MSIL’s focus will be on CNG vehicles for present, as the demand for electric vehicles (EVs) cannot be gauged yet, though the company is launching its first EV in 2020, said MSIL Chairman RC Bhargava.

The entire industry, in fact, should have CNG options as plan B or C if EVs do not sell as expected, and if the battery cost remains as high as it is today, he added.

“The Indian market is different from every other market in the world…we have 75 per cent of the cars made under 4 metre and below ₹5 lakh. So, when you electrify the cars at today’s battery cost, the price of the vehicle will go up by ₹6-7 lakh...I don’t think anybody would buy. Affordability is an issue here,” Bhargava said here on the sidelines of announcing the company’s results.

He said there is a school of thought that believes that prices will come down to half of today’s price and there is another school of thought which sees prices not coming down, but rising with higher material costs. So one has to just wait and see, he said, adding that there has to be some way to reduce the cost of the batteries that would in turn reduce the total cost of the vehicle in future.

“Our view on this is that we want to have clean car and reduce oil imports as well as cut pollution levels,” he said but also cautioned that for doing this the company does not want to invest all on battery technologies.

“We want to look at other alternate technologies. For example, the government has now put the use of CNG for transportation at a higher priority than for power generation,” he said, adding that this is why MSIL wants to use CNG as far as possible. The only problem is that it takes time to fill up as technology is not advanced at fuel pumps and one has to wait for up to an hour.

Therefore, the use of CNG, ethanol, methanol or hybrids in cars should not be given up, he said, adding: “We should first use all the options that are with us…because the end results is the same – lesser fuel imports and cleaner air.”

MSIL has CNG options in almost all of its cars including Alto, Celerio, Dzire and Ertiga.