Amit Gupta, Co-founder and CEO, Yulu Bikes
EVs, technology and new business models will redefine how we think about mobility and vehicle ownership in this decade.
The belief in electric vehicles being the future of mobility is now a given. Whether one looks at vehicle sales data or at Google trends that show a 4-6X increase in searches for EVs in the last 3 years. Many times this potential is just seen in the context of vehicle ownership, where EVs will be a replacement for a conventional fuel vehicle. The exciting truth, however, is that the electric future is about solving mobility needs in new ways suited for our current reality, where the product – EV- is a crucial enabler but not the end goal. With tech, disruptions are going beyond product, and catalyzing new operating and business models that are efficient, effective and relevant for today & future. Let’s see a couple of examples:
Shared Mobility: Urbanization & migration to cities is a megatrend that will continue for the foreseeable future. And most of our urban cities are not designed to handle that sort of influx & infrastructural pressure. Switching to EVs as personal vehicles will help with pollution issues but not congestion. When one considers two factors, one that Electric Vehicles by design are more space efficient than conventional vehicles, and second that EVs are built as much like tech products as automobiles, it opens up new possibilities & use cases. Shared mobility or Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is one such use case where electric 2-wheelers and 3-wheelers with small form factors and technology-enabled back-end can efficiently fulfill the mobility needs of multiple users with a single vehicle. This reduces road footprint per vehicle and per capita vehicle footprint, not to mention the obvious reduction in carbon footprint – thus a multi-level win from pollution to congestion to resource burden on the planet!
Shared mobility also makes mobility affordable, accessible and inclusive. One such beneficiary & early adopter of shared mobility have been the gig worker segment, where in shared mobility services minimized the entry barrier for them to take up delivery jobs and improve their livelihoods. Yulu itself has been able to enable gig delivery workers fulfill 4 million green deliveries every month.
Swappable Battery Service or Battery-as-a-Service (BaaS): One of the biggest barriers with any sort of adoption of electric vehicles is the range anxiety and high cost of battery replacement. While at one end there is continuous innovation taking place on cell chemistry and controlling components like Battery Management System (BMS), on the other hand, operational innovations like Battery-as-a-Service (BaaS) are also lowering adoption barriers. Availability of swappable batteries at Battery Stations minimizes the downtime for shared mobility vehicles thus alleviating the range anxiety and driving adoption of EVs. Technology can give a real-time view of battery demand and allow for automated optimization & alignment of supply. As more EVs get adopted, it drives demand for swappable batteries, thus building the case for a denser battery swapping network. Improved battery availability in turn incentivizes adoption of electric vehicles . BaaS and MaaS are thus both complementary & symbiotic to each other and can over time have network effects.
These are just two examples of how need-based solutions will redefine mobility. Electric future is about thinking from first principles, shedding the legacy of ‘givens’ and charting a path that is holistic, inclusive and sustainable.