A 3 battery truck should be able to run like a 1 battery truck because you’re not using 2 of the batteries. Theres an even bigger thing - modularity should allow you to even change the truck on the fly. You should be able to configure your car or truck in that way. That the chassis, the battery environment, the power train, the motor, the gear box, the container - each of these things should be configurable things that you can order, almost like a computer when you say - RAM, disc space, screen size. Modularity really means vehicle development. And more easily with trucks, because of the box shape in a way. Yes, it’s a little different, but I think it can be done. But if I owned that shape independent of what’s inside that shape - I could work with product developers to figure out what goes into the car, I should be able to get the car - today’s car with that shape too. Now, but you’re stuck because unless volkswagen makes that, you’re not going to be able to get that.
I would like today’s performance capabilities of an electric vehicle in the shape of a volkswagen beetle. So this is what i meant by the infinite truck - this is easier to do for trucks and buses than in cars. Over time, we simply figured out that the car could do that the indie cars could do with periodic charging during the day. And of course the EV would run out of charge if you ran it all day like that - so we mounted a mobile charger on the back of a truck and had the truck follow the EV. We followed one of the cars that provided employee transportation at the moment, to see if this two-door car can keep up with it. In India, this was the employee transportation market. The bottomline is to find a starting point and not worry about the entirety of the future. But once you’ve identified these problems, you can ask, is there any market segment in which these problems don’t apply? And if the answer is yes - you can take that one on right away. Vehicle availability, range anxiety, charging infrastructure, financiability, predictability of goods - which make people think that until these things are sorted, you can’t have EVs as a mainstream vehicle. Why do people think this can only happen in the future? There are 4-5 reasons for that. Our tagline at Lithium came from that - Tomorrow’s Transportation Today.
What Bangalore really needed is a Transport Information Service - and at the time, no public steps were being taken to do this, so I said I am going to build a website that collates all of this. Second, I felt a need to integrate the various silos that existed (the transport department, the police, the bus companies) into a platform that could be useful for residents. We can characterise the city temporally and spatially and as a result do a few things that others have not been able to do. Maybe because of my past work with clouds and data, it occurred to me I could contribute to visualisation - how do we begin to be able to see the city and its problems? My first thought was that we need to collect data that tells you what the city is about. I asked myself - what do I have to contribute to this? I’m not an urban planner, I haven’t thought about cities much. Could you tell us a little bit about that? When I came back to India from my stint in the US as a climate scientist, a few people suggested to me that because of the rapid pace of urbanisation in India, cities would be interesting things to study: how they are changing and what we can learn from that. In our latest interview, Ashwin Mahesh, a modern polymath (ex-NASA Climate Scientist, Politician, Journalist) and co-founder of Lithium Urban Technologies, chats with us about solving urban problems at the intersection of the state, market and society, electric vehicles and a future where energy could be free! We are curious about what sparked your interest in urban mobility - I know Lithium came much later before that you were working with the metropolitan transport system of Bangalore.
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