Safety is not a checkbox, it is an active choice: Ather's Phokela

'Every new industry has initial roadblocks, and there have been challenges at different stages for the EV industry as well'

India's electric two-wheeler monthly sales stagnated in April 2022 and even went down in May 2022. Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations (FADA) president Vikesh Gulati attributed the slowdown to negative customer sentiment due to several fire incidents involving several EVs and supply chain issues. In this context, Ather Energy's chief business officer Ravneet Phokela spoke to DH's Prathik Desai about how many industry players have sidelined the criticality of safety while making EVs.

Edited excerpts:

We have seen the monthly electric two-wheeler sales go down in April and May 2022. Is the electric two-wheeler transition facing some obstacles due to fears around safety?

Every new industry that comes up has initial roadblocks, and there have been challenges at different stages for the EV industry as well. While the industry is growing at a rapid pace over the last 12 months, it is critical that brands prioritise thorough testing of vehicles before they are launched.

We believe that the EV industry is going mainstream rapidly now, as currently, one out of every 10 scooters sold in India is an EV. However, any incident that puts consumers at risk is unfortunate and must be addressed at the earliest possible.

Read | Want to prevent electric vehicle fires? Follow the data

But there is no question of demand derailing as there are a lot of players in the market who are making good products. We feel that incidences of fire are isolated and hopefully will be resolved soon.

Is this because we see a lot of EV players mushroom and dump substandard quality products in the market?

The EV industry has witnessed continuous support from the government by way of FAME-II policy, state subsidies, and PLI schemes. Because of these, we have multiple brands coming in, wanting to be a part of this growth story. However, not all of them are investing time and energy to build well-designed and well-engineered products with the required level of testing. In the absence of these, there will always be the risk of introducing sub-standard products. This undermines consumer confidence in the entire industry.

What is the role of OEMs here and what is Ather doing to address these hiccups?

OEMs must acknowledge the criticality of sound engineering and implement stringent testing standards. While everyone wants to launch and scale up faster, mastering hardware takes some time. What’s missing right now is enough internal testing standards that OEMs can cycle through to ensure the quality of the battery pack is safe and reliable. It’s a tough journey since comprehensive standards don’t exist yet, and companies have to commit to introducing testing procedures themselves.

Since its inception, we - at Ather - have invested strategically in R&D, engineering, testing, and understanding of the ecosystem. Safety is not a checkbox, it is an active choice.

From a quality perspective, we go through 120 tests at the battery pack level and over 800 tests at the vehicle level. We’ve always believed that quality isn’t a set of specifications but a product development philosophy. We take it very seriously.

What are policymakers doing in this regard?

Just as it is for OEMs, even for policymakers it’s early days. The government has taken a long-term view toward EV businesses, and policies such as FAME and PLI are a reflection of that. The same seriousness can now be seen on the policy side from a safety perspective. The government is looking at these issues very seriously and has been engaging with OEMs to understand these issues better. We can expect a revision in some safety standards at some point soon.

It’s important that the government remains deeply engaged with the OEMs to draw from the learnings that we get and develops these standards.

How to increase customer awareness about the usage guidelines of EV and its infra?

The assumption that EVs need a lot of care and elaborate guidelines to operate is incorrect. A well-designed and well-engineered EV should be simple and intuitive to use, and consumers shouldn’t worry about when to charge, how much to charge, how to ride, etc. The vehicle should do that job. Therefore, on an everyday basis consumers should ride EVs the way they have been riding fossil fuel vehicles.

The only thing that they need to be careful about is not tampering with the battery pack, using authorised chargers and getting vehicles serviced regularly. That’s all. The onus to communicate this lies with the OEMs.

This serves two purposes. Firstly, it builds consumer confidence in EVs. Secondly, it allows them to differentiate between quality and sub-par quality products i.e. if a brand of EV comes with lots of instructions and fine print on usage, it clearly would tell consumers that it isn’t a quality product.