With electric vehicle adoption on the rise across the country, Ola Mobility Institute (OMI) has launched its EV-Ready India Dashboard.
Aishwarya Raman, Executive Director, OMI Foundation, told Mobility Outlook that the main goal of the portal was to promote more data-driven decision making in sustainable mobility. It not only tracks data on EV use but also helps customers and business entities in this arena.
The company tracks data across all States — it sources this from the Vahan portal and, in the case of Telangana, from its transport department website. The challenge is to bring down the lag time on data reflection which Raman said was owing to the fact that Vahan uses a different algorithm as also Telangana.
Beyond tracking EV sales, the portal also looks at other aspects of e-mobility such as sales projection for EVs or the required number of charging stations/batteries, R&D clusters and investments on e-mobility. In the process, industry players can decide where to invest and figure out which State offers a good return on investment.
Raman said the portal would help stakeholders take right decisions while States could press the right levers to accelerate investments. “By putting this dashboard together, data and insights are made readily accessible for States to rev up EV adoption,” she added.
Pradeep Karuturi, Lead-Centre for Clean Mobility, OMI Foundation, said the company used the META profit tool for data projection. “We have tweaked the algorithms further based on the research done by our team,” he added.
The portal also aims to help consumers make the right decisions on EVs in terms of total cost of ownership vis-a-vis competing models in the internal combustion engine space as well as keeping a track on sustainability goals of individual States.
Challenges And Opportunities
While the portal collates data and developments gathered by OMI Foundation over the last five years, there are challenges to reckon with like the lag in data projection on. Raman said this could be reduced with more application programming interface (API) integrations.
Another challenge lies in collecting the right data as the same information is available across various platforms be it the number of charging stations or EV-specific investments made by companies.
The 14-member team at OMI Foundation believes that this challenge is turning into an opportunity by allowing States to calculate the investments coming in with each development. The company is looking at a concerted effort by everyone within the ecosystem to forge close relationships with state governments.
The company is also looking at API collaboration with these teams which has already kicked off with some States at an informal level.This will allow them to reduce investments on third party portals for tracking data.
“This partnership will ensure that we are on top of all information in EV adoption while the collaborator who will receive our technical tools makes the right decisions,” said Raman.