Government’s think-tank Niti Aayog is likely to impose an order to online cab service aggregators like Uber, Ola to convert 40 per cent of their fleet of cars to electric by April 2026, cited Mint.
The recommendation to convert cabs into electric aims to bring down India’s oil imports and curb pollution, so that the country can meet its commitment as part of the 2015 Paris climate change treaty.
Niti Aayog, along with the ministries of road transport, power, renewable energy, and steel, as well as the departments of heavy industries and trade planned to impose such rules on the online cab giants Ola, Uber during a meeting in New Delhi on May 28, Mint reported , citing Reuters.
In order to comply with the pending order, SoftBank Group backed Uber and Ola would need to start converting their fleet as early as next year to achieve 2.5% electrification by 2021, 5% by 2022, 10% by 2023 before hiking it to 40%.
Ola was founded in December 2010 as an online cab services in Mumbai. It is an online transportation network company developed by ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
As of May 2019, Ola was valued at about $6.2 billion. The company has expanded to a network of more than 1,000,000 vehicles across 169 cities.
While, Uber is an American multinational transportation network company which is based-out of San Francisco.
It offers services that include peer-to-peer ridesharing, ride service hailing, food delivery, and a bicycle-sharing system.
Furthermore, Ola have previously tried to operate electric cars in the country, but with little success given inadequate infrastructure and high costs.
Whereas on the global platform, China, which is home to the world’s largest auto market, is already leading the world in electrification by setting tough EV sales targets for car makers and offering incentives to taxi operators to increase their fleet of clean-fuel cars.
The government data suggests that EV sales in India grew three-fold to 3,600 in March 2019 but still account for about 0.1% of the 3.3 million diesel and gasoline cars sold in the country over the period.
China’s electric car sales, meanwhile, rose 62% in 2018 to 1.3 million vehicles.
Also, there are several electric scooter manufacturers in the country including Ather Energy, Hero Electric and Okinawa, there are only two car makers that build and sell electric cars Mahindra & Mahindra and Tata Motors.