Straight-piped: Which way do you sway?

Tuhin Guha Updated: March 12, 2025, 12:59 PM IST

By the time the 2025 Bharat Mobility Expo wrapped up, we had, for the first time, a clear sense of what the EV landscape in India is going to look like for the next few years. The top four carmakers in the country, Maruti Suzuki, Hyundai, Mahindra and Tata Motors, will for the first time in the next months all have a mid-sized electric SUV on sale.

While we will leave which of these is the best pick for later with a comparison story, what is clear is that there seem to be two schools of thought on what makes a sensible, cost-conscious EV. Either you develop something on a bespoke EV architecture or fashion an EV out of an existing ICE platform.

The latter approach has been best put to use by Tata Motors, more recently also by Hyundai, where in the last five years, the company has been able to put together a full range of EVs and sell over 2 lakh of these. Of course, it's not as simple as just sticking batteries under the floor and replacing an engine with a motor. Some degree of structural changes do need to be made, especially around the floor pan, to accommodate large batteries and to electronic architectures to handle quite a bit more software intervention. Needless to say, a further amount of work to fine-tune the car's dynamics and safety systems to the different characteristics of an EV powertrain.

Now immediately this strategy gives you speed and agility. You can get a foothold in what is still a nascent market where new model and market share are worth their weight in gold. It also guards you against the fickleness of consumer trends where, as we saw some time ago, EVs start to drop out of favour. And finally, it lets you price your EVs better. A key consideration since price parity between EVs and ICE models has not come as quickly as many might have hoped.

But I think that as we mature as an EV market, this strategy will have diminishing returns. As the two Mahindra EVs, the BE 6 and XEV 9e, have shown, a ground-up EV architecture gives you a clean slate to start from. You can use this to create a completely separate identity for your EVs, a good strategy in the current scenario. With a good localisation level, prices can be reasonably controlled too.

Yes, this is the more capital and time-intensive choice, but you get a degree of flexibility that may just be enough to pay off the initial investment. The simplicity of skateboard architecture lets you create numerous body styles and cover a vast range of the market with more commonality. You can also then find ways to maximise energy density and try various battery sizes to manage costs.

Of course, you can create a high degree of software integration and leapfrog to the latest on-board tech. Also, from experience, something that was always intended to be an EV seems more cohesive as a car in the everyday. It shouldn't be a surprise that Maruti Suzuki, the company that possibly knows the Indian consumer better than anyone else, has gone down this route.

By now, it's probably not hard to guess which way I sway on this debate. But I do think that this is going to be a seminal year for EVs in India. The proposed new EV policy that will drop duties significantly will be a boost for the entire ecosystem. Also, the passenger car market is set to remain flat, which sounds depressing, but it could just be the break from the hype that EVs need to leave an impression on the even more descending buyers that will be shopping for cars this year. What do you think? Don't forget to write in and tell us!