Smooth Ride Podcast: India's EVs need smaller batteries that can be topped up more often, says Exponent Energy

Today's electric vehicle market in India is a rich one - there are many products and many more enthusiastic buyers. But, while the product pie, when it comes to the vehicle itself grows, a fundamental challenge that original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have to contend with is the lack of infrastructure conducive to slow, overnight home charging.

It is a solution that simply doesn't work for a large number of Indian customers who do not have a dedicated parking spot. A defining trait of this market is also its price sensitivity, which means that higher upfront costs for vehicles with bigger batteries put EVs out of reach for many prospective buyers.

In that scenario, how does one truly scale EVs? By building fast-charging systems that can be deployed at scale, without degrading the battery too much, says Exponent Energy.

In this episode of the Smooth Ride podcast, CNBC-TV18’s Alisha Sachdev talks to Arun Vinayak, co-founder of Exponent Energy and also ex-chief product officer at Ather Energy.

Vinayak is trying to make the power grid and EVs talk to each other much more seamlessly than they do today.

"People build technology in isolation. A lot of people would buy charging stations and then set them up, operators who would then wait for customers to come, but then you also have batteries built that take eight hours to charge... if I was to draw an energy flow map, OEMs want complete control on the energy flow between the charger and the vehicle... but energy doesn't seem to flow from the grid to the vehicle seamlessly, and efficiently." Vinayak says.

Tune in to Smooth Ride podcast to find out how Exponent Energy's solutions can be developed at scale and affordably, to solve that problem.