The city on Friday got its first showroom dedicated to electric vehicles (EV) where products of BYD, the Chinese EV conglomerate, will be displayed and sold.
Build Your Dream (BYD), founded in 2003, entered the Indian market with its electric buses in March 2007 and now has expanded to Battery Electric passenger vehicles.
The showroom, called Karini BYD, is located at Tagore Park in Kasba and will display BYD’s portfolio of EVs, including a multipurpose vehicle E6 and an SUV Atto3.
Spread across 2,497sq ft, the showroom has space for four display vehicles and a customer lounge, along with a slow charging point.
A workshop for repairing vehicles, spread across 10,000sq ft and with five work bays, has come up behind the Urbana housing complex. Sanjay Gopalakrishnan, senior vice-president, electric passenger vehicle business, BYD India, said while inaugurating the showroom: “This is our first passenger car dealership in Calcutta with Karini BYD, which will help us penetrate deeper into the Calcutta market. We are currently expanding our dealership network across the nation. We are witnessing the growing EV adoption across key regions in India and are delighted to see that Bengal is intending to set up 1,000 charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs) within the next two years in order to encourage further adoption of eco-friendly automobiles.”
The state witnessed a sharp increase in registration of battery electric vehicles in 2022 with 837 registrations, compared with only 196 in 2021. The BYD Atto3, the company’s e-SUV that has a tested range of 521km, has sold 12 units in the city.
“We are also going to do a campaign among doctors because pan-India, it has been seen that doctors are early adopters of EVs,” said Nitin Himatsingka, director, of Karini BYD.
The dealership will have a slow charger of 7.2KWh that can fully charge a BYD vehicle in 8-10 hours.
“The dealership charger is for inter nal use only,” said Himatsingka. The workshop will have a fast charger of 60KWh capacity that can fully charge a vehicle in one hour which will be accessible to the public.