SUN Mobility plans to build 16,000 battery swap stations with 2,40,000 battery chargers, allowing for over 3 million swaps per day, in order to meet its goal of onboarding 1 million battery swap-enabled electric vehicles by 2025. According to Anant Badjatya CEO, India, SUN Mobility the entire funding for establishing the stations would be done through debt and equity.

Building ecosystem

“The equipment cost per station alone is around $8,000. The entire funding of setting up the stations would be done through debt and equity,” said Badjatya to businessline. “For our mission, the most important thing is to have an ecosystem—the OEMs, and distributors.

Along with this, we also intend to focus on the retrofit market. So, these 1 million vehicles will be a combination of new sales of two and three wheelers, e-rikshaws, loaders, and the retrofit segment of e-rikshaws and autos,” he added. 

According to the company, it will set up 500 swap points and 40,000 batteries by FY23 and 3,000 swap points and 3,00,000 batteries by FY24. Currently, it has 7,000 EVs in the network and 182 stations across 18 cities. The organisation has tied up with more than 10 OEMs including Hero Electric, Piaggio; fleet operators- Amazon, Uber; shared mobility providers; energy distributors – Indian Oil, Tata Power and others.

Buses and trucks

In addition to its existing solutions, SUN Mobility has also developed a battery-swapping technology for buses and trucks, which it intends to launch during the mid of the next financial year, said Chetan Maini, co-founder and chairman, SUN Mobility.

“A station will have 17 batteries and would take three-four minutes to swap the batteries. It is a completely robotically operated station that takes one day to set it up. We ran a year-long pilot project for this in Ahmedabad and would launch the same in these stations in the mid of next year,” he added. According to Maini, a person would pay for what has been used- which would be around 20 per cent less than the diesel and LPG. 

Battery manufacturing

The company recently opened its newest manufacturing plant in Bengaluru, increasing yearly production from 67,000 battery packs to 2,00,000. “Moving forward, we will expand this factory to produce 2,80,000 units by the mid of next year,” said the CEO.

Founded in 2017, SUN Mobility is a joint venture between SUN Group and Maini Group. The company is co-founded by Chetan Maini, the founder of Reva Electric Car Company which is now Mahindra Electric, Uday Khemka, vice chairman of SUN Group, and Ajay Goel, co-founder and executive director.