Ola Electric plans a battery cell manufacturing plant in India

Ola Electric, backed by SoftBank Group, plans to build a battery cell manufacturing plant with a capacity of up to 50-gigawatt hours (GWh) in India. Ola needs 40GWh of battery capacity to reach its annual goal of producing 10 million electric scooters annually and knows those plans when the rest will be used in future electric vehicles. The original plan is to build a battery capacity of 1GWh by 2023 and expand it to 20GWh over the next 34 years. This alone would require an investment of up to $ 1 billion, according to another source aware of the plan. Ola, which is currently importing battery cells from South Korea, also plans to invest in advanced battery and battery technology companies and plans to establish a battery research and development facility in India. Battery cell manufacturing is dominated by a small number of Asian companies supplying major global automakers such as Tesla and Volkswagen, including CATL, LG Energy Solutions, and Panasonic. Ola's ambitious electrification program got off to a volatile start, with production and delivery delays, executive-level exits, and criticism of the product from some Twitter users. Ola didn't give a timeline as to when it would expand to 2 million or 10 million scooters.