In an interview with Sputnik, Abhijeet Sinha, project director of the National Highway for Electric Vehicle (NHEV), an organisation promoting the electrification of India's transportation systems, shares his insights into the possible reasons why incidents of electric vehicles catching fire have increased, what EV manufacturers should keep in mind while maintaining safety standards, and what actions the government can take to ensure safety.
Sputnik: There have been many incidents of electric vehicles, especially scooters, catching fire recently. What are the possible reasons behind these malfunctions?
Abhijeet Sinha: The Centre for Fire, Explosive and Environment Safety (CFEES), a defence laboratory of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), is already investigating the reasons behind the incidents of electric vehicles catching fire. They will come out with the specific reasons behind such incidents.
However, I can say that the reasons cited by the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), like the battery was not properly charged, instructions given to the user were not followed, or weather conditions were harsh, are not the actual reasons. All these reasons are lame excuses.
I would like to say that our concern as of now is whether the pre-existing AIS 156 and AIS 038 (Rev 2) safety standards were followed or not. These safety standards are from 2020. So, the investigation report will reveal whether the OEMs followed these standards or not.
Apart from this, we will also have to see whether the OEMs made any changes in the prototypes approved by the Automotive Research Association of India (ARAI) or the Institute of Computer Aided Design (ICAD).
What happens usually is the OEMs send the best prototype for approval and after approval they make changes in the subsequent batches of the products without informing the authorities. So, this will also come out after the investigation.
It is mandatory for the manufacturers to keep one battery so that if any problem is reported in the batteries they have sold, they can inform the users and recall the faulty batteries. But this definitely has not happened, because if this would have happened, so many unfortunate incidents would have been avoided.
Sputnik: The federal minister for road transport and highways has warned manufacturers of heavy penalties and vehicle recalls. Do you think this will be enough to keep EV manufacturers on their toes?
Abhijeet Sinha: The instructions from the minister are incidental. The manufacturers could have detected any fault in the batteries at an early stage, but they didn't do that. They recalled the faulty vehicles after the fire incidents, but it should have been done before.
Sputnik: As of now, India is importing most of the batteries used in EVs. Could this be the reason for the compromise on quality?
Abhijeet Sinha: You see, import does not have anything to do with quality because if you import something, put it in the vehicle, send it for testing, and it is tested safe - then it is safe. The problem is that if the company changes the importer or any component in the vehicle and doesn’t inform the testing authority, then we can’t say that the importer is at fault.
I think there should be stern actions on the manufacturers if they sell a new product on the certificate that they obtained for a prototype submitted for approval.
Sputnik: What changes do you think the government should make in its EV policy to prevent such accidents?
Abhijeet Sinha: The first thing that I can recommend is that any safety protocol should not be copied from any other country, because of the different weather conditions. Apart from this, the implementation of the law should be made stricter.
Ease of Doing Business has officially recommended to the NITI Aayog that there should be a pilot or prototype installation of each standard which the government is going to notify of in regards to electric vehicles.
Also, transparency should be there in regards to the use of materials or any change in the electric vehicle, and there should be a check on it.
With these three things in the EV policy, we can ascertain accountability if any untoward incident happens.
Sputnik: The NHEV is working rigorously to promote the electrification of vehicles. How do you wish to take this forward?
Abhijeet Sinha: The NHEV is primarily into upgrading highways into e-highways. So, for the kind of goal we have set, we needed a battery swapping policy, and now the draft is already there.
Apart from this, we want every stakeholder to agree on certain safety standards. This will help in the deployment of charging stations or swapping stations across the country, because these stations will become the fuel stations of tomorrow.
At each station, we will have 20 two-wheelers and 20 three-wheelers for local cargo and e-commerce usage in the area. These vehicles will have swappable batteries. These vehicles will help in giving employment to the people, who will be engaged in delivering parcels around the charging station in the rural area.
However, as of now no such safety standard came up in the draft policy, but we are expecting that it will come eventually. If there is no consensus on the safety standard, then we will have to pick one up on the basis of merit and performance. We will install a prototype of that at our charging stations in Gurugram and Noida.
We will keep an eye on the progress of it and share the data for the public good. Depending on the performance, we will install the same standard at all the stations we make and run the same model across all charging stations.
Going forward from here, the Delhi-Jaipur Highway and Delhi-Agra Highway will have around 30 charging stations by the end of this year. Other than that, the Ministry of Power has identified 18 more highways, and once the pilot project going on at two highways is successful, it will be replicated for the 18 other highways.