Alt Mobility aims to deploy around 26,100 electric vehicles (EVs) in the B2B logistics domain this year. Dev Arora, Co-founder & CEO, Alt Mobility, in a conversation with Mobility Outlook, said that the start-up started its operations with 80 EVs in March 2022.
“We have deployed over 4,300 EVs across seven cities, with eight OEM partners and nine finance partners. Our portfolio is a 50-50 split between two-wheeler and three-wheeler electric fleets,” he said.
Further, the start-up says it has signed contracts to deploy 117,000 EVs over the next three years. Magenta, Lets Transport, Eveez, CABT Logistics Zypp, and Entoo are some fleet operators to whom the company has leased EVs. It has several finance partners, including Mahindra Finance, Mufin Green Finance, IDFC First, and Deutsche Bank.
Arora explained, “Our FleetLease product is the most comprehensive and affordable option to switch to electric for fleet operators. We are enabling mobility as a service businesses and fleet operators to acquire an EV with one-fourth the cost of a down payment needed to purchase a vehicle and our monthly lease is upto 20% lower than an EMI, and we provide flexible ownership options to own the vehicle or return the vehicle at the end of the lease.”
Lease for an electric two-wheeler starts at INR 2,800, and for a three-wheeler starts at INR 12,500 exclusively for vehicles used in commercial logistics applications.
Also Read: Mufin Green Closes FY23 At 250 Cr, Eyes $100 Mn Funding In FY24
All-In-One EV Angle
The company says it has built its core value proposition around its ability to minimise operating costs and maximise uptime and fleet utilisation for fleet operators by relying on data received from its smart and connected fleets. Realtime data from the fleet is used towards generating recommendations and alerts for predictive diagnostics. The start-up says its mobile application sends nudges and recommendations to improve driving behaviour and derive the most optimum performance from the fleet, resulting in lower downtime.
“We provide a fully integrated platform for raising and managing all insurance, warranty, service related claims – reducing fleet management overheads and improving operational efficiency. There is a dedicated support team that is responsible for responding to alerts and tracking our fleet health for supporting our fleet partners,” Arora said.
It is also building creating statistical models for benchmarking one vehicle against the other. 'So if a model a vehicle runs in Delhi at a certain temperature, we have a hundred such model a vehicles running in the same city permitting us to identify outliers and dive into root cause analysis,” Arora explianed.
Alt Mobility’s tech stack, it says, also guides the fleet owners about site service support, nearest service garages and charging points. The start-up offers all these full-stack features while leasing the EVs.
“At the end of the day, these EV fleets are income generating assets and we work towards improving bankability, reducing risk and lowering operating costs for fleet operators and financing institutions,” he said.
Also Read: Revfin Funds Over 17K EVs During Last 51 Months
Solving EV Adoption
According to the start-up, what has helped it become cash positive within the first year of its operations has been its willingness to solve the most difficult of questions hovering around the EV finance & lease ecosystem – how does one evaluate the value of used EVs?
“Since the beginning of operations, we have maintained a 100% collection efficiency and have had zero NPAs. We have built robust technology-enabled collection systems that are backed by the ability to repossess, refurbish and redeploy vehicles with an efficiency not seen before in the industry. We have developed proprietary algorithms to compute the battery’s capacity and degradation, which is over 40% of the vehicle’s cost and estimate the vehicle’s resale value for a second life” said Arora.
Moreover, the tech stack also helps the company immobilise EVs of payment defaulters. The start-up’s revenue model requires the companies to deposit leasing charges three months in advance.
Alt Mobility’s plans include exploring the four-wheeler and other larger electric vehicle categories. With the likes of Blusmart, and other cab aggregators announcing an EV push, it seems four-wheeler EVs will also be a big hit in the country, especially in the intercity segment.
The logistics and last-mile deliveries sector has proven to be one of the country's biggest adopters of electric vehicles. As per a report by Boston Consulting Group, by 2025, EV adoption will likely increase significantly in the last-mile delivery fleets, with up to 30% adoption across two-, three-, and four-wheeler verticals.