Switch Mobility India, Ashok Leyland’s electric vehicle (EV) arm, is in talks with an Indian partner for the supply of battery cells. At present, the company imports cells from China.

Stating this at the launch of its new electric bus platform EiV 12 in Chennai on Tuesday, Switch Mobility CEO Mahesh Babu said: “We are not looking into cell manufacturing ourselves. However, the government has announced a production linked incentive scheme for advanced chemistry cell (ACC) battery storage manufacturing. We are in talks with companies who have won the bid for the PLI to supply us our cells. We have already won the PLI for EVs.”

Recently, the central government has approved bids for four companies to avail incentives under the PLI Scheme for ACC battery storages. The companies are Reliance New Energy Solar Limited, Ola Electric Mobility Private Limited, Hyundai Global Motors Company Limited and Rajesh Exports Limited.

Four more companies, including Exide Industries, Amara Raja, Mahindra and L&T have been listed to avail themselves the scheme. An outlay of Rs 18,100 crore has been earmarked by the government towards the scheme, which is intended to establish local manufacturing capacity of 50 GigaWatt Hour (GWh) of ACC and five GWh of Niche ACC capacity. The company, which has an order for 600 e-buses on its new platform EiV 12 plans to build and operate the buses as per State Transport Unit (STU) contracts.

“We are going to provide e-mobility as a service and charge our customers on a per km basis,” said Dheeraj Hinduja, chairman of Switch Mobility Ltd. While the company will have its own charging infrastructure at the bus depot of STUs, who are their customers, it will not get into building charging infrastructure for others. Hinduja said: “There are dedicated companies who are building charging infrastructure, we will not get into that.”

The company has a subsidiary OHM Global Mobility that offers eMobility as a service, leveraging the Hinduja Group’s strength and global network. Switch Mobility is looking at B2B sales for its e-buses though it will also offer its products directly to customers. Asked what its new e-bus would cost, Mahesh Babu said: “A standard floor non-AC 12 meter bus would cost around Rs 1 crore.”