Bounce to invest $100mn in EV mfg

New Delhi: Electric scooter rental startup Bounce is making investment of about $100 million (around Rs 742 crore) over the next 12 months across manufacturing of e-scooters and expanding the battery swapping infrastructure, its co-founder and CEO Vivekananda Hallekere said.

Hallekere said the company will unveil its first e-scooter towards the end of the month and deliveries will start by February next year. "We want to make EV mainstream...when we're talking about transition to EVs, we want to make sure millions of vehicles can actually practically look at it and not worry about charging infra, range or battery related issues....We will have two variants and by November-end, we will start pre-booking and deliveries will start February-end," he said. Hallekere added that the company expects upwards of one lakh vehicles to be booked in pre-bookings."There will be two types of pricing - one will be with battery and one without battery. I think we should be able to price it under Rs 70,000 with battery and without battery, we should be able to price under Rs 50,000," he said.

With batteries the cost of the scooter would be a little higher; what this means is a user will be able to charge the batteries at their homes using the portable charger that would be made available to them.

For the without batteries variant, users will be able to use batteries as a service. Bounce would be setting up swappable charging stations across the city, and a user would be able to go to these stations and swap their batteries and move on.

Asked about manufacturing, Hallekere said the company has a plant in Bhiwadi, and is now scouting for a second location.