India's battery-swapping boom hinges on deliveries and rickshaws

Electric motorcycles, scooters and rickshaws are slowly beginning to replace gas guzzling vehicles in India, making the world’s most populous nation a potential key growth market for charging technologies like battery swapping.

Startups, fuel retailers including Indian Oil Corp. and billionaire Mukesh Ambani, the nation’s richest person, have for years discussed ambitions of building out major networks of swapping stations — which allow users to quickly exchange expired batteries for charged ones.

Now growth in sales of battery-powered two-and-three wheelers, favored by tuk-tuk operators, gig workers and for quick-commerce delivery fleets, is finally giving the sector some momentum. Project developers are betting commercial drivers will opt for the speed of switching a depleted pack, rather than risk lost earnings while waiting for conventional recharging.

Battery-powered three-wheelers accounted for 57% of all new sales of those vehicles last year, data compiled by BloombergNEF shows. Electric sales were 6% of the two-wheeler category in 2024, up from less than 1% in 2020. Swapping technology is gaining traction to meet the needs of those markets, according to India’s government, helping efforts to tackle transport-related emissions that constitute about 9% of the country’s total.

“We have barely scratched the surface in terms of what is required,” said Pulkit Khurana, co-founder of Battery Smart, a startup that targets commercial vehicles and has more than 1,400 swapping sites across 40 cities. “EV adoption has definitely been increasing.”

Battery Smart and other leading firms have raised more than $1 billion to deploy on the expansion of swapping networks in India and the technology is emerging as a “crucial solution” for electric two-and-three wheelers, JMK Research & Analytics said in an October report. Sun Mobility, which operates about 800 sites and has partnered with Indian Oil, is also focused on commercial customers.

India is likely to require more than 26,000 swapping kiosks by the end of the current fiscal year, which runs through March 2026, and roughly 111,000 by FY2030, India’s government estimated in a report on the electric vehicle market published last year. So far, there are around 2,600 battery swapping kiosks, with the majority in Delhi, according to the India Battery Swapping Association, an industry group.

Installations have lagged behind the adoption of more traditional public charging infrastructure, with a total of about 26,367 EV charging stations now in place, the Ministry of Heavy Industries said this month.

Taipei-based Gogoro Inc., which in 2023 outlined a $2.5 billion strategy with a local partner to add as many as 15,000 swapping kiosks across India, last year flagged delays to its plans in the country, in part as a result of uncertainty over policy on subsidies for swapping technology. “We continue to believe in the future growth of India's EV ecosystem,” Henry Chiang, Gogoro’s interim chief executive officer said on a November earnings call. Other prospective entrants to the sector have encountered difficulties in raising sufficient funding.

Ambani’s Reliance previously outlined a proposal to produce swappable batteries, and to add infrastructure across major cities. Efforts to establish a swapping network under the Jio-bp Pulse brand have been hampered by a lack of industry standards, Harish Mehta, CEO of the Reliance BP Mobility venture, said last year. Reliance declined to comment further on its battery swapping plans.

India’s slow build-out contrasts with far more rapid adoption in the world’s top EV market China, where the swapping sector is targeting a much wider range of vehicles, including SUVs to semi-trucks.

Electric automaker Nio Inc. has a network of around 3,000 stations across China. During the recent Chinese New Year holiday its busiest site handled 180 replacements a day, the company said last month.

Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., the largest global battery manufacturer, last month agreed to invest as much as 2.5 billion yuan ($340 million) in a project with Nio to further expand deployments. In a separate agreement, CATL and Sinopec — China’s biggest oil refiner — announced plans to build more than 500 swapping stations in the country this year, and to ultimately target 10,000 installations.

For India, growth in battery swapping will be constrained if automakers refuse to share intellectual property with competitors to standardize vehicle and battery designs, which would enable consumers to use different networks, said BNEF analyst Komal Kareer. “The biggest roadblock to adoption of large-scale battery swapping in India is the lack of interoperability between different battery swapping stations,” she said.

Breakthroughs in fast-charging technology could potentially also impact the need for battery swapping, said Ravneet Phokela, chief business officer at Ather Energy, an EV producer with a network of 3,800 chargers across India. BYD Co. last month outlined an electric vehicle platform it says can refuel in five minutes, though the technology is aimed at regular cars rather than two-and-three wheelers.

Still, battery swapping advocates see rapid expansion in India’s quick-commerce and grocery delivery segment as bolstering the case for wider adoption of the technology. Swiggy Ltd., a delivery service for food and other consumer goods, last month outlined a goal to switch to a 100% electric fleet by 2030, while rivals including Eternal Ltd.’s Zomato have similar plans to expand their use of battery-powered vehicles.

“It’s very, very critical that the drivers are able to get their batteries in three minutes to five minutes,” said Abhinav Sinha, head of technology and telecoms at British International Investment, the UK government’s development finance unit and an investor in Battery Smart. “Every minute lost is an earnings loss for them.”