India’s first large-scale gigafactory which will be a manufacturing facility for rechargeable batteries for electric vehicles (EV) will be up and functioning by next year, revealed Ola Electric founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal in a conversation with ETNow on Wednesday.
“By early next year, we will actually make the gigafactory operational and start using our own Indian-manufactured cells and that is going to be a very important initiative to reduce cost further,” said Aggarwal.
As per the CEO, the initial capacity of the Gigafactory will be 5 GWh. At full scale, the factory will have 100 GWh capacity, which will also be the world’s largest battery manufacturing unit.
While talking about the cost component of the EVs, he comments on the current situation where batteries for Indian consumption have to be imported.
“We import it from Korea. It makes up for almost one-third or sometimes even 40 per cent of the EV manufacturing cost,” said the founder.