India's southern city of Bengaluru unveiled its first electric vehicle battery swapping station on Tuesday to enable fast discharge and support the last-mile connectivity by encouraging e-vehicles.
The station will enable e-vehicles to run for a longer period of time by swapping the discharged battery in two minutes and travel for another 80 km.
"We plan to create 100 battery swapping stations and this infrastructure is going to be spread across the city," said Sandeep Maini, director of Sun Mobility that provides services to accelerate mass electric vehicle usage in the country.
Inaugurating the battery swapping unit, B.S. Yediyurappa, chief minister of Karnataka state, of which Bengaluru is its political capital, said e-vehicles would reduce pollution and the government would provide a subsidy of 569 U.S. dollars for each one of them.
SUN Mobility currently has a network of 50 battery swapping stations spread across 14 cities through its tie-up with the country's largest oil and gas marketing company -- Indian Oil, plans to ramp it up further to 150 stations in 20 cities by March 2021.
The Indian government, which had launched Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric vehicles (FAME) scheme to provide incentives for purchasing electric vehicles, too has been ramping up its electric vehicle charging infrastructure by planning to install at least one e-charging kiosk at around 69,000 fuel stations across the country.
Editor: Galia
