India’s electric-car market is beginning to produce the sort of growth figures that make conference panels cheerful. September’s sales reporting showed rapidly expanding volumes and a wider field of manufacturers. New models arrive with longer claimed range, larger screens and increasingly confident advertising.
Then an owner reaches a charger that the app displays as available and finds it offline, blocked or delivering a fraction of the promised speed. The future becomes a customer-support call conducted beside a locked utility cabinet.
This gap between vehicle capability and charging experience is now the most important practical issue in India’s EV transition. Real-world charging tests demonstrate how much vehicles differ even under functioning conditions. Add unreliable hardware, payment failures and queues, and a highway stop becomes difficult to predict.
I remain pro-EV. Electric cars can reduce urban tailpipe pollution, lower running costs for suitable users and strengthen India’s shift away from imported oil. But optimism does not require pretending that every buyer has a private driveway and a cooperative housing society.
Home charging divides the market
An owner with assigned parking and a reliable home charger experiences an EV differently from everyone else. The car begins most mornings with sufficient range, and public charging becomes an occasional travel tool. For this owner, plugging in can be easier than visiting a petrol station.
An apartment resident with informal parking faces permissions, cable routing, metering, fire-safety questions and resident-welfare-association politics. A tenant may be unwilling to fund equipment at a temporary address. Residents who park on the street may have no legal or physical route to a charger.
Showrooms often glide past this divide. Sales staff quote fast-charging times and point to dots on an app. They should instead conduct a charging-site assessment before accepting a booking. Where will the buyer charge weekly? Who owns the electrical connection? What sanctioned load exists? What will installation cost? If these questions lack good answers, the buyer needs candour rather than enthusiasm.
Building codes should require EV-ready wiring and load planning in new developments, but retrofits are the harder challenge. Cities need kerbside, neighbourhood and workplace options. Distribution companies need standard processes for shared chargers. Housing societies need model rules that balance access, fire safety and cost.
A charger is not infrastructure if it does not work
Network expansion is usually measured by installed points. Owners care about successful sessions. The useful metric is uptime: what proportion of hours can a driver arrive, pay and receive the advertised service?
Operators should publish live uptime histories, not merely current status. A station that reports available while repeatedly failing deserves regulatory attention. Connectors require preventive maintenance, physical protection and prompt repair. Customer support must be able to reboot or diagnose equipment rather than recite a ticket number.
Payment fragmentation is another unnecessary burden. Drivers should not need multiple wallets, deposits and applications to purchase electricity. Interoperability and simple card or UPI payment should be normal. Roaming between networks can preserve competition while eliminating ritual account creation.
Pricing needs transparency. Display the energy tariff, time-based fee, taxes and idle charge before the session begins. Time charges may discourage blocking, but they can punish owners when the charger itself underperforms. If equipment promises a certain output and delivers much less, the billing system should recognise that failure.
Highway charging must be designed for peaks
A route may look adequately covered on an average weekday and fail spectacularly during Diwali traffic. Highway infrastructure needs redundancy: multiple working chargers per site, lighting, toilets, food, security and enough space to queue without blocking circulation.
Charging curves mean a car does not draw its peak rate throughout a session. Battery temperature, state of charge and vehicle architecture affect speed. Operators and manufacturers should educate drivers about arriving with a lower state of charge and moving the vehicle when charging slows. This is not glamorous, but shared infrastructure works better when users understand it.
Station placement must consider more than equal distance. Grid capacity, traffic patterns, alternate routes and nearby amenities matter. A lonely single charger may satisfy a mapping target while providing little resilience. Clusters at reliable commercial stops are often more valuable.
Heavy rain and heat expose poor design. Screens must remain readable, cables manageable and drainage effective. Shade protects both people and equipment. Accessibility matters too; charging bays should accommodate wheelchair users and drivers who cannot wrestle a heavy cable around a badly parked vehicle.
Policy should reward reliability
Public support has helped fund installation. The next phase should link incentives and concessions to uptime, utilisation data, repair speed and payment interoperability. Installing hardware earns a photograph; maintaining it delivers mobility.
Government portals could publish audited station performance while protecting commercially sensitive information. Consumers would choose better networks, and operators would have a reputational incentive to maintain sites. Complaint systems should identify recurring faults and establish compensation where failed sessions cause charges without energy delivery.
Manufacturers also have responsibilities. In-car navigation should display compatible chargers, likely availability and realistic charging time. Brands that include free charging offers should explain network limits. Vehicle software must communicate clearly when the car, rather than the charger, is restricting power.
Battery size should not become the industry’s substitute for infrastructure. Larger packs increase cost, weight and material demand. Reliable charging allows buyers to choose vehicles closer to their actual needs. Infrastructure quality can therefore make the transition more affordable.
The transition must include people without garages
India cannot build an equitable EV market solely for villa owners, offices with captive parking and early adopters skilled at troubleshooting. The next group of buyers will expect appliances, not adventures. They will not consider a failed charging session a story to share in an enthusiast forum. They will consider it a reason to buy petrol.
That does not mean every Indian should purchase an electric car. Public transport, walking and smaller vehicles remain more efficient uses of urban space and energy. Electrification should not become an excuse to reproduce congestion with quieter powertrains. Still, cars will remain part of the mobility system, and their charging network must serve ordinary housing patterns.
The sales curve is encouraging because it shows products are becoming attractive. The infrastructure gap is concerning because it determines who can join. Reliability, interoperability, apartment charging and honest information now matter more than another round of range boasts.
I want the EV transition to succeed, which is why I am impatient with showroom optimism. A car can be beautifully engineered and still be poorly supported. The decisive innovation may not be a new battery chemistry. It may be the moment a driver can arrive at any charger, tap UPI, receive the expected power and leave without learning the operator’s helpline music.
