Tata Motors to supply 25k EVs for Uber fleet network

Tata Motors, the largest maker of electric cars in India, has agreed to supply 25,000 of its X-Pres-T electric sedans to ride-hailing giant Uber’s network of fleet partners in India’s largest order for electric vehicles. According to a top Tata Motors executive, the cars will be delivered over 12-15 months. He added that the order is more than twice as big as its 10,000-car deal with BluSmart last year.

Uber will partner with financiers and help medium and large-sized fleet operators on its platform to purchase these EVs by facilitating access to the vehicles in a supply-constrained environment. The EV rides will be offered in the premium category. It will also work with charge point operators to deploy fast chargers at airports and railway stations, as well as install home-charging solutions in low-income neighbourhoods or multi-housing units where driver partners typically reside.

“On our side, we have ramped up our capacity significantly by working with our suppliers to increase localization. There is a good level of fungibility when it comes to the capacity we use for manufacturing our EVs in the personal mobility segment and the fleet segment. If, for instance, we see a good level of stock building up for passenger EVs, we can dial down PVs and increase supplies of the Xpres-T EVs, and vice-versa,” Shailesh Chandra, managing director of passenger vehicles and passenger electric mobility, Tata Motors said in an interview.

Ride-sharing platforms are looking to make vehicles on their platforms emissions-friendly, with Uber committing to offer all its rides through EVs, micro-mobility or public transport on its platform worldwide by 2040. The cab aggregator platform is also open to working with “multiple partners” to recruit more electric vehicles on the platform across the two-wheeler, three-wheeler and four-wheeler categories.

The partnership also furthers Uber’s plans to give drivers guaranteed economic returns on their investment and leverage Uber’s platform expertise to plan where and when to deploy the vehicles, said Prabhjeet Singh, president of India and South Asia at Uber.

The vehicles will be deployed in seven major Uber markets, including Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad, in a phased manner, with the first lot of deliveries already underway in Delhi and Mumbai. Wile Tata Motors targets production of these vehicles within the next 15 months or so, Uber is working on a three-year plan to deploy them.

The XPres-T compact sedan is the fleet version of Tata Motors’ Tigor EV. The automaker sells the EV in two variants under this brand that is designed and engineered to optimize the total cost of ownership and connectivity for fleet operators. Chandra said the company has also delivered 3,000-4,000 Xpres-T EVs to BluSmart so far.

“The vehicles will be available on our portfolio of premium categories, the largest of them being Uber Premier, and then also reservations and rentals, which are typically perceived as premium categories,” Uber’s Singh said in an interview. “The driver for this positioning is a combination of what the price point of these vehicles today is, and at what point it begins operating these vehicles begins to make economic sense for fleet partners. Secondly, it is also a function of our belief that for getting an emissions-free vehicle, consumers will have an appetite to be able to do their bit to support the economics of the fleet partner. So we will start offering these vehicles in the premium categories, which will mirror premier ride pricing, but over a period of time, as liquidity of these vehicles increases, we will be evaluating how do we bring these vehicles to other categories too,” Singh said.