Inferior commercial electric vehicles have given a bad taste to customers: Euler Motors

Electric Vehicle (EV) maker Euler Motors that made its foray into the commercial segment with HiLoad EV, a cargo three-wheeler with one of the highest payload capacity in the segment, says that e-CVs (commercial vehicles) have to work just like their Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) counterparts. "CV customers are extremely performance-oriented. Until and unless it matches a particular performance level and deliver the promised load, you can't use it commercially. So far, commercial EVs have been inferior products and that has given a bad taste to the customers," Saurav Kumar, Founder and CEO, Euler Motors told Business Today.

Kumar said that although brand is a big factor in mind of a customer but at the end of the day, performance is what matters more. Even though legacy players like Tata Motors and Volvo exist in the market, the three-year-old startup has already forged relationships with big e-commerce companies. "When we started in 2018, we wanted to bring an excellent product and not just a product which is electric with a performance better than ICE vehicles. It's not the other way around that people want to buy an EV and will compromise on performance and efficiency. We have already received 2500 orders from e-commerce companies like Flipkart, Bigbasket, Udaan and others," he said. The company plans to take the next one year to expand into FMCG, utilities and pharma sectors.

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One of the things, Kumar says, Euler is focused on is electrifying the entire light CV segment. "One factor that almost all other OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) were missing was the ecosystem. That's where we differentiated ourselves. We have a network of 200 charging systems in Delhi-NCR alone," he said.

The industry is dealing with global semiconductor shortage and raw material price increase. "It has hit our margins. Last year, our factory was shut down for almost five months and our supplies were also shut down. All those challenges deterred us from scaling. But all that is behind us. We're already producing 100 units per month. In one year we want to ramp this up to 1000 vehicles per month," he said.

Kumar expects electrification to penetrate to 25% of the market by FY25. "I see a tipping point by FY25 and then it will grow exponentially. For next 2 years, we'll focus more inwards but after that we will look at exporting opportunities as well," he said.

He wants to Euler's HiLoad and other launches to cover 36 cities within next 2-3 years. The EV comes with 12.4 kWh battery power and a certified range of 151 km on a single charge. Euler's new 'Charge on Wheels' mobile service station will provide charge and service to the vehicle at any given location or breakdown point. The vehicle has been launched with three new advanced charging variants - home or on-board chargers provided with the vehicles; lightning chargers that can give 50 Km charge in 15 minutes and Charge on Wheels. It aims to put 5,000 units on road by FY23 and plans to expand to new markets such as Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune.

Since inception, the company has raised $11.3 Million from ADB Ventures, Blume Ventures, Inventus Capital India, Jetty Ventures, including repeat investments from other investors.

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