Marking the third anniversary of the Narendra Modi government, Union surface transport minister Nitin Gadkari along with chief minister Devendra Fadnavis flagged off taxi aggregator Ola’s e-vehicle (EV) services in the city.
It will be the first in country to have such a service.
A battery charging station for the vehicles was also inaugurated at the airport where the launch function was held.
State government will come up with measures to promote setting up of charging stations.
This is expected to be a major job provider especially to the technically educated youth.
To begin with, Ola will be having four charging centres in the city.
Its services will include taxis, auto-rickshaws and a couple of buses. Car-maker Mahindra and Mahindra is the major ally of Ola and is supplying 200 taxis.
The company also launched its e-autorickshaws on the occasion. Kinetic Green has provided 100 e-rickshaws to Ola.
This is India’s first multi-modal electric vehicle project at the Nagpur Airport Complex.
The pilot project will have a fleet of 200 electric vehicles including taxis, buses, e-rickshaw and autorickshaws.
All these electric-powered public transport vehicles will be fully owned by cab aggregator Ola. For the project Mahindra & Mahindra has manufactured 100 e2o electric taxis.
Similarly, vehicles have been sourced from other manufacturers like Tata Motors, Kinetic, BYD and TVS, among others.
In addition, four electric charging station has also been built by Ola in various places of Nagpur including the Nagpur airport.
Shared and electric vehicles: Know More- As per the NITI Aayog’s recent joint report with Rock Mountain Institute, adoption of electric and shared vehicles could help the country to save $60 billion in fuels while cutting down as much as 1 gigatonne (GT) of carbon emission by 2030
- According to Mahindra & Mahindra, it has made a total investment to the tune of Rs600 crore in technology, products, and plants of e-vehicles.
- The company already has manufactured 2,700 e-vehicles which are running across India which are clocking around 14 million kms per day.
- Ola has stated that it has invested Rs50 crore in the Nagpur initiative and has plans to further scale up its operations by investing $2 billion in e-vehicles across all cities of India.
- It has set an ambitious target of running one million electricity-powered vehicles on the Ola platform by 2020.
