Emails (Others): RETROFITTING OLD CARS WITH ELECTRIC KITS

Dr Ranjan Ray / Dr Atul Ranjan / Dr Jasvinder Singh / Dr A K Jain / Dr Poonam Gupta

Indian Institute of Petroleum

Dear Friends ,

With great interest , I read :

Old cars retrofitted with electric kits is the latest solution ?

Congratulations on this innovation which will ,

# Accelerate the switch-over to non-polluting electric vehicles

# Give a new “ avatar “ to 1.1 million private 4 wheelers

# Save assets worth lakhs of crore of rupees , which would , otherwise get scrapped

It was also very heartening to read about your efforts to come up with “ Solar Powered EV charging stations “

This news report says :

For 100 km run ,

# EV will cost only Rs 58

# Petrol car will cost Rs 458

It also reads ,

“ Retrofitting could cost around Rs 1.5 lakh – not counting for the lithium-ion battery

Could you please advise re the capacity of battery needed and its landed cost ?

For over 2 years , in my emails to the Cabinet Ministers , I have been advocating “ Retrofitting of Petrol cars “ , as you can find from :

Some 31 months back , in my blog / email ,

[ Piyush Plan ? / 27 March 2016 ]

I wrote :

# DISPOSAL OF EXISTING VEHICLES ( 200 million + produced till 2030 )

* Enable / encourage MSME units to carry out " Retro Fitting " of existing vehicles

# Why scrap entire vehicle ? Why not retrofit ?

· In an OLD vehicle,

- only “ Polluting Sub Assembly “ is the ENGINE

- other “ Non-Polluting Sub Assemblies “ are :

Body – Chasis – Transmission – Tyres etc

So , why SCRAP those non-polluting parts ?

Why not just scrap the old engine and retro-fit the vehicle with a brand NEW engine ( BS VI compliant ) ?

That will mean re-utilizing some 80 % of the asset and , at the same time getting rid of the air pollution !

With regards,

Hemen Parekh

Thursday, 25 January 2024