Meet the minds that shaped the electric cars' dream in India
Sudarshan Kumar Maini , founder of the Maini Group, is 84 but rarely misses a board meeting of any of its Bengaluru-headquartered companies. It’s early October, a sunny day, and we’re ready for a trip down an electric lane.
For an entire generation, Chetan Maini, aged 47, is the face of the electric car because of the
Reva. It’s the electric car built from Bommasandra in Bengaluru from 2000 onward—a business the Mainis sold to automaker Mahindra & Mahindra in 2010. But trust Chetan Maini, for perspective. He is the youngest of Sudarshan Maini’s sons after Sandeep, 51, and Gautam, 50.
The Bommasandra plant by itself has been a womb to many ventures, notably to build dock-levellers that ran on electrical energy with hydraulic power packs. This was for factory plants in the early 1990s, where labour was used to load and unload bulky materials, or where diesel was often used to power equivalent appliances on the shop floor. Later this month, the Bommasandra plant will host its aerospace components business. Back in 2000, the Mainis wanted to build a consumerfacing product from that plant.
“The family put Reva ahead of everything else,” says Chetan. “In many ways, the Maini group would have been far bigger if it had reinvested the cash in existing businesses when they were growing.” He is referring to the mainstay, Maini Precision Products which last fiscal contributed nearly 80% of the group revenue. “But the group put a lot of emotional and personal investment in the electric car venture than any automotive group here before.”
But the spark behind the electric vision came from the founder, Sudarshan Maini, when he noticed factory shop floors’ dependence on diesel and labour.
ELECTRIC EYE
In 1983, he was taking Maini Precision Products to the exports markets. It had been a decade since he started the company to build components, machine tools and hardware of all kinds. Bosch India (MICO or Motor Industries Company then) was one of his earliest customers. Before starting the Maini Group, he had become the first Indian to reach a top position in 1968, heading production management in an organisation where Germans held leadership sway. As the Maini Group expanded and Sudarshan Maini visited more companies in India, he noticed the high dependence on diesel and manual labour on the shop floors.
The electric dock-leveller, introduced in the early 1990s, sought to automate loading and unloading in factories by bringing the dock level with the trucks that brought the goods there. This has become the company now known as
Maini Materials Movement (MMM) under Sandeep, but sparked off a number of other ventures. “The electric dock-levellers enhanced safety and labour productivity,” recalls Sandeep, adding that MMM focussed on small and medium-scale manufacturing companies.
Under the goods and services tax, warehouses will now have larger footprints, and MMM is eyeing a bigger market. The MMM venture also paved the way for the Mainis to get into warehousing systems. This has happened because of a joint venture with the Ferretto Group in Italy called Armes Maini. “We were in movement and stacking systems. Then, we went into loading and unloading systems, then we went into storage. Now we have the entire portfolio,” Sandeep Maini says. From factories to airports and IT campuses, the group has also sold its electric buggies and tow tugs. This was an MMM solution, established around the same time as the Reva.
REVVING FOR THE ’90S
Both Sandeep and Gautam Maini cut their teeth in business from 1989, when Chetan left for the US to study mechanical engineering at Michigan University. Sudarshan Maini was active in Maini Precision Products, and took Gautam under his wing who had specialised in commerce and finance. While Maini Sr was busy with the exports with a keen eye for foreign companies to collaborate with for the domestic market, Gautam focussed on operations. In the past decade, he has built the aerospace venture from scratch. In the same time, Sandeep grew Maini Materials Movement from the get-go. “Each brother brings a unique trait to the table,” says a former manager of the Maini Group, who asked not to be identified. “Chetan has always been the innovator. Gautam is extremely good in customer orientation and business while Sandeep is very good in organisational development.”
According to him, Sandeep Maini brings realistic frameworks to the business: who will be in charge of a project, deploying the team, and timelines. Chetan gives the example of how the Mainis were able to create an affiliated business for the Reva electric car’s needs in 2009. This would evolve into an independent business called Maini Plastics and Composites, with its own OEM customers. The electriccar ecosystem didn’t exist in the country, but a new model of the electric car required plastic panels.
Maini Precision Products created a plastics division to make vacuum formed parts and sub-assemblies. “The resources and strength we needed for that— a new facility, R&D team–we could very quickly put it together,” Chetan recalls. “We did it very seamlessly, and I could focus on my core—technology guidance to the team. They operationalised it, and they understood quality systems because they had worked in other Maini businesses before.”
Similarly, the group set up the first few charging plants and a chassis division. There were up to five new divisions that were created to help build Reva. What surprised the Maini Group was that OEMs began to approach them after seeing the exteriors of the Reva. This paved the way for orders from the likes of Ashok Leyland and Bosch. “It came into being, built on the spaces of Reva,” the eldest brother says.
Even as Gautam Maini has been the Maini Group’s face to customers globally with Maini Precision Products, he has worked on building its aerospace venture. In June, the group signed a 10-year contract with French OEM Saffran Aircraft Engines to make low-pressure turbine guide vanes for their LEAP engines. He began cultivating ties with the company more than a decade ago. “You don’t make money for long periods of time, but approvals from the clients is quite a journey— an excellent journey,” says Sandeep Maini. “The stability of the auto components business has helped us sustain ventures like aerospace.”
It has also entered into a contract with Marshall Aerospace and Defence Group to manufacture structural machined parts and sub-assemblies for a major aircraft OEM. “Raw materials are typically imported. It is very expensive, calls for high-quality processes,” Sandeep adds. “The key is relationships,” says Sudarshan Maini. “We have believed in relationships beyond business. Sometimes, we don’t make money but we have maintained our relationships.” It’s funny that the strongest association with the Mainis is the electric car for a company steeped in B2B engagements. That brings us to the question: What’s Chetan been building?
FUTURE PERFECT
The youngest brother has been busy over the past five years, even as he moved on from Mahindra Reva and its electric vehicle business. He is a co-promoter to a startup called Lithium Urban Technologies to establish the infrastructure and service environment for shared electric-powered mobility.
In this period, he was part of the automotive electronics working group to revise national policy, and advisor for the National Electric Mobility Mission Plan 2020, a government initiative to promote hybrid and electric mobility in India. But Chetan Maini returned to headlines a few months back with a joint venture between Virya Mobility 5.0 (wholly owned by the Maini Brothers) and SUN New Energy Systems to build a batteryswapping infrastructure on the scale of petrol stations. It’s called Sun Mobility.
“The idea is build a network of stations with smart batteries (IoT-enabled) which are compatible with multiple platform types,” he says. This will contribute to getting energy at a lower cost, and maintenance. “We have to separate the energy business from the vehicle business. And make refuelling quicker.” The battery is a huge part of the electric vehicle cost, he notes. Sun Mobility will focus on the electric three-wheeler and electric bus market, to begin with. Apart from the Mainis’ 15-year experience of running Reva Electric Car, there are at least three external factors that nobody anticipated a decade ago, thanks to the smartphone. There is constantly improving mobile and Internet connectivity.
Two, there is the shared economy popularised by the Olas and Ubers. And the sensors-enabled IoT. Beyond these three factors, investors and entrepreneurs can’t miss the rise of a Tesla, which has become the face of the electric car. That’s the backdrop. But in India, Chetan has experienced two challenges from his Reva years which Sun Mobility wants to solve for public transport and the shared economy when both lean toward electric vehicles: infrastructure support.
It’s range anxiety especially for long distance commutes. “In shared mobility, drivers don’t know gross distance in a day and area they have to go to. They can’t afford to be off the road. This market is growing the most,” he says. Refuelling time is vital for them, apart from the range anxiety. “With society moving to shared economies and pay-asyou-go, our solution has to enable that,” he says. The solution is to provide batteries from station, like how gas cylinders are provided to households.
In the bus stations, the batteries will be robotically swapped because of the size of the batteries. “The process will be automated to measure how much is done? How many kilometres and how much energy has been used? Everything is known. No pilferage. Everything is handled for you. We want to simplify the whole process,” he explains. “We’ll own the batteries.” This also means that different electric vehicles will need different batteries to be fully charged at the swapping stations. Maini is confident they have the IPs and math figured out. And a proof of concept is expected in January. And if that doesn’t sound straight out of a Philip K Dick, it’s because the Mainis have been at electric technologies for almost a quarter century in some shape and form. That matters when the future is electric.
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When the electric vehicle sales pick up in about five years, an area of 3 km could require about 300
charging stations with about 4-5 charging slots, he said. With this costing, setting up charging stations across Delhi would cost about Rs 3,300 crore over five years.
