Ajanta Oreva electric car update

Remember we talked about the Ajantav Oreva electric car several months back? They are back in the news.

That was more than a year back – 13 October, 2008 to be precise – when Ajanta suddenly appeared in the news everywhere, with their plans to produce an electric car at a price less than that of the Tata Nano, the ultra low cost car from Tata Motors. Click for Tata Nano photos

At that time, they had displayed the car at a showroom in Rajkot where it was the cynosure of all eyes.

Suddenly, the same news and plans of Ajanta to manufacture an electric car under the name ‘Ajanta Oreva Super’ is back in the news again. Try as we might, we could not figure out what exactly was new. It was known a year back that they planned to price the Oreva Super under Rs 1 lakh, and the same remains. Even then, it was reported in the media that the price could be as low as Rs 85,000 – and that is their in our story too. The new rash of stories mention the same thing. Did everyone forget last year’s story already?

There is a bit of extra info though. Some are saying that the Ajanta Oreva Super will travel 200-plus kilometers, and that the company plans to ask for government help to keep the prices low.

Whatever that may be, we are not going to be left behind in repeating the story, and if everyone else does it, like hell we will repeat it too!

Anyway, with the reasoning for this repeat story out of the way, let me tell you that it is not easy to produce a workable electric car at anything like Rs 1 lakh. Sure, Ajanta may know something which we don’t and may have something revolutionary in the Oreva Super electric car. But we also know that try as they might, there was no way Maini could price their Reva range of electric cars any cheaper, and their new Reva NXR which will be launched sometime in 2010 is not going to be cheap either. It will most likely cost Rs 3 lakh, and probably quite a bit more. Worldwide, electric cars have always been priced higher than comparable petrol or diesel cars – not lower. Something like that can be done only with help from the government, like how the Chinese government is doing it, going all out to encourage the manufacture of electric cars in the country.

Like we said, either Ajanta knows that the Indian government will do something similar here, or they have found a way of making electric motors and more importantly, battery packs extremely cheaply. If that is the case, we wish them all the best.