for automotive platforms. Together, we are looking to solve the challenges of a fully software-defined architecture – addressing critical areas such as hardware abstraction, API management and AI-based engineering optimisations.”

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The ePlane Company has announced the completion of its full-scale electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, the e200X. Designated PT-01, the prototype has successfully integrated all core subsystems into a single structure, marking the transition from design and simulation to physical testing.

The e200X is designed as a single airframe versatile enough to serve three distinct markets – Passenger Air Taxi, Urban Cargo Carrier and Air Ambulance.

The company emphasises that the aircraft was designed to be compact, allowing it to integrate into existing urban infrastructure without requiring significant city redesigns.

Developed at the company's own facilities in Chennai, the e200X features in-house development of major components, including propellers, airframe structure, landing gear and battery pack.

This vertical integration provides the company with control over performance, manufacturing costs, and iteration speed, having reached this milestone on approximately USD 21 million in funding.

With assembly complete, the e200X will now undergo ground testing, flight testing and certification.

Prof. Satya Chakravarthy, Founder, The ePlane Company, said, "We set out to build an electric aircraft to a world-class benchmark, engineered and manufactured in depth in India for the World.  We deliberately designed the e200X to be compact, because an aircraft that asks a city to rebuild itself around it will not solve the problem it was built to solve. The same airframe can move people as an air taxi, carry goods as a cargo aircraft, and save lives as an air ambulance, and it can do all three using the infrastructure cities already have. That combination of real capability and capital efficiency is how we intend to compete, and win, in markets around the world.”

The company’s board includes prominent figures such as Vishesh Rajaram (Speciale Invest), Eash Sundaram (JetBlue) and Aditya Ghosh (Homage, Akasa Air). The venture, incubated at IIT Madras, has also received international recognition, including being showcased at Bharat Innovates 2026 and featured in Nvidia Founder Jensen Huang’s GTC keynote.

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Chinese technology company Xiaomi has marked a new milestone for its automotive product offering with its electric vehicle.

The company has announced a significant milestone in autonomous vehicle technology by completing the first official autonomous lap of the Nurburgring Nordschleife circuit in Germany with the Xiaomi YU7 GT, equipped with a Track Package, navigating the 20.8 km circuit without a human driver, recording a lap time of 10:29.483.

Following this performance, the Nurburgring has introduced a new official vehicle category: Autonomous Driving (under Electric Vehicles).

The Xiaomi YU7 GT autonomously navigated all 73 corners of the Nordschleife, managing 300 metres of elevation change and varying road surface conditions. The performance was driven by Xiaomi’s autonomous driving system, which integrates the Xiaomi XLA architecture and the MiMo-Embodied foundation model introduced in March 2026. The end-to-end architecture enabled the vehicle to coordinate steering, braking and power delivery in real-time, maintaining stability under high-speed and high-load conditions.

Xiaomi’s autonomous driving programme has evolved since the 2024 launch of Xiaomi HAD. The current system moves beyond simple behaviour imitation toward autonomous decision-making and deeper environmental interpretation. The company stated that the Nurburgring project serves as a critical testing ground to collect data for refining vehicle dynamics modelling, control strategy optimisation and safety redundancy mechanisms.

This achievement underscores Xiaomi’s commitment to advancing artificial intelligence in the automotive sector through rigorous real-world validation.

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QuantumScape Corporation has announced a multi-year joint research agreement with Honda R&D Co., a subsidiary of Honda Motor Co.

The collaboration focuses on advancing QuantumScape’s solid-state lithium-metal battery platform, including the development of associated manufacturing processes.

This agreement follows a successful technology evaluation period during which Honda conducted a technical study and competitive benchmarking of QuantumScape’s battery platform.

Atsushi Ogawa, Chief Operating Officer, Research Center of Excellence, Honda R&D Co, said, “QS technology demonstrated compelling and unique advantages during our evaluation. We see potential for QS technology to add value across a range of applications, including automotive, and we are excited to move forward into the next phase of our partnership.”

Dr. Siva Sivaram, CEO and President, QuantumScape, added, “Honda is a leading global automaker renowned for its engineering excellence and product quality across automotive and other applications worldwide, and its evaluation represents one of the most rigorous assessments of our technology to date. This agreement reflects the growing confidence in QS solid-state lithium-metal batteries to enable safer, higher-density energy storage.”

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