Greaves Cotton is venturing into the multi-brand electric vehicle retail segment and the first such outlet will come up in Bengaluru soon. Introduced under the brand name AutoEVMart, the platform serves as a marketplace for all EV products in the country offering two and three-wheelers, bicycles along with charging solutions and spares, among others, Greaves Cotton Managing Director and Group CEO Nagesh Basavanhalli said.
Greaves mobility business comprises Ampere Electric, which caters to both two-wheeler (e-scooter including high-speed scooter) and three-wheeler (e-rickshaw, e-auto and e-loader) segments.
Within e-three wheelers, the company has a presence in e-rickshaws under the ELE brand and e-autos under the MLR brand.
Between Ampere Electric and Greaves, there are more than 600 retail stores in over 400 cities.
“These will be the first of its kind multi-brand retail stores for cleantech or electric mobility. We want to give the consumers a one-stop shop for EVs where they can choose from several electric brands in one place.
“AutoEVmart is part of our larger strategy to create an EV ecosystem, which is built on wider choice, convenience and unique experience to consumers,” Basavanhalli told PTI in an interaction.
The company is planning to set up its first EV retail store in Bengaluru.
“We will start first with Bangalore, which has come as an obvious choice for the city being more or less the EV capital of India. We will gauge the response from the first outlet and then will go to the other major EV cities in the country. When we launched a multi-brand service (under Greaves Care) a couple of years ago we saw a big response. So, based on the response, here we will move to other parts of the country as well,” he said.
He, however, said that the multi-brand EV retail stores network will be a little more exclusive.
The announcement comes on World EV Day, which is observed on September 9 every year.
Company’s entry into the multi-brand EV retail segment comes in line with its ambitious campaign – ‘Moving Billions With Greaves,’ it said.
The platform is a concept that will enable consumers with a wide range of electric vehicles to choose from Ampere Electric to other brands in the EV space, said a release.
The company wants to emphasize the affordability and reliability aspect of EVs to enable consumers with smooth last-mile connectivity, it added.
“We have demonstrated the capability that we can ramp up to 600 stores in very short order. So, if we need to and depending on how this first one (coming up at Bangalore) is received, we will ramp up. So, you can look at probably a handful to start with and from there expand it in a cluster format to other cities.
“But it won’t be as prolific as Graves-Ampere retail network,” Basavanhalli said without divulging the investment that the company will make into the new business.
He said Auto EVmarts will have a phygital format -offering services both offline and online.
The platform will keep it limited only to two and three-wheelers partly because as much as 80 per of EVs in the country or mainly two-wheelers, which is a focus area for the company at present, he said.
