India’s commercial vehicle industry has reached a turning point. After years of depending on government subsidies and limited pilot projects, the economics of electric mobility have finally made a compelling case on their own. Payback periods on electric buses and trucks once stretched to 7 or 8 years and have now fallen below 2, even without subsidy requirements. For an industry that has always made decisions on total cost of ownership (TCO), that change is significant.
The numbers frame the opportunity. India’s heavy commercial vehicle market currently moves 70 per cent of the country’s freight by road, yet trucks represent just three per cent of the total vehicle population while contributing 34 per cent of all road carbon emissions. The country spends over $105 billion annually on oil imports. Industry estimates logistics costs at roughly 14 per cent of GDP, nearly double the global benchmark. Electrification will dramatically cut per-kilometre operating costs, potentially making Indian goods cheaper to produce and move over time. Against this backdrop, the Government has committed to deploying 150,000 electric buses by 2030 under the PM E-Drive and PM E-Bus Sewa programmes, while simultaneously pushing forward corridor electrification plans along the Golden Quadrilateral highway network that could make long-haul electric trucking operationally viable within 2-3 years.
EKA Mobility, headquartered in Pune, sits at the centre of this shift. Its story offers a practical lens on what it takes to build an electric commercial vehicle business in India from the ground up. Founded in 2022 as part of the Pinnacle Industries group, EKA has in 5 years assembled a portfolio of over 14 EV models spanning three-wheelers, small commercial vehicles, buses and heavy-duty trucks. In an industry where traditional OEMs average less than one new platform per year, EKA has developed 12 distinct vehicle platforms in 5 years, largely because it started with no ICE legacy to protect and built every platform as a born-electric architecture from day one.
Strategic interest
Most incumbent OEMs have approached commercial EV development by electrifying existing ICE platforms. This creates a structural divide between OEMs that own their vehicle software and those that depend on imported technology stacks, particularly from China. Also, dependency on rare earth magnet imports has real supply chain consequences. Chief Product Officer Zoeb Karampurwala of EKA points to software ownership as the defining variable. “If you don’t own it, you don’t control your supply chain, your range improvements, or your uptime, and those are exactly what fleet customers care about most,” he says.
Uptime and range anxiety remain the two most cited barriers to commercial EV adoption, particularly among financiers who are still pricing battery degradation risk into loan structures. However, buses that entered service in 2013 and 2014 have demonstrated battery durability well beyond initial projections, and several operators are now running electric coaches over 550 km daily with consistent performance.
The TCO case is being made with hard numbers. An electric 55-tonne truck running 400 km daily delivers a payback period of 1.8 years against a diesel equivalent, with per-kilometre costs roughly halved even after factoring in battery replacement. For industrial operators who have already installed captive solar generation across the cement, logistics and FMCG categories, effective electricity costs can fall to Rs2-3 per unit. E-commerce majors, including Amazon and Flipkart, committed to fully electric last-mile delivery, are actively scouting for medium- and heavy-duty electric commercial vehicles. Meanwhile, the ramp-up of domestic EV production will remain partially hostage to global supply dynamics and restrictive supply chains, with battery cells and power electronics being imported.
As Dr Sudhir Mehta, Founder and Chairman of EKA Mobility, frames it: “We are building for the long term, scaling a diverse portfolio designed to deliver the lowest total cost of ownership, while taking India’s engineering and manufacturing capabilities to global markets.” With marquee investors including Japan’s Mitsui and the Netherlands’ VDL Groep investing Rs850 crore, ENAM Holdings Rs200 crore, and the National Investment & Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) Rs500 crore into EKA, institutional capital appears to share that conviction.
India has a narrow but genuine window to emerge as the world’s second-largest electric commercial vehicle ecosystem after China.