The government is putting up charging infrastructure through oil marketing companies (OMCs) at various locations is good, but they should be at the right locations so that electric vehicle (EV) penetration can reach at a higher level, a top official at Tata Motors said on Thursday.

According to the government’s Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric Vehicles (FAME-II) scheme, the OMCs (including Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum) are eligible for a subsidy of ₹800 crore.

The Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas is currently in the process of deploying 22,000 public EV charging stations, expected to be installed by December 2024. Of these, 7,432 stations are being deployed under FAME-II scheme implemented by the Ministry of Heavy Industry.

This policy stipulates that to be eligible under the FAME-II scheme, EV charger manufacturers must achieve a minimum of 50 per cent domestic value addition by December 1, 2024.

Main issue

“The issue is that if these chargers are not put in the right place, then it can be a poor utilisation for them and the chargers being put in the wrong place would not actually help overcome the issue that we are facing,” Shailesh Chandra, Managing Director, Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles and Tata Passenger Electric Mobility, said here.

Therefore, Tata Motors has taken an initiative to set up chargers at locations frequently visited by Tata EV owners with partnerships with some of these OMCs so they put up the chargers at the ‘logical points’, apart from the company also expanding its own charging points including at the dealerships, he said.

“We have started this initiative of bringing all these charge point operators (CPOs) together and we are sharing the insights on where potentially they could be putting up their chargers. That should be of great help and therefore in the next one or two years we are going to see a big change,” Chandra said.

He said there is a lot of start-ups and CPOs who have started coming up and they have the money, are ready to invest and they have a plan.

Chandra also said that more models with different price-points have to be introduced because product is not a problem right now and price is also not a big problem now, as the products have proven themselves to be much punchier, more convenient with better driving experience, running cost and maintenance cost is low.

Therefore, charging infrastructure has to be improved because primarily the bottlenecks are around charging only, which still holds the person to not go for EV as their only and first car purchase.

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