Umesh Yadav starts up his three-wheeler at 7 a.m. and hits the road looking for fare-paying passengers.
He’s one of millions of drivers in India who operate autorickshaws, known across much of Asia as tuk-tuks after the loud spluttering noise a two-stroke engine makes as it coughs out a trail of choking blue smoke.
But Yadav’s machine is different–it’s electric, quiet, and clean. There are no fumes and no cacophony when it trundles through crowded streets of Gurugram, an urban conglomeration just south of India’s capital, New Delhi, that’s been ranked as the world’s most polluted city.
Yadav is part of a small, but growing, band of electric tuk-tuk drivers here who use a surprisingly convenient subscription service for swappable batteries that could change how we regard the practicality of electric vehicles (EVs). With the help of data and cloud computing, it is tackling long-held reservations about recharging times and range limits.
When his autorickshaw runs low on charge, Yadav simply stops at one of several battery swapping stations in the city, which are like vending machines for fresh batteries. He taps his NFC key fob to open a compartment in the vending machine and swaps his depleted battery, which is slightly bigger than a shoe box and weighs around 13 kilograms (approximately 28.6 lbs), with a freshly juiced one. He pays for only the energy he’s used, which is deducted from his electronic wallet that is also stored in the key fob.
A few minutes later, he’s back driving and looking for fares. It’s just like changing a battery in a camera or other devices.
“I’m able to run for much longer during the day without having to stop for a few hours to charge my autorickshaw. I’m enjoying it a lot,” the 29-year-old says.
Bengaluru-based startup SUN Mobility developed this solution after its founder Chetan Maini had a Eureka moment while doing a DIY chore.
“I was working around the house and ran out of juice on the power drill. I did what I had done several times before: swapped the battery and went back to work,” recalls SUN Mobility’s founder. “It gave me an idea of the way ahead. Why can’t people swap batteries for their EVs?”
Maini thinks swappable batteries will revolutionize the EV sector and urban life generally. He says that before long, electric bikes and autorickshaws like Yadav’s will be sustainably zipping around cities around the world, ferrying around people and goods.
The reality for EVs right now, however, is very different.
The growth and popularity of electric mobility has been sluggish, largely due to the lack of public-charging infrastructure, where drivers plug in their vehicles and wait for hours for them to charge.
A MarketWatch report found there are just about 250 public charging stations operating in India and just 156,000 EVs were sold in the country in 2019-20–a miniscule fraction of the 231 million vehicles sold in that that period.
It’s much the same everywhere in the world. Maini says anxiety over how far a vehicle can run on a single charge and time required to recharge a battery stops many drivers from going electric.
Ask anyone–from Sydney to San Francisco–and chances are you will hear the same arguments, he laments.
Chetan Maini is no stranger to EVs. In 1996, he founded the Reva Electric Car Company. He launched Reva, an affordable, compact and India’s first electric car, named after his mother. The car was sold in 24 countries. While it fell short of becoming a mainstream form of personal transport, it is now regarded as one of the forerunners for today’s EV revolution.
In his current role, Maini has taken a drastically different approach to powering EVs by applying the idea of shared economy to the battery ecosystem. He’s come up with a pay-as-you-go battery as a service system that is run on a digital platform built on the Microsoft Cloud.
You subscribe to a battery subscription service rather than own just one battery for your EV. You pay to swap batteries in much the same way as you pay to refuel a regular gasoline-powered vehicle at a filling station. Before your current battery loses power you simply stop off at a swapping station and put in a fresh one. This takes about the same time, if not quicker, than filling a vehicle’s tank. That means you don’t have to wait for hours before your EV hits full charge and you don’t have to change your refueling habits an awful lot.
Ultimately, the distance your EV can travel is no longer limited by the amount of charge in one battery. And because you don’t buy the battery upfront, the cost of an EV can come down nearly 50%, Maini says.
“If people are willing to rent homes and cars, I figured they’d be open to renting the battery too,” he says.
Unlike Reva, with SUN Mobility, Maini isn’t focusing on personal cars but rather on shared transportation. He believes this will have a bigger impact in the fight against climate change. “I realized that 85% of India travels on two-wheelers, in three-wheelers and in buses. That’s where most of our energy is used and a major source of pollution. So, to create a real impact on society, I would need to focus on that segment,” Maini says.
And at the heart of his vision is the battery.
The battery as a service system doesn’t just help its customers stay asset-light, since it retains the ownership of the battery, but also provides SUN Mobility to do more with its battery that makes its platform smarter as more people use it.
The batteries as well as the swap stations are connected to the Cloud using Microsoft Azure and numerous built-in solutions like Azure IoT Hub, Azure Data Factory, CosmosDB, Azure Databricks, among others, that transmit battery performance telemetrics back to SUN Mobility.
Customers also have the option of using an app, which connects with their EV’s battery and gives them real-time information of their battery’s performance and the nearest swap station in case the battery is running low.
“We have stations, batteries, and customers that are connected to us. There are over 150 data points coming into our system from each battery,” Maini explains.
With that data, SUN Mobility understands battery utilization, most frequented routes, and peak hours. Using AI and machine learning algorithms, it can predict the potential demand. It can not only optimize its existing network of battery swapping stations, but also plan the location and feasibility of future stations.
An unintended outcome of the battery performance data has enabled SUN Mobility to train EV owners to get more range out of their batteries by tweaking the way they drive.
“After some of our sessions, we’ve seen an improved energy behavior by 15% that can help owners of the vehicles increase their revenue too,” Maini says.
