Will force battery producers closer to customer. reduce gate keepers and strengthen supply chains. and yes reduces the cost and hence companies can offer batteries for rent
It makes the comparison with an ICE vehicle much more direct. Instead of "cheap car plus expensive fuel" vs. "expensive car plus cheap electricity", it's "car plus fuel" vs. "car plus battery rental".
Also, just thinking about it now, it helps mitigate risk due to fluctuating demand because the cost to own and operate the vehicle scales down more at light usage.
So there is a benefit in converting fixed upfront capital costs into rolling operational costs.
In most developed countries consumers can convert those upfront costs easily and cheaply through loans. In a country like India, loans are much more expensive.
Think of it like using cloud services instead of buying an upfront machine.
Loans for cars are between 5.1% and 7.7% here in the Netherlands.[0] Loans for cars tend to be the cheapest loans after mortgage loans. So 6.9% (Number for 2020) doesn’t appear crazy high to me.
> Statistical Concept and Methodology: Many interest rates coexist in an economy, reflecting competitive conditions, the terms governing loans and deposits, and differences in the position and status of creditors and debtors. In some economies interest rates are set by regulation or administrative fiat. In economies with imperfect markets, or where reported nominal rates are not indicative of effective rates, it may be difficult to obtain data on interest rates that reflect actual market transactions. Deposit and lending rates are collected by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as representative interest rates offered by banks to resident customers. The terms and conditions attached to these rates differ by country, however, limiting their comparability. Real interest rates are calculated by adjusting nominal rates by an estimate of the inflation rate in the economy. A negative real interest rate indicates a loss in the purchasing power of the principal. The real interest rates are calculated as (i - P) / (1 + P), where i is the nominal lending interest rate and P is the inflation rate (as measured by the GDP deflator). In 2009 the IMF began publishing a new presentation of monetary statistics for countries that report data in accordance with its Monetary Financial Statistical Manual 2000. The presentation for countries that report data in accordance with its International Financial Statistics (IFS) remains the same.
Companies that raise prices by doing that will be beaten by companies that don't very quickly. Alternatively, combined with the much weaker law enforcement, "illegal" (I'm not sure about the legality of cracking copy protections here) copies will flourish if it's close to being feasible, which it could be.
Maybe it makes it easier to buy and have cars shipped from outside the country, since batteries are hazardous materials? Or maybe locally-made batteries are cheaper?
The opposite might be the case as well, maybe the cars are easy to manufacture locally but they import the batteries from China or wherever?
Or maybe just decoupling the batteries from the car enables more consumer choice. I wish the article had some hint about the actual motivation for this policy, but I could imagine several scenarios where it could be beneficial.
Not sure how Govt duty works in India but if it is anything like in Australia removing the battery would make the vehicle cheaper and thus reduce the amount of duty paid.
It will allow companies to compete above their scale if they don’t own huge battery operations, and probably force standard battery interfaces / easy customer install. That could make swapping batteries practical depending on the design.
This statement is ignorant at best. What looks like a sound business decision, one which opens up the market for more competition, you are twisting it as a politically motivated corrupt move.
By the logic you are stating, any business or market friendly move by any government will have to be targeted at specific individuals or families.
I really want to understand why there will not be any competition or open interface.
The car company decides the interface. If a rival chooses to create an open interface, and reap the benefits, market forces will ensure that all manufacturers do the same.
Moreover, the number of car manufacturers are limited, but the number of battery companies can expand a lot. Perhaps lead way to investments from overseas.
Imagine Tesla being able to open a battery factory in India, and just sell batteries, without worrying about cars and all.
You are either not Indian or you are ignoring everything to suit your narrative.
The current government has put on a lot of regulation to "protect home grown e-tailers" when Ambani was planning to launch an Amazon competitor.
Flipkart before they sold to Walmart had begged for years to give protection, but none was given, but when JioMart was to be launched, suddenly regulation was changed to benefit local e tailers, major benefactor was JioMart.
> Imagine Tesla being able to open a battery factory in India, and just sell batteries, without worrying about cars and all.
Hahahahahahahaha Due to stuoid red tape, Tesla took Gigafactory plans to China. 70% thungs were need to be locally sourced for starting Tesla factory in India and obviously we don't have the ecosystem.
> By the logic you are stating, any business or market friendly move by any government will have to be targeted at specific individuals or families.
Were you living under a rock when Telecom rules were being constantly flouted by Jio? All rules were specifically created to help Jio. The AGR case crippled telecos except Jio. Jio also has AGR but SC put the decision onto the govt for collecting or not. But others are forced to pay regardless if they go under.
> The car company decides the interface. If a rival chooses to create an open interface, and reap the benefits, market forces will ensure that all manufacturers do the same.
Hahahaha just like "anyone can start a startup in India. They can take Amazon AWS servers and domain from Godaddy and there won't be an issue.
Just like "anyone can apply for a business license and start a manufacturing plant"
You blisfully and maliciously ignore that the entire govt machinery has been working overtime to favour Ambani Adani.
> Moreover, the number of car manufacturers are limited, but the number of battery companies can expand a lot
Yeah and there can be many businesses which you can set up. Sure, all you ought to do is as for a license. Sure, govt won't twist rules to favour JioBattery and JioElectricCar
Protection for them has been around when the previous government was there too. FDI norms were eased only in the fag end of 2012.
Additionally, I agree with protecting home grown e-tailers. Now, perhaps the rules favor Ambani, but breaking up large conglomerates is a different problem.
From the perspective of enacting sound laws and regulation, restricting outside e-tailers and promoting home grown ones is always good, atleast until India is a lot more developed.
> Due to stuoid red tape, Tesla took Gigafactory plans to China.
And thereby ending up supporting an authoritarian regime that mocks human rights, and is actively participating in genocide.
Tesla went to China for cheap labor. Do you think ill-treatment of workers in Chinese factories will be reported by "Independent media" in China?
>anyone can start a startup in India. They can take Amazon AWS servers and domain from Godaddy and there won't be an issue
I don't get it. Yes, anyone can actually make a startup in India, they can hire AWS servers, get domains from GoDaddy and there wont be an issue. I know because I did the same.
>anyone can apply for a business license and start a manufacturing plant
Technically true, but it's still difficult. Even in countries like US, you have to grease a few hands to get things done. Sure, it may be the hands of a Senator, but still you have to do it. I would say the exception is Silicon Valley, but examples like those are few and far between. Even SV spends a lot for lobbying.
>You blisfully and maliciously ignore that the entire govt machinery has been working overtime to favour Ambani Adani.
Far fetched.
>Yeah and there can be many businesses which you can set up. Sure, all you ought to do is as for a license. Sure, govt won't twist rules to favour JioBattery and JioElectricCar
Can you run a business in your country without a license from the govt?
Govt. may twist rules, but the rules currently placed are not twisted. I never said they cannot be twisted in the future.
> Can you run a business in your country without a license from the govt?
As far as I know, businesses don’t require general licences to operate in the United Kingdom.
Licences for certain activities that have an environmental impact may be necessary (significant use of water, potential pollution of air / ground / water, dangerous material handling).
It really depends on a couple of factors: Nature of business, location, regional Govt etc. Corruption at lowest level is the most difficult to remove though because the cabal of Babus have it in their interests to make things as difficult as possible. Your tone is not in keeping up with HN etiquette.
Well, if ease of doing business was so improved under Modi govt like the propaganda accounts pretend online, why is it taking that guy months to setup his manufacturing facility?
Isn't "make in India" rebranded to "local vocal" and " self reliance" the new rebranded cliches which the current government and their workers throw at others?
If the guy really knows how to set up businesses in weeks then let him start a company helping others set up businesses
I know for a fact that unless you pay bribes or you're connected politically, it's very difficult to start a business in India.
> It has been brought to my attention that there was a mistake by an entry level employee.
> So the Revenue Department itself was supposed to get all the NOCs required by going to all those offices, but an entry level employee forgot to add my file to the list of NA’s to be done.
> So now I have been told that all the NOC’s will be taken care of by the Revenue Department, Collector Office.
govt must have kicked all the relevant dept in the ass for this to happen
Indian govt employees don't care what issue you face until you go digital
They recently sent me an electric bill of 1000x of my actual bill by mistake
I called them for weeks nobody picked phone
Raised ticket in their app, nobody bothered
I sent one tweet out -> within one hour I got email from head of electrcity department
They got my email id from my twitter username. I had given them 0 personal details. That's the level of work they do if you go digital
Collector office gives 0 shit about people in general unless they're rich or politically connected
It is laughable to think that to get a single document like birth certificate, we have to pay thousands in bribe but business related NoCs will be automatically taken care by collector office???
The collector is King. His office is the office of the King.
>Also how Jio abused and flouted ALL regulatory things and gave free data calls for over one year when the law explicitly forbids it.
Jio was questioned and it argued that IUC (Interconnect Usage Charges, the minimum charges that are to levied on the user for a voice call on any Indian cellular network, these charges are charges levied by a network for a call that originates in another network but terminates in its network) was relevant to normal mobile calls, and what Jio was providing was essentially data calls, akin to talking on whatsapp, it can give away free calls.
It's not like it was not questioned, or it did not explain. Also other operators have opposed the free calls issue because they earn quite a bit of revenue from IUC charges, which are basically a tax on allowing users on one network to call users on another network.
So you can make the call, whether Jio actually flouted the rules, or did it make it cheap for everyone to make calls in the market.
As an additional point, TRAI, the main Telecom regulating body in India, has slashed the IUC charges by half in 2018 and is set to be completely removed by December 2020
> I also love how you ignore that the govt pressurized telcos to pay AGR dues while Jio was let out of the payment cycle
AGR dues are just that, dues. Money the companies were supposed to pay, but did not and accumulated the dues. Jio was a new entrant and has significantly lesser dues (195 crores), compared to other players (Airtel, which has been in the market for decades, owes about 44000 crores). All of them were given a time period of 10 years to make staggered payments, payments that they were supposed to pay, but ignored. That is a huge loss for the country. Even in the courts, the companies did not fight about dues, they fought about whether they were responsible for past pending dues on spectrum, that they purchased from other companies.
All companies went to court, when they were asked to pay past dues of spectrum purchased by them recently. Essentially they were asked to pay for the dues accrued on the spectrum, they recently purchased from failing companies.
>And yet you totally neglect that when flipkart begged for speific ecommerce protection none was provided
Flipkart opposed relaxing rules related to FDI norms and asked for specific protections for e-comerce. The rules were relaxed nevertheless.
>Only when Ambani reacted to launch JioMart was the protection avoided
I guess you meant to say 'provided". I would like to know what specific protections were provided to JioMart?
>Well, Modi govt put red tape so much that Tesla chose to go to a country which blatantly copies IP and patents.
>Things are that bad.
I am curious about this also. As far as I remember, Tesla never showed any interest in building a factory in India. However, what exactly are the "red tape so much" that you are talking about?
> , Tesla never showed any interest in building a factory in India. However, what exactly are the "red tape so much" that you are talking about?
All you have to do is Google. Did you do that?
There are countless tweets and articles about Elon himself replying to Indian Tesla fans that due to Modi govt's inflexible regulation, he can't start a factory in India.
I didn't bother to read the other wall of text since you don't show a propensity to finding out facts which don't fit in your narrative.
> Considering that the ruling party is BJP (equivalent to US Republicans)
There are many things wrong with the BJP, but they are not really equivalent to the Republican Party. This is a lazy comparison at best, disingenuous at worst. Their economic, environmental policies and even social issues are completely different than the Republicans.
Your statement is lazy comparison, disingenuous at worst.
Economic policies? Oh, do you mean the disasterous butchering of Indian Economy which took it to a 8yr low? Or do you mean the 45yr high unemployment level? Or the pathetic rollout of GST when they kept changing rules everyday or the disasterous demonization which screwed up entire informal sector?
Environmental policy?
Is this the same policy wherein the BJP is about to remove all protections provided to Environment by law? It would made it very easy for companies to take out a forest?
Or are you referring to the million trees cut down under the pretense of "development"
Or do you refer to the butchering of part of Arey forest for a metro car shade in Mumbai?
Social issues you say?
So you mean the blatant attempt of destroying Secular fabric of this nation by bringing CAA NRC?
Or do you refer to the police state wherein they arrest everyone who dares oppose them on sedition? Or the arrest-but-no chargesheet-file? Or the malicious rearrests after courts have let the dissenters go?
You are just listing newspaper headline items, I'm not sure how they are relevant when comparing BJP with the Republican Party. Let's actually talk about the policies and contrast. Some of the government schemes announced (and in progress) would make Modi right at home in a Bernie Sanders town hall meeting rather than being similar to the Republicans. Just off the top of my head:
* Modi doubled down on Congress' NREGA scheme for providing guaranteed 100 days of pay to rural workers, whether they worked or not.
* Introduced direct cash transfers to farmers.
* Various farm loan waivers, especially some of the BJP-led state governments.
* Announced a free healthcare under National Health Protection scheme.
* Free housing, electricity and LPG gas connections for the poor.
* Introduced long term capital gains tax in 2019.
* Non-opposition to LGBT rights. I say "non-opposition" because they don't champion it like the Democrats, but are neutral since it's not a big ticket item in Indian society or politics. They passed a bill to prohibit discrimination against transgender persons last year (but there is some controversy surrounding it [1]). Again, a big no-no for the Republican Party.
* Massive push for renewable energy - India doubled its renewable energy capacity in 3 years and on track to triple it in the following 4 years [2]. 47 GW (45% of all under development) coal projects was cancelled just in 2019 [3]. Good luck trying to get the climate change denying Republicans to do this.
BJP's economic polices are as socialist as they come [4]. None of this would fly with the Republicans. That's how they are different - in actual policy positions.
True that. I thought you were yet another BJP troll let loose on me.
Yes, BJP is primarily acting like a socialist party.
Also I didn't say equal to Republican, I said equivalent as in both parties are conservative and they both work exclusively for their billionaire donors while pretending to care for common people.
There is a thin line between favouring crony capitalists and ignoring general public and working exclusively for your cronies.
Exclusively is what both republicans and BJP are experts at doing.
Indian economy is screwed and yet Ambani is getting richer day by day. Adani recently took 74% stake in Mumbai airport
All govt companies are now bankrupt because BJP wants to favour their cronies. BSNL is on the verge of collapse because BJP considers Jio as the "official govt telecom company"
> BSNL is on the verge of collapse because BJP considers Jio as the "official govt telecom company"
BSNL had it coming with years of mismanagement, high employee costs and inability to upgrade infrastructure. Though, you could certainly argue competition from Jio accelerated it with its predatory pricing.
BSNL's downfall has nothing to do with Jio's aggressive policies which violated the law but the law was twisted so that Jio can carry on.
BSNL was systematically destroyed by Modi govt to favour Jio.
If BSNL was mismanaged for years then why did it collapse only when Govt moved all official contracts to Jio rather than BSNL?
WHY is Modi govt not giving money to BSNL? almost all Pune office of BSNL has taken voluntery retirement. All of them went away in poof one week they filled people by hiring daily contractors
If you don't believe that BSNL was systematically destroyed then I have a bridge to sell you.
Maybe don't go easy on being ignorant on facts. Maybe read news.
Last I checked they announced a Rs 74,000 crore bailout package by way of BSNL-MTNL merger. I don't know what the status of that is, but that doesn't sound like "not giving money to BSNL".
> It seems like you're pretending to be neutral while spreading false information by twisting facts.
Er, where is the false information? The bailout package announcement is real. Delloite are the contracted consultants for making the BSNL-MTNL merger happen. As I said, I have no idea what the status is. If the execution is botched (and this government has a history of poor execution), feel free to criticize. But it seems like you are making false claims throughout this thread (no sources for anything), only to then shift goalposts when you're proven wrong with sources.
> so that their troll armies can refer to the announcement
Please keep this kind of rhetoric out of HN and discuss in good faith. This isn't Reddit.
I agree with the idea that Republicans are extremely different than right wing parties worldwide.
However, they are no less socialist than anyone else. The only difference is Republican socialism flows upwards.
I mean, what could be more socialist than demanding a foreign company he sold and deciding which limited sets of companies is allowed to buy it. And we don’t even need to get into the outright bribery where they are demanding a cut of the transaction.
That behavior, even without the open corruption, is beyond what most major center left parties in the world are proposing now that Corbyn does not lead UK’s Labour.
Yeah. The Modi government/BJP is equivalent to right wing authoritarian governments around the world. Tories in the UK, Netanyahu’s government in Israel, etc.
The Republican Party is on its own little island far far away from any other normal political party in the world. For example, the Republican Party is the only major democratic political party in the entire world that denies the existence of anthropogenic climate change. There are major right wing political parties worldwide that may claim the costs of doing anything exceeds the benefits or that we need to wait for better solutions, etc but no major party denies the basic scientific fact of it happening the way the Republicans do.
There is also other stuff like the prevalence of young earth creationism, the overt religiosity, the lack of any economic principles (e.g. just see their rhetoric on deficits when there is a Democrat in charge vs what they do when they are in charge) etc that sets them apart from major right wing political parties worldwide.
> lack of any economic principles (e.g. just see their rhetoric on deficits when there is a Democrat in charge vs what they do when they are in charge) etc that sets them apart from major right wing political parties worldwide.
You literally described six mismanaged years of BJP in India
They did EVERYTHING which they opposed during Congress's time
They opposed FDI when in opposition
And now they approved FDI in everything including defence manufacturing
There even was a site called modilies.com containing all such listing of things he opposed as CM which he is doing as PM
It decouples innovations between car and battery technology.
Car manufacturers will only innovate batteries to the extent that fits their pricing and performance models.
With the decoupling, the market for batteries will expand and different types of batteries for different performance / technologies will come into picture. But by making it legal to sell cars without batteries, it obliges car manufacturers to come up with data, certifications, technology transfer systems, etc to legally allow battery manufacturers to support their cars. This reduces a lot of paperwork and other red tape. For example, insurance. If you buy a car and change it's battery, your insurance provider may object for coverage or charge you extra for after market modifications.
So, while the user has to buy the battery, he will have more choice.
Also, new battery technology and new battery companies can grow with more ease.
There are some downsides to this approach. Many vehicle dynamics and safety tests are conducted for the vehicle as a whole. So it has to be seen how those issues are addressed. However, since the location of the battery, in a given vehicle is fixed, I think coming up with a framework of certifications or standardized parameters for battery physicals should be easy.
I think this law is primarily aimed at taxis and auto-rickshaws in many urban areas. Most of India's middle class still drives bikes and scooters. However, there are many taxis and autos. And these are usually very polluting. Shifting to an EV is usually more cost effective for the driver. The cost per kilometer of travel is lesser in EVs.
In India, the most common vehicles are not cars, but mopeds/scooters. Unlike cars it is perfectly feasible to have battery swapping as your main/only form of refueling, and have the customers subscribe to your battery swap infrastructure instead of buying the battery. Its far more convenient for customers since you never need to wait to charge your vehicle, and you don't need to worry about having charging stations near your work or at home. This is precisely what gogoro, the most popular e-scooter company in Taiwan does.
I see it as helping adoption by alleviating battery replacement anxiety.
If the vehicle doesn't even come with a battery and you're able to acquire a standard battery from any number of competing vendors, you're a whole lot less afraid of buying an EV and not being able to replace its battery in five years because it's been obsoleted by the OEM.
> The amendment will allow OEMs to sell batteries separately or with subscription models, and will also encourage private players to join in as well, boosting the grass-roots of the electric ecosystem.
So it's about allowing competition in battery providers and allowing battery leasing. This is a good move because not only does it open up the industry and hopefully drive overall prices down, but it decouples the prices of vehicle and "fuel", making it easier to compare directly with petrol-powered vehicles.
Also, by incentivizing vehicle designs with removable (and thus swappable) batteries, it makes taxis and other high demand use cases more practical without needing widespread fast charging infrastructure.
While allowing competition for batteries is a good idea, I fear that it'll go the way of printer ink cartridges or the Keurig.
Sure, technically you can get a battery from whomever you like for your car so long as it's compatible - but the Manufacturer has put DRM on the battery interface. All in the name of safety, you see - they don't want to see their cars catching fire on national news because of some shoddy batteries.
However what it'll mean is that unless the battery maker is willing to fork out a large chunk of cash per battery to the car maker, the car maker won't certify it as compatible.
> While allowing competition for batteries is a good idea, I fear that it'll go the way of printer ink cartridges or the Keurig.
That came to mind also, though "OEMs to sell batteries separately or with subscription models" might just of covered that aspect.
Batteries are already standard cell sizes, it's the packaging of those cells that makes things interesting. Now will they end up standardising that aspect across cars is the crux here. Certainly be interesting how this all pans out.
I think the point of this rule is that the manufacturer can't put a DRM on the car. India is trying to trying to set up electric cars like it has dealt on mobile devices - the sim is separately sold from the device and any sim from any company can be paired with any mobile phone.
I didn't see anything forbidding DRM.
Even if DRM itself wasn't permitted, there's nothing stopping the manufacturers patenting some aspect of the battery system.
At a guess, the connector would be the cheapest and easiest place to come up with some patentable novelty that doesn't actually matter. It could be physical OR an electronic interface of some kind. Then it's a case of "Well, yes, you can license the connector design... for $xxx per unit"
DRM stuff does not really work outside US, especially in India. Most electric vehicles here are ebikes or small three wheel lorries. Many use recycled laptop batteries or even lead car batteries.
Indeed, there would likely come a time where bad actors, rent seekers in financial industrial complex, attempt to consolidate with purpose of increasing prices. It may not come to such a time of Tesla and their battery business reach a scale they're presently projected for; this scenario of course may also require attention for counterpoint mechanisms to sway potential abuse.
Unless they are going to dictate a lot of technical details this ignores a number of safety concerns. Electric vehicles typically design safety in at the vehicle level. There may be several high voltage capacitors in the system which can kill you in an instant if not properly discharged. Manufacturers also consider things like severed cables in an accident and plan for that when considering how to dissipate that charge in different scenarios.
It will get sorted I'm sure, but there are often technical details that change when changes like this are made.
They will even need to standardize connectors and possibly protocols to really do this well.
In the Prius III (the only one I personally worked on) there is a safety plug which cuts the voltage. It's actually pretty simple once you start to understand how the system works.
Better place, An Israeli startup tried electric cars with battery swapping and failed miserably.
So, decoupling battery from the car and allowing better competition in the battery space might fly. Car makers need not be bothered by the battery tech and can just focus on making good electric motors, since most of the car parts are from other vendors anyways.
However, the decoupling might not be all that rosy as Musk has demonstrated that safety is best achieved with total vertical integration. Even Tesla tried battery swapping but gave up.
This might work really well in 2 wheelers though. The existing bike manufacturers won't have to retool their factories by much to replace the engine with a motor and the batteries can be probably swapped in and out of the under seat space or something like that.
Removable batteries for cars has a LOT of bulk and weight to deal with. More a "service interval" like action rather than a daily event. Still handy to have but not nearly so much incentive in the market.
But for motorbikes and scooters, maybe it could work. Especially small city scooter(125cc equivalent) work.
Mind you, I am picturing a dystopian future whereby all the UberEats-like delivery scooter people keep getting their batteries stolen...
Israel is full of electric bikes with removable batteries that you can bring in with you into the coffee shop and charge while you eat/drink. Also makes the bike less desirable for thieves (another big problem).
Theft is a major issue and all anti-theft measures will result in increased cost. One possible option is for the battery manufacturers to make the stolen batteries useless by short circuiting them or something like that. So there is total deterrence against theft.
It's not difficult to imagine a battery that is digitally tied to a particular vehicle or key fob. Please don't make dangerous suggestions like short circuiting though. Nobody wants their house to burn down just because someone had a "cute" idea.
I wonder how much it'd cost for them to license a tiny part of the low-frequency radio spectrum? The one for BBC Radio 4 covers most of the country with a single transmitter for example, using this old-school technology you could report your battery's serial number as stolen (with the appropriate authentication) and the company would broadcast a signal to short it out. This would be much harder to defeat than an internet-based solution I think.
It's not clear that Tesla's was more than a compliance effort. California had a "fast-fueling" zero-emissions vehicle credit and by enabling battery swaps, Tesla qualified. California changed the incentives and Tesla shut down it's swapping efforts.
I'd love to know what the decision making process was, and if they were ever serious about rolling it out.
My assumption is that when designing the Model S, it wasn't yet clear that charging speeds would eventually become good enough that it made battery swap unnecessary.
Tesla wrote the playbook for a modern EV, so it's easy to look back in retrospect and assume they had a single clear vision, but battery swapping could easily have looked like a credible path back then.
Although I'm pretty sure that by the time they publicly announced it they knew it was a dead end, and its only use was publicity and ZEV credits.
> An Israeli startup tried electric cars with battery swapping and failed miserably.
I believe it’s a killer flaw to over-interpret the failure of a novel technology and/or business model.
Yesterday’s miserable failure may be tomorrow’s runaway success given some refinements or the better availability of component technology and/or the readiness of the market.
Over the decades I’ve experienced a few - one of the more memorable examples for me is the Apple Newton. A pretty miserable failure at the time. Fast forward a couple of decades, and most of us are now carrying the logical evolution of that device in our pockets, whether it be made by Apple or others.
totally, not debating that battery swap won't work for cars in the future but as of now, it probably won't.
Also, the changing business model resulting from the battery and the vehicle separation will most certainly lead to innovation in batteries. So cars can innovate on motors while battery makers can innovate on batteries and who knows a third market might emerge for those battery swapping robots.
It'll be interesting to watch out how this will plays out - Tesla as the all integrated electric vehicle (Apple) v/s the rest of the industry which might go the independent vehicle/battery/swap robot (wintel) route.
Indian market is very different, very cost conscious. Also better place had a problem in the sense that it was 5-7 years too early, the concept was always a good one. NIO's success in China is demonstrating the same.
Better places tried to roll that out in denmark where I live.
I think the failiure was down to tree or four things:
- electric cars were still a novelty
- low range, very few and unreliable battery changing stations.
- expensive cars.
- Only one model, a saloon car which is one of the least sold car types in denmark. People mostly go for microcars or stationwagon type cars plus SUV's.
BetterPlace was a rent seeker that lobbied to limit ability to use other service providers including for example the home charging station. They lobbied to have the home chargers regulated so that only they could provide it.
They also spent money on useless operations and had serious internal politics. They were financed and controlled by a known rent seeker and shouldn't be taken as an example for what the technology can or cannot do
It is very well thought out on many levels and will also enable electric car markers to enter the market without the burden costs in battery investment. That with competition for battery market thru choice, ability to repair/replace the batteries alone a big thing. So many things going for this, kudos to India, I hope other countries follow suit.
>Also, by incentivizing vehicle designs with removable (and thus swappable) batteries, it makes taxis and other high demand use cases more practical without needing widespread fast charging infrastructure.
That is a big plus as allows more control when batteries are topped up, so enables the ability to shift demand to off-peak usage and equally add grid storage/supply for grid stability thruout the day in a battery form factor that's competition driven price-wise. Lot's of potential here and the first step in that direction has been made.
> and equally add grid storage/supply for grid stability thruout the day in a battery form factor that's competition driven price-wise
That's a really good point! As India builds more intermittent renewables, there's an opportunity for independent storage to help stabilize the power grid that battery rental suppliers would be well placed to take advantage of. (Assuming their regulations keep up with this idea... it's been so painful watching Australia's energy regulators fumble their way towards the concept that widespread grid-tied batteries might be a GOOD thing.)
I bought a Prius once because I thought I was clever and I was going to get a great car with great gas mileage. I read on the Internet that despite what everyone says about the battery that it is actually very rare for it to die. Well... turns out either that's not true or I got unlucky. My battery died. Not only did it die, but it died an hour and a half way from my house... So during the height of rush our in stop and go traffic my Prius, while it would still run, would take forever to accelerate. I wound up just driving home with my hazard lights on.
When I finally made it home the first thing I did is look it up to see how much it would cost to replace the battery on my car. Well, turns out that when I was trying to replace it (was a few years ago) that the only people authorized to change it was the Toyota dealer. The Toyota dealer would only replace the entire battery though, and that battery was $3,000 to replace. There was no freakin way I was going to pay that.
So after some Internet sleuthing and lots of research I discovered that it is actually possible to replace an individual module in the battery(The battery is actually wired in series of 18 modules). Granted, you would have to replace another one soon if the battery modules weren't balanced with each other. To balance the battery modules though you had to use some funky looking third party charger that wasn't really designed for it and in order to do it in a reasonable amount of time it would cost about $500 because you would have to buy multiple chargers, plus the cost of however many dead modules you had. Then you had to ensure that you could safely remove a 250lbs battery, without shocking yourself with 3,000 volts of electricity. I wound up just replacing the one cell to see how long it would take for the battery to give up on me. That saved my recharging the modules, but the rest of the work I had to do still.
So $34 and 6 months later and I was still driving it. It was only when my wife actually didn't change the oil in the car that it wound up dying (a story for another day).
Which leads me to my point. Toyota had engineered the car so that if there was any battery failure there was no ability for the user to really upgrade it without risking serious injury of death, unless you know... they spend two weeks reading about it and learnings in the ins and outs (which I did). Considering that the battery was ALREADY modular it would have cost them a tiny bit of effort to ensure that users could easily do this themselves. Not only that, but they insisted that the entire battery needed to be replaced because they were also too afraid to allow even their technicians to touch it. All of this could have been prevented if a law like the above existed.
The battery in a Prius seems to be around 300V[1], which is plenty lethal. Most electric vehicles have lethal battery voltages, typically around 200-400V.
It seems a pretty bad deal to spend 2 weeks of your spare time to read about some funky battery, then risk your life fixing it and all that for less than $3,000. Unless you enjoy doing this kind of stuff or really short on money and rich on time.
It was a calculated risk. And I was, and still am, very poor. 3,000 is basically an entire months pay for me at this point. Back then it was two months pay. I don't work as a programmer, yet (knock on wood). So paying 3k is basically out of the question.
Why not just allow both and not be restrictive? And keep the choice to consumers and manufacturers. Why not just focus on safety standards of the vehicle and batteries
Just imagine a country that did not allow you to buy a laptop with pre-fitted batteries. A heavy user like me would like a standardized external battery in that case, but many won't. The limitations on the design are huge. I am not arguing against swappable batteries.
With electric cars being approx 2 times costlier in India, I do not think taxis would be a use-case for that. They are a business and they need to look at practical cost-benefit and they will not be the first ones to jump to electric.
On top of that only 5-10% of India's population can afford to be generally environment friendly in an impactful way. And only 1 or max 2% can afford the huge upfront premium on electric cars.
The Indian government needs to create less restrictive and less taxing policies towards electric but it creates policy quagmires, has a very small tax base and hence is tax-greedy overall.
Wait, the OP news source is a strict liberalization of policy. When you say "why not allow both" what is the thing that you believe is not allowed and why do you believe that it is not?
How does it pass safety regulations without an integral part of the vehicle? How do they publish performance data if it can't move on itself?
Not that those are insurmountable obstacles, but a law that says "You can't claim your vehicle does 200 miles on a charge if it doesn't include a battery" or "You can't claim your vehicle is safe in a frontal crash because the battery absorbs some of the energy except you're not including the battery" don't seem unreasonable.
There is no specific regulation, other than selling incomplete products as completed products.
For example, its perfectly legal to advertise a car as saying its a car without engine. You just cannot advertise it in such a way that the viewer thinks he can buy the car and just enjoy it.
How's this any different than the situation with PC parts? You have CPU and GPU manufacturers advertising their products with images of games being played, yet you need to buy half a dozen other parts before you can start gaming.
Imagine - a software and hardware standard developed for batteries that allows generic installation/communication between the vehicle and the battery pack.
And the realization that EV's may be multi-decade investments (and need to be high quality to last) if the batteries are replaced each decade. Electric motors don't wear down with kms like petrol motors do - how often have you seen luxury cars wrecked where the interiors lasted a lot longer than the driveline (pretty often i.e. BMW Audi)?
Why shouldn't people be able to buy high quality interiors and put new batteries in them.
This is nice, if the battery spec is standardised and 3rd party battery makers can directly supply to the end users; not just to the OEMs. Barriers to entry for power delivery systems should be brought down as well incl. Smart Power Grids so that startups can enter the space in order to improve power delivery to the end users, at the end of the day economics of owning an EV in India should be favourable for the consumer to invest in it.
How long before we have cars exploding because someone, somewhere, tried cutting corners and jerry-rigged a DIY battery in their car to save some money?
Actually in Indian market the primary target audience i believe is 2 and 3 wheelers, which have smaller batteries and shorter ranges. China has already converted most of such fleet to electric. Due to lack of capability in producing batteries locally in India as well as geopolitical issues hampering China imports and dependency, this is one policy designed to make adoption cheaper.
Indian ICE manufacturers never had the vision to create an EV industry at home, they are very reactive in nature. Only Tata, Mahindra have some capability and most of the 2 wheeler manufacturers were importing almost all the important components from China.
This is unnecessary as it will force perfectly usable vehicles to be scrapped and it would come at a huge cost to the environment.
Ideally it would have been good to allow this change for internal combustion engines as well so as to allow ICE cars to swap out their engines for more fuel efficient engines.
15 year old cars in India are tinboxes, with very little margin for safety. No airbags for eg. Maybe once we actually start manufacturing cars that are safe, we can turn this off after a decade.
You can still buy new cars off the lot right now without airbags or any safety features. And of course, trucks and commercial vehicles rarely come with these safety features in any case.
Also, this scrapping law applies even for vehicles with all safety features.. including from companies such as Mercedes, BMW, VW etc.
I would think that it makes perfect sense to scrap vehicles - no matter how young/old, if it seriously fails an inspection or if the pollution levels from the vehicle is too bad - and there are existing "fitness" tests for this, and so why scrap vehicles which are well maintained?
The new law that is being put into motion requires that all petrol and diesel vehicles be scrapped in 15 years no matter their condition. So if you have BMW in mint condition and serviced regularly - but it is 15 years old? well, tough luck, it won't be allowed to ply on the roads.
I've seen Indian cars turning into money black holes in 50000 kilometers. And a BMW towed to service for more than a month since it took a ubiquitious pothole wrong. I recall seeing one Porsche and three Benzes of more than 10 years age. Its the budget bikes (8-14 hp, carb) and cars (35-70 hp) which are likely to be running for 15 years, maybe simple equipment forgives rough roads better.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 64.9 ms ] threadAlso, just thinking about it now, it helps mitigate risk due to fluctuating demand because the cost to own and operate the vehicle scales down more at light usage.
So there is a benefit in converting fixed upfront capital costs into rolling operational costs.
In most developed countries consumers can convert those upfront costs easily and cheaply through loans. In a country like India, loans are much more expensive.
Think of it like using cloud services instead of buying an upfront machine.
See https://tradingeconomics.com/india/real-interest-rate-percen... for real (ie inflation adjusted) interest rates in India.
They seem to be above 5% per year. That's high compared to the rest of the world. (Though I wouldn't say extremely high.)
[0]: https://www.ing.nl/particulier/lenen/jouw-leendoel/autolenin...
It's probably some kind of institutional lending, which tends to be much lower.
Trading Economic say they took the data from the World Bank.
See https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FR.INR.RINR?locations=I... for a comparison of real interest rates between the Netherland and India accordind to the World Bank.
The Word Bank gives a bit of background:
> Statistical Concept and Methodology: Many interest rates coexist in an economy, reflecting competitive conditions, the terms governing loans and deposits, and differences in the position and status of creditors and debtors. In some economies interest rates are set by regulation or administrative fiat. In economies with imperfect markets, or where reported nominal rates are not indicative of effective rates, it may be difficult to obtain data on interest rates that reflect actual market transactions. Deposit and lending rates are collected by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as representative interest rates offered by banks to resident customers. The terms and conditions attached to these rates differ by country, however, limiting their comparability. Real interest rates are calculated by adjusting nominal rates by an estimate of the inflation rate in the economy. A negative real interest rate indicates a loss in the purchasing power of the principal. The real interest rates are calculated as (i - P) / (1 + P), where i is the nominal lending interest rate and P is the inflation rate (as measured by the GDP deflator). In 2009 the IMF began publishing a new presentation of monetary statistics for countries that report data in accordance with its Monetary Financial Statistical Manual 2000. The presentation for countries that report data in accordance with its International Financial Statistics (IFS) remains the same.
However, renting allows for lower income earning sections of the society better access to EVs
Companies that raise prices by doing that will be beaten by companies that don't very quickly. Alternatively, combined with the much weaker law enforcement, "illegal" (I'm not sure about the legality of cracking copy protections here) copies will flourish if it's close to being feasible, which it could be.
The opposite might be the case as well, maybe the cars are easy to manufacture locally but they import the batteries from China or wherever?
Or maybe just decoupling the batteries from the car enables more consumer choice. I wish the article had some hint about the actual motivation for this policy, but I could imagine several scenarios where it could be beneficial.
There won't be any tight competition or open interface, it'll be a monopoly by the two business groups who support him the most.
By the logic you are stating, any business or market friendly move by any government will have to be targeted at specific individuals or families.
I really want to understand why there will not be any competition or open interface.
The car company decides the interface. If a rival chooses to create an open interface, and reap the benefits, market forces will ensure that all manufacturers do the same.
Moreover, the number of car manufacturers are limited, but the number of battery companies can expand a lot. Perhaps lead way to investments from overseas.
Imagine Tesla being able to open a battery factory in India, and just sell batteries, without worrying about cars and all.
The current government has put on a lot of regulation to "protect home grown e-tailers" when Ambani was planning to launch an Amazon competitor.
Flipkart before they sold to Walmart had begged for years to give protection, but none was given, but when JioMart was to be launched, suddenly regulation was changed to benefit local e tailers, major benefactor was JioMart.
> Imagine Tesla being able to open a battery factory in India, and just sell batteries, without worrying about cars and all.
Hahahahahahahaha Due to stuoid red tape, Tesla took Gigafactory plans to China. 70% thungs were need to be locally sourced for starting Tesla factory in India and obviously we don't have the ecosystem.
> By the logic you are stating, any business or market friendly move by any government will have to be targeted at specific individuals or families.
Were you living under a rock when Telecom rules were being constantly flouted by Jio? All rules were specifically created to help Jio. The AGR case crippled telecos except Jio. Jio also has AGR but SC put the decision onto the govt for collecting or not. But others are forced to pay regardless if they go under.
> The car company decides the interface. If a rival chooses to create an open interface, and reap the benefits, market forces will ensure that all manufacturers do the same.
Hahahaha just like "anyone can start a startup in India. They can take Amazon AWS servers and domain from Godaddy and there won't be an issue.
Just like "anyone can apply for a business license and start a manufacturing plant"
You blisfully and maliciously ignore that the entire govt machinery has been working overtime to favour Ambani Adani.
> Moreover, the number of car manufacturers are limited, but the number of battery companies can expand a lot
Yeah and there can be many businesses which you can set up. Sure, all you ought to do is as for a license. Sure, govt won't twist rules to favour JioBattery and JioElectricCar
Protection for them has been around when the previous government was there too. FDI norms were eased only in the fag end of 2012.
Additionally, I agree with protecting home grown e-tailers. Now, perhaps the rules favor Ambani, but breaking up large conglomerates is a different problem.
From the perspective of enacting sound laws and regulation, restricting outside e-tailers and promoting home grown ones is always good, atleast until India is a lot more developed.
> Due to stuoid red tape, Tesla took Gigafactory plans to China.
And thereby ending up supporting an authoritarian regime that mocks human rights, and is actively participating in genocide.
Tesla went to China for cheap labor. Do you think ill-treatment of workers in Chinese factories will be reported by "Independent media" in China?
>anyone can start a startup in India. They can take Amazon AWS servers and domain from Godaddy and there won't be an issue
I don't get it. Yes, anyone can actually make a startup in India, they can hire AWS servers, get domains from GoDaddy and there wont be an issue. I know because I did the same.
>anyone can apply for a business license and start a manufacturing plant
Technically true, but it's still difficult. Even in countries like US, you have to grease a few hands to get things done. Sure, it may be the hands of a Senator, but still you have to do it. I would say the exception is Silicon Valley, but examples like those are few and far between. Even SV spends a lot for lobbying.
>You blisfully and maliciously ignore that the entire govt machinery has been working overtime to favour Ambani Adani.
Far fetched.
>Yeah and there can be many businesses which you can set up. Sure, all you ought to do is as for a license. Sure, govt won't twist rules to favour JioBattery and JioElectricCar
Can you run a business in your country without a license from the govt?
Govt. may twist rules, but the rules currently placed are not twisted. I never said they cannot be twisted in the future.
As far as I know, businesses don’t require general licences to operate in the United Kingdom.
Licences for certain activities that have an environmental impact may be necessary (significant use of water, potential pollution of air / ground / water, dangerous material handling).
My brother runs a mon-n-pop store, selling stationery items.
Getting a business license took 1 day, one application and renewed every year online. Cost is about 10 USD per year.
I know many in my neighborhood that don't even have that.
Majority of the retailers have a simple license, usually obtained very quickly from local municipal corporation.
I can start a company for consulting, trade, retail, etc, with the help of a legal counsel and a bit of paperwork in about a couple of weeks.
Please help the guy who wrote this article set his business up
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24106545
It took him months and he is still waiting for the numerous licenses and approvals and signatures to get around the red tape
I love how you casually slip in fake propaganda without sounding like a blatant IT cell account
Isn't "make in India" rebranded to "local vocal" and " self reliance" the new rebranded cliches which the current government and their workers throw at others?
If the guy really knows how to set up businesses in weeks then let him start a company helping others set up businesses
I know for a fact that unless you pay bribes or you're connected politically, it's very difficult to start a business in India.
> It has been brought to my attention that there was a mistake by an entry level employee.
> So the Revenue Department itself was supposed to get all the NOCs required by going to all those offices, but an entry level employee forgot to add my file to the list of NA’s to be done.
> So now I have been told that all the NOC’s will be taken care of by the Revenue Department, Collector Office.
Doubt it's a systematic problem.
govt must have kicked all the relevant dept in the ass for this to happen
Indian govt employees don't care what issue you face until you go digital
They recently sent me an electric bill of 1000x of my actual bill by mistake
I called them for weeks nobody picked phone Raised ticket in their app, nobody bothered
I sent one tweet out -> within one hour I got email from head of electrcity department
They got my email id from my twitter username. I had given them 0 personal details. That's the level of work they do if you go digital
Collector office gives 0 shit about people in general unless they're rich or politically connected
It is laughable to think that to get a single document like birth certificate, we have to pay thousands in bribe but business related NoCs will be automatically taken care by collector office???
The collector is King. His office is the office of the King.
Anything that didn't suit your malicious intent gets ignored totally while your try to divert attention.
> Protection for them has been around when the previous government was there too. FDI norms were eased only in the fag end of 2012.
And yet you totally neglect that when flipkart begged for speific ecommerce protection none was provided
Only when Ambani reacted to launch JioMart was the protection avoided
Also I love how to totally ignored the fact that Jio abused and how the entire govt machinery has favoured Jio
Also how Jio abused and flouted ALL regulatory things and gave free data calls for over one year when the law explicitly forbids it.
I also love how you ignore that the govt pressurized telcos to pay AGR dues while Jio was let out of the payment cycle
> Tesla went to China for cheap labor. Do you think ill-treatment of workers in Chinese factories will be reported by "Independent media" in China?
Well, Modi govt put red tape so much that Tesla chose to go to a country which blatantly copies IP and patents.
Things are that bad.
Jio was questioned and it argued that IUC (Interconnect Usage Charges, the minimum charges that are to levied on the user for a voice call on any Indian cellular network, these charges are charges levied by a network for a call that originates in another network but terminates in its network) was relevant to normal mobile calls, and what Jio was providing was essentially data calls, akin to talking on whatsapp, it can give away free calls.
It's not like it was not questioned, or it did not explain. Also other operators have opposed the free calls issue because they earn quite a bit of revenue from IUC charges, which are basically a tax on allowing users on one network to call users on another network.
So you can make the call, whether Jio actually flouted the rules, or did it make it cheap for everyone to make calls in the market.
As an additional point, TRAI, the main Telecom regulating body in India, has slashed the IUC charges by half in 2018 and is set to be completely removed by December 2020
> I also love how you ignore that the govt pressurized telcos to pay AGR dues while Jio was let out of the payment cycle
AGR dues are just that, dues. Money the companies were supposed to pay, but did not and accumulated the dues. Jio was a new entrant and has significantly lesser dues (195 crores), compared to other players (Airtel, which has been in the market for decades, owes about 44000 crores). All of them were given a time period of 10 years to make staggered payments, payments that they were supposed to pay, but ignored. That is a huge loss for the country. Even in the courts, the companies did not fight about dues, they fought about whether they were responsible for past pending dues on spectrum, that they purchased from other companies.
All companies went to court, when they were asked to pay past dues of spectrum purchased by them recently. Essentially they were asked to pay for the dues accrued on the spectrum, they recently purchased from failing companies.
>And yet you totally neglect that when flipkart begged for speific ecommerce protection none was provided
Flipkart opposed relaxing rules related to FDI norms and asked for specific protections for e-comerce. The rules were relaxed nevertheless.
>Only when Ambani reacted to launch JioMart was the protection avoided
I guess you meant to say 'provided". I would like to know what specific protections were provided to JioMart?
>Well, Modi govt put red tape so much that Tesla chose to go to a country which blatantly copies IP and patents.
>Things are that bad.
I am curious about this also. As far as I remember, Tesla never showed any interest in building a factory in India. However, what exactly are the "red tape so much" that you are talking about?
All you have to do is Google. Did you do that?
There are countless tweets and articles about Elon himself replying to Indian Tesla fans that due to Modi govt's inflexible regulation, he can't start a factory in India.
I didn't bother to read the other wall of text since you don't show a propensity to finding out facts which don't fit in your narrative.
There are many things wrong with the BJP, but they are not really equivalent to the Republican Party. This is a lazy comparison at best, disingenuous at worst. Their economic, environmental policies and even social issues are completely different than the Republicans.
Your statement is lazy comparison, disingenuous at worst.
Economic policies? Oh, do you mean the disasterous butchering of Indian Economy which took it to a 8yr low? Or do you mean the 45yr high unemployment level? Or the pathetic rollout of GST when they kept changing rules everyday or the disasterous demonization which screwed up entire informal sector?
Environmental policy?
Is this the same policy wherein the BJP is about to remove all protections provided to Environment by law? It would made it very easy for companies to take out a forest?
Or are you referring to the million trees cut down under the pretense of "development"
Or do you refer to the butchering of part of Arey forest for a metro car shade in Mumbai?
Social issues you say?
So you mean the blatant attempt of destroying Secular fabric of this nation by bringing CAA NRC?
Or do you refer to the police state wherein they arrest everyone who dares oppose them on sedition? Or the arrest-but-no chargesheet-file? Or the malicious rearrests after courts have let the dissenters go?
* Modi doubled down on Congress' NREGA scheme for providing guaranteed 100 days of pay to rural workers, whether they worked or not.
* Introduced direct cash transfers to farmers.
* Various farm loan waivers, especially some of the BJP-led state governments.
* Announced a free healthcare under National Health Protection scheme.
* Free housing, electricity and LPG gas connections for the poor.
* Introduced long term capital gains tax in 2019.
* Non-opposition to LGBT rights. I say "non-opposition" because they don't champion it like the Democrats, but are neutral since it's not a big ticket item in Indian society or politics. They passed a bill to prohibit discrimination against transgender persons last year (but there is some controversy surrounding it [1]). Again, a big no-no for the Republican Party.
* Massive push for renewable energy - India doubled its renewable energy capacity in 3 years and on track to triple it in the following 4 years [2]. 47 GW (45% of all under development) coal projects was cancelled just in 2019 [3]. Good luck trying to get the climate change denying Republicans to do this.
BJP's economic polices are as socialist as they come [4]. None of this would fly with the Republicans. That's how they are different - in actual policy positions.
[1] - https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/12/04/7843987...
[2] - https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/energy-speak/new...
[3] - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/banking/financ...
[4] - https://www.fairobserver.com/region/central_south_asia/india...
Yes, BJP is primarily acting like a socialist party.
Also I didn't say equal to Republican, I said equivalent as in both parties are conservative and they both work exclusively for their billionaire donors while pretending to care for common people.
I've got a bridge to sell you if you think this characteristic is exclusive to only BJP and the Republicans.
Exclusively is what both republicans and BJP are experts at doing.
Indian economy is screwed and yet Ambani is getting richer day by day. Adani recently took 74% stake in Mumbai airport
All govt companies are now bankrupt because BJP wants to favour their cronies. BSNL is on the verge of collapse because BJP considers Jio as the "official govt telecom company"
This is categorically false. There are several PSUs that are profitable. From a cursory Google search: https://www.fortuneindia.com/psu?year=2019
Maybe go easy on the exaggeration.
> BSNL is on the verge of collapse because BJP considers Jio as the "official govt telecom company"
BSNL had it coming with years of mismanagement, high employee costs and inability to upgrade infrastructure. Though, you could certainly argue competition from Jio accelerated it with its predatory pricing.
BSNL was systematically destroyed by Modi govt to favour Jio.
If BSNL was mismanaged for years then why did it collapse only when Govt moved all official contracts to Jio rather than BSNL?
WHY is Modi govt not giving money to BSNL? almost all Pune office of BSNL has taken voluntery retirement. All of them went away in poof one week they filled people by hiring daily contractors
If you don't believe that BSNL was systematically destroyed then I have a bridge to sell you.
Maybe don't go easy on being ignorant on facts. Maybe read news.
BSNL has been a loss making business since 2010. It's literally in their financial statements. Read it: https://www.bsnl.co.in/opencms/bsnl/BSNL/about_us/financial_....
> WHY is Modi govt not giving money to BSNL?
Last I checked they announced a Rs 74,000 crore bailout package by way of BSNL-MTNL merger. I don't know what the status of that is, but that doesn't sound like "not giving money to BSNL".
Then Modi should've put in more money in BSNL
But BJP did not do that did they?
It seems like you're pretending to be neutral while spreading false information by twisting facts.
74,000 package announced?
Well the BJP govt has announced a LOT of things over the last six years.
BJP CM promised 25k crore to Kalyan Dombivli Municipality. KDM got 0 Rs from BJP
I can't even remember a single month in Modi's first term when he wasnt announcing oackage
Thousands of crore to JK
To Bihar
To Jharkhand
Anywhere BNP was desperate to win elections they threw bubbles of 10000000crore package so that their troll armies can refer to the announcement
If I had a penny for everytime BJP announced a package for anything then I'd be a billionaire
Er, where is the false information? The bailout package announcement is real. Delloite are the contracted consultants for making the BSNL-MTNL merger happen. As I said, I have no idea what the status is. If the execution is botched (and this government has a history of poor execution), feel free to criticize. But it seems like you are making false claims throughout this thread (no sources for anything), only to then shift goalposts when you're proven wrong with sources.
> so that their troll armies can refer to the announcement
Please keep this kind of rhetoric out of HN and discuss in good faith. This isn't Reddit.
> Where is the false information
You're pretending as if Modi govt did not intentionally bankrupt BSNL.
Your so called.package is bogus. ET calls it "lacks teeth"
https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/is-modis-b...
How BJP is dismantling BSNL
https://www.newsclick.in/how-centre-dismantling-bsnl
So both the package is fraud and BJP intentionally dismantled BJP to favour Jio
And here you're pretending that BSNL's downfall was inevitable. They pushed BSNL into a ditch and now they're not helping it come out of the ditch
It took me a second to google "BJP announced package but didn't give" first result?
And this wasn't the only result.
18months on but 125k crore package was not received by Bihar
https://m.hindustantimes.com/india-news/18-months-on-bihar-y...
Also the 20.lakh crore for corona is also a fraud
https://www.indiatoday.in/news-analysis/story/covid-19-packa...
Fitch Solutions said the actual fresh money in the Covid-19 package is only about 1% of GDP
Modi declared that package was 10% of GDP. But actual money given by him was only 1%
They included "income tax refunds" in this package, also "Selling ISRO" was a part of the package under "privatising space travel"
The actual money given my BJP was negligible compared to other countries
https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/covid-19-india-...
> Please keep this kind of rhetoric out of HN and discuss in good faith
You'd do better to follow your own advice and stop your malicious intent.
However, they are no less socialist than anyone else. The only difference is Republican socialism flows upwards.
I mean, what could be more socialist than demanding a foreign company he sold and deciding which limited sets of companies is allowed to buy it. And we don’t even need to get into the outright bribery where they are demanding a cut of the transaction.
That behavior, even without the open corruption, is beyond what most major center left parties in the world are proposing now that Corbyn does not lead UK’s Labour.
The Republican Party is on its own little island far far away from any other normal political party in the world. For example, the Republican Party is the only major democratic political party in the entire world that denies the existence of anthropogenic climate change. There are major right wing political parties worldwide that may claim the costs of doing anything exceeds the benefits or that we need to wait for better solutions, etc but no major party denies the basic scientific fact of it happening the way the Republicans do.
There is also other stuff like the prevalence of young earth creationism, the overt religiosity, the lack of any economic principles (e.g. just see their rhetoric on deficits when there is a Democrat in charge vs what they do when they are in charge) etc that sets them apart from major right wing political parties worldwide.
You literally described six mismanaged years of BJP in India
They did EVERYTHING which they opposed during Congress's time
They opposed FDI when in opposition And now they approved FDI in everything including defence manufacturing
There even was a site called modilies.com containing all such listing of things he opposed as CM which he is doing as PM
Car manufacturers will only innovate batteries to the extent that fits their pricing and performance models.
With the decoupling, the market for batteries will expand and different types of batteries for different performance / technologies will come into picture. But by making it legal to sell cars without batteries, it obliges car manufacturers to come up with data, certifications, technology transfer systems, etc to legally allow battery manufacturers to support their cars. This reduces a lot of paperwork and other red tape. For example, insurance. If you buy a car and change it's battery, your insurance provider may object for coverage or charge you extra for after market modifications.
So, while the user has to buy the battery, he will have more choice.
Also, new battery technology and new battery companies can grow with more ease.
There are some downsides to this approach. Many vehicle dynamics and safety tests are conducted for the vehicle as a whole. So it has to be seen how those issues are addressed. However, since the location of the battery, in a given vehicle is fixed, I think coming up with a framework of certifications or standardized parameters for battery physicals should be easy.
I think this law is primarily aimed at taxis and auto-rickshaws in many urban areas. Most of India's middle class still drives bikes and scooters. However, there are many taxis and autos. And these are usually very polluting. Shifting to an EV is usually more cost effective for the driver. The cost per kilometer of travel is lesser in EVs.
https://www.gogoro.com/
If the vehicle doesn't even come with a battery and you're able to acquire a standard battery from any number of competing vendors, you're a whole lot less afraid of buying an EV and not being able to replace its battery in five years because it's been obsoleted by the OEM.
> The amendment will allow OEMs to sell batteries separately or with subscription models, and will also encourage private players to join in as well, boosting the grass-roots of the electric ecosystem.
So it's about allowing competition in battery providers and allowing battery leasing. This is a good move because not only does it open up the industry and hopefully drive overall prices down, but it decouples the prices of vehicle and "fuel", making it easier to compare directly with petrol-powered vehicles.
Also, by incentivizing vehicle designs with removable (and thus swappable) batteries, it makes taxis and other high demand use cases more practical without needing widespread fast charging infrastructure.
Sure, technically you can get a battery from whomever you like for your car so long as it's compatible - but the Manufacturer has put DRM on the battery interface. All in the name of safety, you see - they don't want to see their cars catching fire on national news because of some shoddy batteries.
However what it'll mean is that unless the battery maker is willing to fork out a large chunk of cash per battery to the car maker, the car maker won't certify it as compatible.
That came to mind also, though "OEMs to sell batteries separately or with subscription models" might just of covered that aspect.
Batteries are already standard cell sizes, it's the packaging of those cells that makes things interesting. Now will they end up standardising that aspect across cars is the crux here. Certainly be interesting how this all pans out.
At a guess, the connector would be the cheapest and easiest place to come up with some patentable novelty that doesn't actually matter. It could be physical OR an electronic interface of some kind. Then it's a case of "Well, yes, you can license the connector design... for $xxx per unit"
It will get sorted I'm sure, but there are often technical details that change when changes like this are made.
They will even need to standardize connectors and possibly protocols to really do this well.
So, decoupling battery from the car and allowing better competition in the battery space might fly. Car makers need not be bothered by the battery tech and can just focus on making good electric motors, since most of the car parts are from other vendors anyways.
However, the decoupling might not be all that rosy as Musk has demonstrated that safety is best achieved with total vertical integration. Even Tesla tried battery swapping but gave up.
This might work really well in 2 wheelers though. The existing bike manufacturers won't have to retool their factories by much to replace the engine with a motor and the batteries can be probably swapped in and out of the under seat space or something like that.
Removable batteries for cars has a LOT of bulk and weight to deal with. More a "service interval" like action rather than a daily event. Still handy to have but not nearly so much incentive in the market.
But for motorbikes and scooters, maybe it could work. Especially small city scooter(125cc equivalent) work.
Mind you, I am picturing a dystopian future whereby all the UberEats-like delivery scooter people keep getting their batteries stolen...
edit: streamline
Thank you.
My assumption is that when designing the Model S, it wasn't yet clear that charging speeds would eventually become good enough that it made battery swap unnecessary.
Tesla wrote the playbook for a modern EV, so it's easy to look back in retrospect and assume they had a single clear vision, but battery swapping could easily have looked like a credible path back then.
Although I'm pretty sure that by the time they publicly announced it they knew it was a dead end, and its only use was publicity and ZEV credits.
I believe it’s a killer flaw to over-interpret the failure of a novel technology and/or business model.
Yesterday’s miserable failure may be tomorrow’s runaway success given some refinements or the better availability of component technology and/or the readiness of the market.
Over the decades I’ve experienced a few - one of the more memorable examples for me is the Apple Newton. A pretty miserable failure at the time. Fast forward a couple of decades, and most of us are now carrying the logical evolution of that device in our pockets, whether it be made by Apple or others.
Also, the changing business model resulting from the battery and the vehicle separation will most certainly lead to innovation in batteries. So cars can innovate on motors while battery makers can innovate on batteries and who knows a third market might emerge for those battery swapping robots.
It'll be interesting to watch out how this will plays out - Tesla as the all integrated electric vehicle (Apple) v/s the rest of the industry which might go the independent vehicle/battery/swap robot (wintel) route.
I think the failiure was down to tree or four things:
- electric cars were still a novelty - low range, very few and unreliable battery changing stations. - expensive cars. - Only one model, a saloon car which is one of the least sold car types in denmark. People mostly go for microcars or stationwagon type cars plus SUV's.
IIRC it was Renault with the Fluence Z.E pairing with a company named Better Place
They also spent money on useless operations and had serious internal politics. They were financed and controlled by a known rent seeker and shouldn't be taken as an example for what the technology can or cannot do
>Also, by incentivizing vehicle designs with removable (and thus swappable) batteries, it makes taxis and other high demand use cases more practical without needing widespread fast charging infrastructure.
That is a big plus as allows more control when batteries are topped up, so enables the ability to shift demand to off-peak usage and equally add grid storage/supply for grid stability thruout the day in a battery form factor that's competition driven price-wise. Lot's of potential here and the first step in that direction has been made.
That's a really good point! As India builds more intermittent renewables, there's an opportunity for independent storage to help stabilize the power grid that battery rental suppliers would be well placed to take advantage of. (Assuming their regulations keep up with this idea... it's been so painful watching Australia's energy regulators fumble their way towards the concept that widespread grid-tied batteries might be a GOOD thing.)
I bought a Prius once because I thought I was clever and I was going to get a great car with great gas mileage. I read on the Internet that despite what everyone says about the battery that it is actually very rare for it to die. Well... turns out either that's not true or I got unlucky. My battery died. Not only did it die, but it died an hour and a half way from my house... So during the height of rush our in stop and go traffic my Prius, while it would still run, would take forever to accelerate. I wound up just driving home with my hazard lights on.
When I finally made it home the first thing I did is look it up to see how much it would cost to replace the battery on my car. Well, turns out that when I was trying to replace it (was a few years ago) that the only people authorized to change it was the Toyota dealer. The Toyota dealer would only replace the entire battery though, and that battery was $3,000 to replace. There was no freakin way I was going to pay that.
So after some Internet sleuthing and lots of research I discovered that it is actually possible to replace an individual module in the battery(The battery is actually wired in series of 18 modules). Granted, you would have to replace another one soon if the battery modules weren't balanced with each other. To balance the battery modules though you had to use some funky looking third party charger that wasn't really designed for it and in order to do it in a reasonable amount of time it would cost about $500 because you would have to buy multiple chargers, plus the cost of however many dead modules you had. Then you had to ensure that you could safely remove a 250lbs battery, without shocking yourself with 3,000 volts of electricity. I wound up just replacing the one cell to see how long it would take for the battery to give up on me. That saved my recharging the modules, but the rest of the work I had to do still.
So $34 and 6 months later and I was still driving it. It was only when my wife actually didn't change the oil in the car that it wound up dying (a story for another day).
Which leads me to my point. Toyota had engineered the car so that if there was any battery failure there was no ability for the user to really upgrade it without risking serious injury of death, unless you know... they spend two weeks reading about it and learnings in the ins and outs (which I did). Considering that the battery was ALREADY modular it would have cost them a tiny bit of effort to ensure that users could easily do this themselves. Not only that, but they insisted that the entire battery needed to be replaced because they were also too afraid to allow even their technicians to touch it. All of this could have been prevented if a law like the above existed.
So yeah... I think this is a great idea.
Though I was also telling a story and exaggeration tends to be a part of story telling.
It's like saying I saw an alligator as big as a house. Sure, probably didn't happen, but you get the point.
[1]: http://www.hybrids.co.nz/battery-specs/
You will get there! I just landed my first well-paying gig. Keep at it and you will, too :)
Just imagine a country that did not allow you to buy a laptop with pre-fitted batteries. A heavy user like me would like a standardized external battery in that case, but many won't. The limitations on the design are huge. I am not arguing against swappable batteries.
With electric cars being approx 2 times costlier in India, I do not think taxis would be a use-case for that. They are a business and they need to look at practical cost-benefit and they will not be the first ones to jump to electric.
On top of that only 5-10% of India's population can afford to be generally environment friendly in an impactful way. And only 1 or max 2% can afford the huge upfront premium on electric cars.
The Indian government needs to create less restrictive and less taxing policies towards electric but it creates policy quagmires, has a very small tax base and hence is tax-greedy overall.
Not that those are insurmountable obstacles, but a law that says "You can't claim your vehicle does 200 miles on a charge if it doesn't include a battery" or "You can't claim your vehicle is safe in a frontal crash because the battery absorbs some of the energy except you're not including the battery" don't seem unreasonable.
For example, its perfectly legal to advertise a car as saying its a car without engine. You just cannot advertise it in such a way that the viewer thinks he can buy the car and just enjoy it.
So this probably adds exceptions specifically for battery-less EVs to still get a VIN and be sold as a complete vehicle.
Viewing this from a US perspective anyways...
Imagine - a software and hardware standard developed for batteries that allows generic installation/communication between the vehicle and the battery pack.
And the realization that EV's may be multi-decade investments (and need to be high quality to last) if the batteries are replaced each decade. Electric motors don't wear down with kms like petrol motors do - how often have you seen luxury cars wrecked where the interiors lasted a lot longer than the driveline (pretty often i.e. BMW Audi)?
Why shouldn't people be able to buy high quality interiors and put new batteries in them.
And standardise recycling while you're at it.
Renault tried it with the Fluence in Israel, it stopped. The Zoé has been designed to have easy battery swaps but it's not used.
Tesla did some demos in the past but they didn't explore more.
However Nio still believes in this solution, with proprietary batteries, so if they are very successful in China some others may try again.
Indian ICE manufacturers never had the vision to create an EV industry at home, they are very reactive in nature. Only Tata, Mahindra have some capability and most of the 2 wheeler manufacturers were importing almost all the important components from China.
Something like the Gogoro battery, but with flexibility for larger vehicles.
This is unnecessary as it will force perfectly usable vehicles to be scrapped and it would come at a huge cost to the environment.
Ideally it would have been good to allow this change for internal combustion engines as well so as to allow ICE cars to swap out their engines for more fuel efficient engines.
Also, this scrapping law applies even for vehicles with all safety features.. including from companies such as Mercedes, BMW, VW etc.
I would think that it makes perfect sense to scrap vehicles - no matter how young/old, if it seriously fails an inspection or if the pollution levels from the vehicle is too bad - and there are existing "fitness" tests for this, and so why scrap vehicles which are well maintained?
Cars plummet in value in 5 years in India.
The usage scenarios are nothing like in the US.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/auto/miscellaneous/govt-...