In this leg, we’ll be leaving Hyderabad and going through Central India back home to Delhi. This covered 1655 km, done in three days.

Our motive in a few words: to show you that it’s not just possible to do these long trips on an EV vehicle, but it’s pretty easy and the cost effective.

It’s a long journey and a long article, like the previous ones. I’ve divided it into three parts: one for each day. I’ll also be publishing a separate article on observations from the charging infrastructure we came across through the entire trip. Keep an eye out for that.

Here’s an index for you to skip to the part that would most interest you.

Index

Hyderabad to Nagpur

Nagpur to Gwalior

Gwalior to Delhi

Cost and Savings

Housekeeping

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You can check out our individual charging sessions in this handy roadtrip sheet!

We shared live updates about this trip in our WhatsApp community. Join the group to follow our next trip! This trip was in September 2025. We are back from our summer break and will resume regular publishing!

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Hyderabad to Nagpur

Route: Hyderabad - Nizamabad - Adilabad - Jamb - Khandali

Distance: 728 km

Time taken: 9h 45m

Number of charging stops: 3

In Hyderabad, we hosted a small breakfast community meetup at the iconic Cafe Nilofur in Hyderabad. It was open to all. We discussed current issues within the EV ecosystem, trends we observed and the way forward.

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Before we left Hyderabad, we wanted to check out a couple of chargers within the city. The Voltran Charging hub, which had six 60kW fast chargers.

And, Glida’s massive charging hub which had 130 charging points. It had a good vibe, bright machinery and extremely high power charging infra. We hope such kinds of hubs become the norm across India.

We left Hyderabad around noon, the latest start in the road trip so far. Our plan was to head to Nagpur, some 500km away.

Hyderabad is a sprawl. It felt like we had to travel 70km to finally leave its urban influence and start seeing rural scenery. Three hours later, we stopped at a BPCL fuel pump in Nizamabad. We were at 22% SoC.

We got cheap electricity for the car, but at a cost on our bodies. The charger has no shade (like, most PSU chargers). 30 minutes later, the car was at 78%. We were pretty depleted though.

All EV owners must now be used to supernatural math skills by now. Nagpur was 300km away and we could do it with a full charge now. But, the charging speed is likely to drop and it would take us 45 minutes to reach 100%. It wasn’t worth it. We decided to head towards Nagpur and get a quick top-up along the way.

The route was an old-fashioned, four-laned highway. It was bustling, with a lot of speed breakers and crossings. Every now and again, it seemed like a village had spilled over onto the highway. It was hard to maintain a consistent speed of 80kmph.

The charging infrastructure on this stretch is yet to catch up to the rest of the country. There were few chargers, and most were 25-30kW. A few 60-120kW chargers were available, but operated by PSUs (BPCL, IOCL) and these seemed - to no one’s surprise - to be offline.

By sundown we were in Maharashtra. It felt like returning to roots: things just seemed a lot more familiar. But, the road condition seemed to have gotten worse. There were large potholes and craters.

Then the drive became significantly worse when it started to rain. Visibility dropped and we had to switch on the AC. Expected range crashed. We needed to finalise a charger sooner than expected.

We narrowed down on a 120kW charger operated by BPCL at Jamb, some 60km before Nagpur. We had heard of PSUs keeping high power chargers and wanted to see it first-hand. These chargers are often considered a rare beast, but we have proved it wrong when we analysed the Bull case for PSUs (which you can read for free).

At 8 p.m., we reached Jamb. The charger was empty and it was online. We connected and the car was pulling full power. The other advantage of this charger was that it has a restaurant next door. For those keeping track: Yes, it was our first full meal since Hyderabad.

We were tired and wanted to crash at Jamb itself. But, we struggled getting a hotel room. 1.5 hours later, we gave up and decided to drive towards Nagpur. 18km later, in a non-descript highway town of Khandali, we found a hotel. It had a Jio-bp fast charger attached to it, which we didn’t expect. The rooms were not good. But we were too tired to move on.

Nagpur to Gwalior

Route: Nagpur - Sagar - Gwalior

Distance: 765 km

Time taken: 13h 50m

Number of charging stops: 2

At 6:30 a.m., we left the hotel.

There are three ways from Nagpur to Delhi. Nagpur-Jabalpur-Chitrakoot (UP) and then the expressway to Delhi. This was described in our Bandhavgarh trip. Or, we cut through Indore and join the Delhi–Mumbai Expressway. The second part of the route I’ve done numerous times, including on the first day of this trip. We chose option three: via Gwalior to Agra and Yamuna Expressway. It was new.

This required some planning. We were in areas where charging infrastructure still had gaps. We decided to skip the Nagpur-Chhindwara route, and instead go from Nagpur to Pench and from there to Sagar. This is because the Chhindwara route had mostly 30kW chargers by Glida, BPCL and Tata Power, and a sole 60kW charger by BPCL. The other route had a lot more options for 60kW chargers as well as 25-30kW charging options.

Through the trip we wanted to stick to chargers above 60kW. We wanted to highlight the maturity of the charging infrastructure. Where, we not only had options for charging, but also many options for optimum, high speed chargers.

This trip has shown the abundance of 60kW chargers. If you aren’t using these chargers, then you’re pretty much wasting time during these long road-trips.

The highway drive was beautiful, particularly through Pench. The forest stretched till the horizon, and there was a constant chirp of birds. Signboards notify you of animal crossings and along with rise hopes that one can get to see a tiger along the way. This is what road trips are all about. The last time we felt this much peace and serenity was when we drove through the Western Ghats in Kerala. That was a couple of days ago, but it felt like it was last month.

Two hours later, we had crossed Pench National Park and we decided to stop at a 120kW charger by Statiq at Mohagaon.

There were plenty of options ahead of us: including some 60kW PSU and non-PSU chargers and a 90kW charger too. The Statiq charger was a 10 km detour. But we were hungry and this charger had a restaurant attached.

We’re in central India now. So no more dosas; and instead we’d have sandwiches and poha.

The next four hours - or, around 250km - was driving on National Highway 44 (Srinagar to Kanyakumari). It was a gorgeous drive: through agricultural fields, forests. We went up and over the Satpur hill range and then over the Vindhyas from where we had entered the Gangetic plains.

There weren’t too many functioning 60kW chargers along the way. Most were just 25-30kW.

By afternoon, we were at Sagar where we had an option of at least eight 25-30kW charges and just two 60kW (one Adani and the other Jio). On route was the Jio charger, which had a hotel attached too.

This hotel seemed to be from some fantasy land recreated for a movie set. It was very weird looking. It was called Hotel Paradise, but not sure whose version of Paradise that is.

For one, it had a big parking lot that was shaded, except for the part which had the charger. The touchscreen of the Mindra machine was not working, but fortunately, we could do this from the app.

And then, we enter the hotel to find it massive. But the seating was circular, as if radiating around a central big pillar. It was exquisite, grand and massive. And eerily empty.

The service was super slow despite us ordering something simple and easy to make. Perhaps, this was among the first meals they had cooked this afternoon.

We were still 695km from Delhi. At the start of the day, we had made an ambitious plan of perhaps attempting to drive directly. We’d reach Delhi late in the night.

But this delay, plus our general exhaustion, meant we were aiming for Gwalior, some 300km away.

Finding cheap and reliable accommodation with AC charging in Gwalior was challenging. After a bit of searching, we found a guy on booking.com who had a room to rent in his house that had EV charging.

For the first hour, the highway cut across low hill ranges. At some point, we crossed Jhansi and entered Uttar Pradesh: the 11th and final new state of the road trip. We crossed more creeks, streams and rivers (Sindh and Betwa), all feeding into Ganga (a river we won’t be crossing on this trip). At one point, the highway cuts across a reservoir. It was dark, however.

Around 8 p.m., we approached the house in Gwalior. The roads were barely five meters wide. Cars were parked on both sides. The charger was in the verandah and not in the parking area. We had to play a little game of tetris with cars to be able to squeeze in the gaps, and put the car nose in. We had to use a 30m extension cable to charge.

We were at 13% SoC and we needed all the juice we could get from this 15A charger. It would take 20 hours to get a full charge with this. Wish people start to specify the type of charger they have when listing it as their amenities.

Folk from the neighbourhood turned up to see us charge, and started interrogating us about the car and the charging.

The guy who rented us the room charged us INR 400 (USD 4.2) as “charging fee”. He clearly overcharged, and perhaps just blurted out a number without understanding how much electricity was being consumed. But it was late, and this overnight charging was saving us time the next day. We just needed enough charge to get us to Agra.

Gwalior to New Delhi

Route: Gwalior - Agra - New Delhi

Distance: 334 km

Time taken: 7h 10m

Number of charging stops: 1

It was a slow, anti-climatic-kind-of-day to end this frenetic road trip. Just 350km, largely on an expressway. If we had fully charged, we’d have driven it in one stretch. But we had to do a quick top-up at Agra. So, we left only at 8 a.m.

In 12 hours of charging it had gone up from 13% SoC to 50%. We had to wait for other cars to be moved so we could exit. In the time it took, it went up to 51%. Always Be Charging.

It was our last day, and we were comfortable with the charging situation. We broke our self-imposed 79kmph rule and decided to burn through the juice at speed.

Two hours later, we were at Agra. There are plenty of options here. My picks are ChargeZone’s charger in Marriott hotel or Statiq at ITC Mughal hotel close to which is a Burger King.

This time, we came across something we hadn’t heard of. A 360kW charger! Operated by Glida. The Statiq app showed a 120kW charger also on the premises, and strangely, it said it was free. We had to check it out, even if it was on the outskirts of Agra.

The charger was in a sort of upcoming suburb of Agra. It was remote, on the Western edge of the city somewhere near the Agra-Lucknow Expressway. We were confused as to why someone would set-up such a high capacity charger here.

We found the charger (a Mindra 360kW and an Exicom 120kW machine). It was functional. The entire area was empty. We parked our car haphazardly (as if any delay would shatter our illusion) and plugged it in. 16% SoC and the charger was active and giving us the car’s full power.

There were no eateries here, but fortunately, we could order a Burger King meal to the spot.

A security guard was present at the site and we got talking. A little while later, a technical team from Glida arrived too. After a while, the property owner came too. Through our conversations, we realised a few things about this hub:

• This is primarily a bus charging station, aimed at tourist buses that come from Delhi to Agra and back. While tourists see the Taj Mahal, the bus can charge here.

• The charging station was made live only the night before we came. A bus had come for a test charge. I guess they had forgotten to take the charger off the app. This explains why the spot was open and charging marked as free.

While we were charging, a Mahindra 9E pulled up. Perfect because this car could potentially pull in charge at the charger’s max capacity of 360kW compared to our max limit of 60kw (though, we realised later that the charging gun was limited to 180kW).

It was when he positioned his car next to ours that we realised that the system was designed for buses (as the charger was installed with a setback on a podium). The 9E owner seemed to be disappointed with his car’s range, saying it would give just 300-350km, compared to the advertised 500km range. We realised later this was because he loved exceeding 120–150kmph on highways.

We were there for nearly an hour. Our car was at 80% SoC.

The final section is a straight expressway. We had enough juice and our speed limit was over 100kmph. Like the Mahindra 9E owner, it was more about thrills than range.

We crossed over the Yamuna River, our 61st river of the trip. We’d cross Hindon River at Greater Noida before crossing Yamuna again.

At 3 p.m., thirteen days since we left, and 6,000-km later, the car rolled into its familiar spot in South Delhi.

Cost and Savings

These trips aren’t meant to be merely joy rides. They allow me to evaluate charging infrastructure along the way (which has become useful for charging companies to understand customer POVs).

They also, hopefully, encourage others to adopt EV technology if they are still under the impression that long journeys in electric cars are still not possible due to the nascent charging infrastructure in the country. We hope we are changing these minds.

EVs are the future: better for the wallet and the environment.

Here is a comparison we’ve made from our trip.

Share

Series Index

1. The Epic EV Roadtrip! (Published - 16 February 2026)

2. New Delhi to Bengaluru (Published - 24 February 2026 )

3. Bengaluru to Varkala (Published - 11 March 2026)

4. Varkala to Hyderabad (Published - 4 June 2026)

5. Hyderabad to New Delhi (This one!)

6. Chargers, Charging and Commentary

This is an index of articles to come. The links will be updated as the articles are published. You can bookmark this section or subscribe to get them straight to your inbox.

This series of articles wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our team. The trip, time, effort - everything was self sponsored and costs money. We do not take advertising or sponsorship money. It allows us to say the uncomfortable truth without compromising on our ethics. You can do your bit by buying us a pizza or getting a premium subscription to the Substack.

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Behind the wheel, Photos : Garvit, Priyans.

Words and Graphics : Priyans

Edit : Mohit Rao

Map : Siddharth Agarwal

All rights reserved with Priyans Murarka @ ExpWithEVs.

The data from here and this article cannot be repackaged or sold without explicit written permission of ExpWithEVs.

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In this leg, we’ll be leaving the beautiful cliffs of Varkala in Kerala towards Hyderabad. This covered 1385 km, done in two days.

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Our motive in a few words: to show you that it’s not just possible to do these long trips on an EV vehicle, but it’s pretty easy and the cost effective. We also check out the charging infrastructure along the way.

It’s a long journey and a long article, like the previous ones. I’ve divided it into two parts: one for each day. I’ll also be publishing a separate article on observations from the charging infrastructure through the entire trip. Keep an eye out for that.

Here’s an index for you to skip to the part that would most interest you.

Index

Varkala to Tirupati

Tirupati to Hyderabad

Cost and Savings

Housekeeping

Please enable images if you are reading this on email. There are over 15 images and videos in this article! The best way to experience this article is on a desktop browser (click here) or on the Substack App.

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You can check out our individual charging sessions in this handy roadtrip sheet!

We shared live updates about this trip in our WhatsApp community. Join the group to follow our next trip!

Join our WA Community!

For our premium subscribers, you can access the PowerBI of our trip for free. Just drop me a message. You don’t need a license to access it, just a valid work email.

Varkala to Tirupati

Route: Varkala - Aravakuruchi - Krishnagiri - Vellore - Chitoor - Tirupati

Distance: 822 km

Time taken: 17 h

Number of charging stops: 7

Sigh. I’m going to miss Varkala. Look at this sunset the day before we left.

At 5.20 a.m., we left for Hyderabad. We were supposed to go to Chennai for a meeting. But since that was cancelled, we decided to do the drive towards Hyderabad. This was almost 1,400km that we hoped to cover in two days.

The drive back seemed even more daunting than the journey here. We had driven for three days from Delhi to Bengaluru, where we took a couple of days break. This time, we’d be on all-day drives for at least four days. Highway, chargers, roadside food and suspect hotels before we got home.

But when we left Varkala, at least our car, bodies and mind were well-rested and recharged.

We knew most of the journey would be in the plains of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. And so, we wanted to soak in the first three hours, where we’d be driving through Southern Kerala and over the Western Ghats to Tenkasi. Gorgeous.

We knew we had to charge once in Tamil Nadu. It’s a place with notoriously high prices per unit (Rs. 28 per unit at private Charge Point Operators (CPOs), compared to Rs. 14 at BPCL or IOCL).

As mentioned a few times in our road trips and articles, this price differential did not bother private CPOs. This is because they offer reliable charging with better amenities. At BPCL’s petrol stations, you may not even find functional restrooms.

Around 10.30 a.m., nearly 5 hours into the drive, we decided to stop for breakfast and to charge at Thanakkankulam. We’d done just 250km all morning. This was more due to the scenery that caused us to stop or slow down in awe, rather than the state of the roads.

Vadas and dosas for us from Ariyas Bhawan; and a 120kW Hyundai charger hosted on Statiq for the car. A 30 minute charging session got us from 30% SoC to 75%.

Back on the road. We were heading to Vellore through Madurai. Compared to the scenery of the ghats, there was nothing much to write home about the plains of Tamil Nadu. It was beautiful in its own way. Just not Western-Ghats-in-the-monsoons gorgeous. It was also warm outside, and didn’t feel like winter was coming. 35C and bright sunlight.

So I’ll focus a bit on the chargers we spotted along the way. (We’re a bit nuts that way. One of our favourite exercises was to spot the charger in petrol stations from the highway and figure out the manufacturer. We’re getting very good at this game!)

Enroute we saw Hydra Charging, a CPO we hadn’t seen in a while. We decided to take a quick drinks break at this 120kW charger.

In 10 minutes, we went from 40% SoC to 54%. Handy, but unnecessary. Though we were the only ones charging, it felt slower than 120kW. The charger was giving just 7 units of energy in 10 minutes, or 42kW. It should’ve been closer to 50kW if it was charging at decent speeds.

We really didn’t need to repeatedly top-up, but to keep the drive interesting, we decided to try out only BPCL chargers. It would help us save money.

85km from the Hydra Charger, we stopped at BP Navani, north of Nammakal. The charger, at a fuel pump, has no amenities around. It has an abandoned or non-operational food mall. Not exciting stuff and this makes the wait much more dull. In 20 minutes, the SoC went from 27% to 61%. More than enough to cover the 240km to reach Vellore.

On the road again, we decided to stop at another BPCL charger at Krishnagiri, some 150km from our previous charger. This was a 60kW charger, but had the advantage of a restaurant, the iconic Sarvana Bhavan, right opposite the petrol station. It was 5 p.m., we’d been on the road for nearly 12 hours. It was time to grab a late lunch (or, an early dinner?).

The Krishnagiri BPCL charger was at a fuel pump which also seemed to be a popular rest stop for trucks and heavy vehicles. There was just enough space for our car to fit in amongst the jigsaw puzzle of heavy vehicles. I can’t imagine families using this on their journeys.

Tamil Nadu notoriously high prices per unit: Rs. 28 per unit at private Charge Point Operators (CPOs), compared to Rs. 14 at BPCL or IOCL. As mentioned a few times in our road trips and articles, this price differential did not bother private CPOs. This is because they offer reliable charging with better amenities. At BPCL’s petrol stations, you may not even find functional restrooms.

For instance, in Krishnagiri, Mahindra set-up one of their flagship chargers across this BPCL charger. They know that cheaper charging does not take away their competitive edge.

In general, South India has great charging infrastructure. Reliable, fast. But, we did see a lot of non-functional Public Sector Unit chargers too.

Anyway, back to our road trip. We had a decision to make. From Krishnagiri, the route to Hyderabad would either go on the outskirts of Bengaluru or cut across the border and head through Kolar Gold Fields to the Bengaluru-Hyderabad Highway. But, we decided another route. Head east, instead of North to go to Vellore. This would be a deviation, but we wanted to pay homage to one of the most iconic charging sites in India, ChargeZone’s Cafe Coffee Day charger at Vellore.

We were excited, we had enough juice in the car. To hell with maintaining optimal speeds below 80kmph. We sped through on the wide, classic national highway connecting Bengaluru and Chennai. In 40 minutes, we were at Vellore.

This charging site was one of the first high power publicly-accessible charging sites. Gentari and ChargeZone set-up this charging site. It then became an expansive showcase of chargers. ChargeZone also set-up another site next to this: this one with a 1MWh BESS (Battery Energy Storage System) with a 55kW solar to charge high-power electric vehicles like buses and trucks as well as electric four wheelers. This was an investment of Rs. 1 crore and enabled the site to have five 240kW chargers.

Eventually, it was time to move on. Despite having been on the road for 12 hours, we felt we had it in us to push a bit more. The more distance we covered today, the earlier we’d reach Hyderabad the next day.

On to the next charger then: Elektrik Mobility, a small CPO based out of Andhra Pradesh which had a hub in nearby Chittoor where at least 10 cars could charge at once.

We had two options, either take the main road through Vellore city or a rural bypass road. We chose the latter hoping it would save us time by beating city traffic.

But, we quickly found out that trusting Google Maps can be a mistake. The rural road kept getting narrower and took us through villages that were buzzing with activity. There was often just enough space for our car to pass (and on one occasion, we had to get down and do some back-of-the-hand calculations to see if the car could fit through the space. We had to fold all the side mirrors and stop oncoming traffic just to move forward.).

Along the way, we crossed another great Indian River: Cauvery.

The roads in Andhra Pradesh were much better. Our stop in Vellore to Chittor was just 64km. But it took us two hours to cover that distance.

The Chittoor charger was well-lit, right beside the alternate Bengaluru-Chennai highway, and had multiple chargers (including, high powered ones for trucks, an Ather one for two-wheelers, and had fast and slow chargers). There were clean washrooms and even had personnel manning the hub. It was great to see these hubs being set-up across the country.

We were at 49% SoC. It was 8.50 p.m. As the car charged, we evaluated our moods and energy. Maybe, we could push a little more?

In 15 minutes, the car was at 70% SoC. By then, we had decided to drive to the Temple town of Tirupati , some 75km away. Tirupati was chosen as it had 5 Type2 chargers for slow charging, while there was a hotel next to the charging hub.

The highway from Chittoor to Tirupati was excellent: wide, well-lit, clear lane markings, bright divider markings, and low traffic. In an hour, we were at Tirupati.

The charging hub was at the bypass before Tirupati. It was a great location for tourists and those in transit. We were at 53% SoC and decided to put the car in a slow charger.

For those planning multi-day road trips on their EV, this is something to ponder about. So far, we had done 4,000-km and had put the car in slow charging only in Varkala before this. Slow charging definitely helps balance the battery pack. The battery is made of a series of individual cells, and slow charging helps spread electrons more evenly across these cells. Whereas, when only resorting to fast charge, electrons are dumped in the pack at high speeds, which can lead to an imbalance spread.

With the car on slow charge, we took a relatively cheap room in the hotel next door.

Tirupati to Hyderabad

Route: Tirupati - Kadappa - Kothakotha - Hyderabad

Distance: 563 km

Time taken: 10h 30m

Number of charging stops: 2

We left at 5 a.m. It was going to be a straight-forward route and straight-forward drive. So, we’ll do a bit more charger talk today.

Before we left Tirupati, we wanted to check out Voltran’s charging hub. Voltran is a CPO based out of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, where they have 6-8 charging locations. It was dark and empty. I’m not sure if they had a power cut or it wasn’t as impressive as E-mobility’s hub or I had wrongly assumed it was 24x7.

For the journey to Hyderabad, we chose the route towards Kadapa and then Kurnool. This route (on National highway 44 and National Highway 400) is the shortest route, and passes through the forested regions of the Eastern Ghats.

The highway was surprisingly very empty, and winded through the lush green forests. It was a clear day with a gentle breeze. A great day to drive. We observed several chargers, many of them being 60kW.

We had narrowed down on a Voltran hub north of Kadappa as we wanted to try as many regional players as possible. It could be a good stop for a quick breakfast. The hub was at a non–descript location on the highway. The signage on the approach was not good.

But this hub did have personnel manning it. He had the connector in hand, signed us on the app for Voltran, asked us for how long we wanted the charge (30 minutes, we said), and with a tap of his RFID, the charging session started. The hub only has a tea and coffee machine, and no food.

The road-side eatery next door was small, but looks can be deceiving. This was among the best dosas we had on the trip. It was run by a friendly, warm couple.

In 30 minutes, the car was at 82% SoC. Between Kadapa and Kurnool, some 174km away, there were not many chargers. We had enough to reach Kurnool, after which there were plenty of chargers till Hyderabad.

After Kurnool, we first crossed the Tungabhadra River, and 15 minutes later, crossed the Krishna River. We were now in Telangana, our 10th state.

At Kothakota, we stopped at a BPCL charger. In 20 minutes, the car went from 12% SoC to 45%. That was enough to reach Hyderabad 145km away.

While the charger was good and delivered full power, there was nothing to do at the petrol station but wait out in the open. Fortunately, it was a bit cloudy.

On our way, we saw a 120kW IOCL charger and wanted to take a closer look. It was cordoned off. A restaurant was next door and a watchman kept beckoning us over. We thought he was warning us to stay away. But turns out, the restaurant had an Adani charger and the watchman was trying to get us to use it.

We stopped to take a few pictures - probably confusing the watchman - and then we were on the road again. Just before entering Hyderabad, we stopped by Jio-bp’s massive charger hub near the airport. It had 50 charging points and we can see Refex EV Cab companies cars being charged here. It was a new charger where minor construction was still happening.

At nearly 3.30 p.m., we entered Hyderabad. What welcomed us were wide roads and high speed limits. Strangely, we couldn’t find a hotel with a public Type2 Charger for slow charging. We were at 3% SoC, so our priority was to find a charger.

Costs and savings

These trips aren’t meant to be merely joy rides. They allow me to evaluate charging infrastructure along the way (which has become useful for charging companies to understand customer POVs).

They also, hopefully, encourage others to adopt EV technology if they are still under the impression that long journeys in electric cars are still not possible due to the nascent charging infrastructure in the country. We hope we are changing these minds.

EVs are the future: better for the wallet and the environment.

Here is a comparison we’ve made from our trip.

Share

Series Index

1. The Epic EV Roadtrip! (Published - 16 February 2026)

2. New Delhi to Bengaluru (Published - 24 February 2026 )

3. Bengaluru to Varkala (Published - 11 March 2026)

4. Varkala to Hyderabad (This one!)

5. Hyderabad to New Delhi

6. Chargers, Charging and Commentary

This is an index of articles to come. The links will be updated as the articles are published. You can bookmark this section or subscribe to get them straight to your inbox.

This series of articles wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our team. The trip, time, effort - everything was self sponsored and costs money. We do not take advertising or sponsorship money. It allows us to say the uncomfortable truth without compromising on our ethics. You can do your bit by buying us a pizza or getting a premium subscription to the Substack.

Buy us a pizza

Upgrade to a paid subscription

Behind the wheel, Photos : Garvit, Priyans.

Words and Graphics : Priyans

Edit : Mohit Rao

Map : Siddharth Agarwal

All rights reserved with Priyans Murarka @ ExpWithEVs.

The data from here and this article cannot be repackaged or sold without explicit written permission of ExpWithEVs.

A quick primer on the details about various Charging Infrastructure reports are available here.

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Index

Overview

Geographic Growth

Grid Demand vs Charger Rating

Price vs kW

Conclusion

Premium QnA

Housekeeping

You can read our article on March 2026 charging infrastructure to get an overview.

We are publishing this article from Europe, where we are looking at some interesting insights to bring to the Indian market.

We will be answering a mailbag question at the end of the article. Make sure to give it a read! Today’s questions - 1MW charging and above near ports and highways. Next week we will address why Exicom chargers behave differently on Jio-bp versus other CPOs. Click here to submit more questions!

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We are currently traveling through Europe and meeting e-mobility industry! If you are around in Copenhagen, Berlin, Warsaw then please connect!

Acknowledgement

EVInfraBI was created by Priyans Murarka and Garvit Singh. This wouldn’t have been possible without the efforts of our data entry team.

All rights reserved with Priyans Murarka @ ExpWithEVs.

The data from here and this article cannot be repackaged or sold without explicit written permission of ExpWithEVs.

Overview

The CCS2 chargers are growing, the Type2 chargers are being taken off the public network, thus their ratio is decreasing rapidly. We covered absolute growth of these numbers in our previous free article. Please check it out for more context.

We’ve also covered why it doesn’t make any sense for CPOs to invest in public Type2 network here. Broad pointers - Type2 charging’s operational expenses mainly rent to hire the space eat up most of the margin that a CPO can make. More units are sold by CCS2 chargers in a much faster time, leading to higher revenue for the fixed amount of rent being paid. Thus, we will continue to see public Type2 going down in the near future.

The grid demand is a better metric to track than CCS2 and Type2 charger ratio. There has been 80% increase Year on Year for the public charging infrastructure. This is a good sign. We believe Grid Demand will continue climbing as CPOs install higher capacity chargers.

The pincode coverage also saw an increase by 25%! Nationally, every three out of ten pincodes now have a CCS2 or a Type2 charger.

The average cost to charge across the network has gone upto INR 18.37 (USD 0.19) per unit. In the later sections, we will see the split between Private and Government CPOs, which will give more clarity on why the pricing jumped by almost INR 0.4 (USD 0.04) in one quarter.

The average charger rating had a double effect on growth - the reduction of Type2 chargers as well as CPOs installing higher power chargers. In our older article, we covered how the average battery capacity and charging capacity of cars is rising, which is in sync with growing average charger rating.

In this article, we will also explore public and government chargers, their ratings, their pricing and strategy with interactive and static charts.

Part 2 will be live next week where we will dig into other aspects of EV charging infrastructure.

You can subscribe to read the article, and more from our archive! It will help us continue publishing these reports and to do more.

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Geographic coverage

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Thank you for showing all the love for our hybrid webinar with TERI. We are planning another one this Friday at 4PM, for our premium subscribers. We will look at the charging infrastructure in India, understand who deployed what this quarter, which CPO is leading the race in higher power charging, what trends we saw in price changes, and some talk about the hardware.

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I will be visiting Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Berlin, Milan and Warsaw later this month. If you’d like to meet or want me to check some interesting charging sites then please drop me a message.

Today, we will look at some of the top global charger OEMs and understand how they are placed with respect to the Indian market.

The OEMs we will be talking about are ABB, Alpitronic, Autel, Delta, Kempower, Siemens, StarCharge and Tesla.

Try zooming in and see where each of the companies are located!

Let’s look at each OEM and their approach to India market.

ABB

ABB has existed in India for over a century, playing a key role in power and automation businesses across utility, industry, transport, infrastructure sectors. They have manufacturing setups in India and have on ground information about how Indian businesses are.

Globally, ABB is recognised as a premium hardware provider with majority of their clientele like Ionity (Europe), Electrify America (USA), Walmart (USA) and DEWA (UAE).

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The article has interactive charts, so I would strongly recommend reading it on your desktop.

Before we dive into the data - let’s clear out a few concepts.

Connector - A connector connects to a car to charge it. It is also known as a ‘gun’ or a ‘charging point’. There are various ways to charge a car, but we only consider CCS2 (fast) and Type2 (slow) connectors. Other connectors like a 15A socket or industrial plugs are ubiquitous. It doesn’t give us an accurate picture when we start counting those.

Charger - A single charger can have one or more connectors. We’ve seen sites with a single charger having upto 12 connectors. For our analysis, this is considered as a single charger with 12 connectors.

Charging Station - A single charging station can have one or more than one charger.

Thus, charging stations have charger(s) and chargers have connector(s).

Captive chargers - A captive charger is restricted by use only for certain use cases - like for employees in an office parking lot, or charging hubs for cabs, or the slow charger installed at your home. These chargers are considered captive and not included in this analysis. Only public chargers are considered in our analysis.

So, next time, when you see anyone quoting any data on ‘chargers’ in India, ask them whether it is charging stations or chargers or connectors and whether they’ve included captive chargers.

We are conducting a Data driven session with TERI on EV charging infrastructure in India on 1st May in New Delhi.

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We will be in Sweden, Germany, Italy and Poland next month. Let’s meet and discuss charging infrastructure!

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Yearly overview

We’ve extensively covered car sales in this article a few weeks ago. To recap, India has been selling 50,000 to 60,000 electric four wheelers for the past few quarters. With the existing crisis in West Asia, the push towards EV adoption is expected to be faster.

For the Oct-Dec and Jan-Mar quarter, the industry installed ~1000 CCS2 chargers per quarter. This is roughly 33% slower than the installation rate in Mar-Jun and Jun-Sep quarter. The industry installed more connectors (~2500 CCS2) in the Jan-Mar quarter than ~2000 CCS2 connectors in Oct-Dec quarter.

Looking at the entire country can give us some picture, but when we look at individual regions, we get a much clearer understanding. South Zone leads all the zones as shown in the chart below. This is due to high EV sales in South India as compared to the rest of the country.

Once a leader, the West Zone’s growth rate slowed down considerably this quarter. The South Zone too has seen slower growth, whereas North East saw reduction in total number of connectors. The North, Central and East zones have increased the rate of growth in this quarter.

Let’s look at some of the top states and CPOs in India.

Maharashtra leads the country with high CCS2 chargers. We are expecting this number to cross 2000 chargers by September this year. The second place fight is extremely close between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. We might see a toss up here in the next quarter as Tamil Nadu because Karnataka’s recent policy of adding Road Tax on EVs is regressive and will hamper the EV adoption in the state.

While we are here, let’s also look at some of the top CPOs in India by CCS2 chargers

BPCL is a clear leader among all CPOs with almost 3000 public CCS2 chargers.

Let’s look at the top government CPOs in more detail.

The chart begs to ask the question to IOCL - Why has IOCL, consistently, over the years, removed chargers from their app? We’ve been documenting their downfall in chargers in our previous reports. Did we just waste public money with PSUs? We wrote about how PSUs can turn the situation around and described a bull case for Oil Marketing Companies.

HPCL has shown almost consistent growth with adding ~250 chargers for the previous two quarters. BPCL, on the other hand, showed great growth in the last quarter by adding almost 600 chargers.

While the industry has been putting up chargers around the country, are they working? Are they on highways or in cities? Where do CPOs prefer to setup chargers? We will be answering some of these questions in our next article!

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Would you like to know more about the industry market share and growth in the industry? Drop us a comment or reach out to us on social media!

We have various data analytics tools around charging infrastructure. If you’d like to know more, please feel free to reach out to us.

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Disclaimer

All rights reserved with Priyans Murarka @ ExpWithEVs.

The data from here and this article cannot be repackaged or sold without explicit written permission of ExpWithEVs.

If you liked our insights, then please read some of our other work here :

While we have the data for 2W, 3W, 4W and Heavy vehicles (LCV, LGV, HCV, HGV, Bus) but today, we will focus only on Heavy Vehicles.

Reach out if you’d like to deep dive into any of it.

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In this series, we’ve already covered sales of electric four wheelers in India along with popular intercity EV Bus Routes (interactive!) in India.

The heavy vehicles segment is where the total cost of ownership (TCO) is a critical factor determining the profitability of a business. Today, majority of the segment consumes vast amounts of diesel. Traditionally polluting industries like cement, ports, mining, consumer goods, chemicals are attracting favourable investments if they reduce their carbon emissions. One such way to do this is by moving their fleet to electric, piece by piece.

The other pressure is to reduce the scope 2 emissions, i.e. moving the deliveries to electric fleets.

In the passenger movement section, funding is available under various government schemes to move public intracity transport to electric fleets. Fixed route transportation sees value addition in passenger comfort and running costs once the diesel bus is replaced with electric.

Recommended Reading - I recently came across this beautiful article titled “Cobalt Pipeline” in Washington Post by Todd Frankel.

Index

HGVs - Market Share, Manufacturing Status, Registrations
Buses - Sales, State Registrations, Models (Inter and Intracity), OEM Manufacturing Status, Charging

The article contains ten charts and figures. All rights reserved with Priyans Murarka @ ExpWithEVs.

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The data source is VAHAN and Telangana Transport Department. We have a multi page interactive PowerBI on HEV sales and registration data. Please reach out to us if you are interested to buy.

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HGVs

HGVs stand for Heavy Goods Vehicles, which include trucks, tractors, trailers, tankers, etc. In India, there are 12 electric OEMs in this space - BYD, IPL Tech, Olectra, Energy In Motion, Propel Tech, Ashok Leyland, Sany, Blue Energy Motors, Tata Motors, iBoard, Volvo and QUCEV.

Let’s take a look at the market and also understand where the companies are coming from.

The industry has sold little over 1000 HGVs across the years. The market is small but significant.

There’s a marked decrease of BYD’s market share, the leader in HGVs. Despite having a fraction of sales in 2025, they still have ~30% market share in India. BYD has reduced direct sales in India, but they have maintained

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We’ve been studying heavy electric vehicles for the past few months. One interesting aspect about heavy electric vehicles is passenger buses.

Passenger buses are intracity (operating within a city) or intercity (across two towns and cities). For every single intercity bus, India has nine intracity buses. Buyers prefer intracity because it is easier to manage operations and have centralised charging infrastructure at bus depots.

Intercity buses have higher running than intracity buses, yielding better ROI for the buyers.
The government and private players have released investment and bus purchase announcements over the years to promote intercity travel.

Associated recommended reading on India’s EV Buses by ICCT’s Bhaumik Gowande.

For this exercise, we studied 10 players - five government run transport departments and five private players.

KSRTC - Karnataka State Transport Corporation
TGSRTC - Telangana State Transport Corporation
MSRTC - Maharashtra State Transport Corporation
APSRTC - Andhra Pradesh State Transport Corporation
UPSRTC - Uttar Pradesh State Transport Corporation

Actual Routes

North India

Click on the map to know details about each route!

The dominant routes in North India are Delhi - Dehradun and Delhi - Agra.

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While we have the data for 2W, 3W, 4W and Heavy vehicles (LCV, LGV, HCV, HGV, Bus) but today, we will focus only on 4W.

Reach out if you’d like to deep dive into any of it.

Reach out

Index

1. YoY Sales

2. Battery capacities and charging impact
   

   The article contains 10 charts and figures. All rights reserved with Priyans Murarka @ ExpWithEVs.

   The charts and data from here and this article cannot be repackaged or sold without explicit written permission of ExpWithEVs.

Sponsored content funds narratives. To get the facts, pay and support independent research and insights. Become a paying subscriber to ExpWithEVs. We don’t take any ads or kickbacks.

For Indian Cards and UPI

For everyone else (except AmEx)

This research has been possible with the support of our paying subscribers. Paying subscribers get access to our community and complete archive of our industry stories.

The data source is VAHAN and Telangana Transport Department. We have a 26 page interactive PowerBI on e4W sales and registration data. Please reach out to us if you are interested to buy.

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Annual paying subscribers can get access to 24h access to this PowerBI. I <3 Analysts can get access upto a week.

YoY Sales

The e4W industry saw nearly doubling of sales from CY24 to CY25.

While the EV industry grew from almost nothing to ~200K cars from 2020 to 2025, the total 4W sales went up from 1.6M cars to 4.6M cars in the same time period.

The EV industry sales saw a stagnation in numbers from 2023 to 2024 because the models launched in the industry were not able to attract significant buyers. No new mass market cars, under 30L, were launched in 2024. This led to only 10% growth in the market. When OEMs don’t offer new cars to the market, it will stagnate.

While when we look at 2025, we see the growth doubling mainly because we saw Harrier, Windsor and Mahindra Twins hit the market. These cars were lapped up by the country and accounted for almost 43% of the sales in the calendar year.

The year also saw a marked change in the OEM market share. While the industry nearly doubled, Tata Motors saw a significant decline. We can say that JSW MG and Mahindra expanded the market. Tata Motors has been leading the EV market since 2020, but in 2025, that position was challenged closely.

Not all was going in favour of EVs in 2025 though. We saw one significant GST cut for ICE vehicles that immediately pushed sales towards ICE which could’ve been EVs.

Here’s a sample of four states - Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. We saw pickup in sales for Petrol, CNG and Diesel in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. While Kerala only saw an uptick in Petrol sales.

It is also interesting to see that Maharashtra sells almost equivalent CNG and Petrol cars, while in Kerala and Karnataka, Petrol dominates by a magnitude. CNG, Diesel and EV sales are consistent across these two states.

While digging around, we found this to be very surprising. Jaipur RTO, the capital of Rajasthan, was responsible for most number of EVs by Tata Motors.

The other surprising entry in the RTOs is Ahmedabad. One usually does not see Gujarat and Rajasthan topping the automotive sales charts. The list also shows that the market for Tata Motors has moved away from Tier 1 megapolis of Mumbai and Delhi to smaller cities like Pune, Jaipur and Ahmedabad. For Delhi, only two RTOs found a mention among the top 18 - Noida and Dwarka at 6th and 11th position.

Battery Capacities and charging impact

From 2020 to 2025, India deployed a total of 18.473 GWh of battery capacity on road, not including the multiple battery replacement for Tata EVs.

In 2025 alone, we deployed more battery capacity than we have from 2020 to 2024.

Let us look at the battery capacity trends over the years. Battery capacities rose by over

Read more

In this leg, we’ll be driving from Bengaluru to Varkala in Kerala through Salem and Coimbatore. This covered 932 km, done in two days. This trip was done to combine a series of meetings with those in the EV industry, meet our community, meet existing and prospective clients. The beautiful cliff town of Varkala would be a well-deserved break.

The motive behind the article is to show you that it’s not just possible to do these long trips on an EV vehicle, but it’s pretty easy and the cost effective.

It’s a long journey and a long article, like the first one. I’ve divided it into two parts: one for each day. I’ll also be publishing a separate article on observations from the charging infrastructure through the entire trip. Keep an eye out for this entire series.

Index

Bengaluru to Tiruppur

Tiruppur to Varkala

Cost and Savings

Housekeeping

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You can check out our individual charging sessions in this handy roadtrip sheet!

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We are in Hyderabad on 13th March. Drop us a line if you are around.

Bengaluru to Tiruppur

Route: Bengaluru-Krishnagiri-Salem-Coimbatore-Tiruppur

Distance: 424km

Time taken: 14h30m

Number of charging stops: 5, 3 working, 2 not working

It was great to get a couple of days rest after our three-day Delhi to Bengaluru drive. But now, it was time to leave early. Bengaluru to Coimbatore is just 350km and could be done in a single charge.

But speed was not our objective. I wanted to take some pitstops along the way to test out chargers, particularly the Zeon ones as we were now in their territory. Moreover, in Southern India, the charging network is so dense that you don’t really have to plan charging (unlike, say, the stretch between Aurangabad and Solapur, where we had driven through a few days prior).

At 4.30 a.m., I opened the Zeon app to find, to my surprise, around 40% of their network to be offline. This mystery would be solved later in the day when we met with the Zeon team.

We left for Coimbatore at 5 a.m. and headed to the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu border town of Attibele to use the BESCOM charger there.

I wanted to charge on the BESCOM (Bengaluru Electricity Supply Company) network in Bengaluru. It has an incredibly cheap charging fee: at just Rs. 7 per kWh. But the community (Join our Whatsapp group) had warned us that cab drivers usually occupy these slots and disapprove of outsiders - who can probably afford the more expensive chargers elsewhere - using these chargers. It was early in the morning and the hope was to do a sneaky, quick charge before we could get these looks.

As we left Bengaluru, the EVMitra app showed that a charger was available. We were excited.

The charger was by the side of a building, and parking was a challenge here. A cab had finished charging at the charger, but was still plugged in. We took the other charging gun, and it connected. The charging started. And seconds later, it stopped. Less than 0.1kWh was added. The Residual Current Device (RCD - a sort of safety trip for the device) had failed. This could be due to some sort of electricity leak from the wiring or a damaged component. Sigh. Just our luck.

Back to the road, and back to expensive private chargers.

To make the best of the situation, we looked out for a charger close to a coffee shop. We used our EVInfraBI to find a Starbucks at Shoolagiri, just 24km away, open at 6.30 a.m.

We zipped by the industrial town of Hosur, after which National Highway 44 winds a bit around the rocky hills of the Eastern Ghats. We soon arrived at a 60 kW charger operated by Statiq on Hyundai’s network. A little fact that surprised us: Hyundai has 65 chargers across ChargeZone and Statiq app. More than half of them are in South India. But, none of them are actually at Hyundai dealerships. You’d assume that it would be a no-brainer to use your distribution network for your branded electric charging. Instead, next to the Hyundai showrooms, you are likely to find ChargeZone, Tata Power, Shell Recharge, Adani TGas chargers.

The car went from 38% SoC to over 50% in the time we got our coffees. This was enough for us. As I said, the purpose of the trip was to check out more chargers.

The highway to Coimbatore is smooth, with loads of trucks carrying wind turbine blades (Tamil Nadu is the epicentre of wind energy in India). There was a good tailwind and a natural drop in elevation from Bengaluru (3,000 feet above sea level) to Coimbatore (1,350 feet). Our efficiency was close to 10km/kWh or 100wh/km: about 42% better than the typical 7 km/kWh that we get. Pretty good for a boxy SUV.

There is little else to say about this day’s drive, so we’ll focus on what we do best: looking at chargers.

2.5 hours later, we decided to test a BPCL charger near Salem. Chargers operated by the Oil Public Sector Units (like, Indian Oil or HP or BP) are significantly cheaper than private Charge Point Operators (CPOs): Rs. 14 per unit at BPCL, compared to Rs. 28 at other CPOs.

One would think this would mean that Oil PSUs would be dominating the market. But, reality is entirely different. (We wrote a detailed piece on potential bull case for Oil PSUs). Most of these chargers at petrol stations don’t work. Moreover, if you were family, would you prefer to stop at a swanky restaurant complex or a dingy petrol bunk where the washrooms are filthy?

To our joy, this charger was working. While we had tea and snacks from a stall next door, the car went from 19% SoC to 52%. More than enough to go to Coimbatore, some 130km away.

On the road again: green fields on either side, dhabas and restaurants, lots of trucks, the usual road trip.

A couple of chargers of note: Close to Salem is the Sankagiri Zeon, one of the earliest Zeon installations. You’ll find numerous videos of early EV adopters stopping here. The chargers here have been upgraded from ABB to Exicom over the years. If you’re into EV charging infrastructure, then do read our analysis report from our EVHardwareBI tool which tracks trends across the country.

There’s also a Relux charging station at the toll. I don’t really get the concept of charging by a toll, as you’d have to navigate into this in traffic and navigate out of it in traffic.

At Coimbatore, we had a couple of meetings: with MAK controls where we saw their new chargers and another with Steam A, the software powering Zeon’s charging app.

To Steam A, we asked why Zeon’s network was down at 4.30 a.m. They seemed surprised. They checked the data and came back with the answer: their app was being updated and the chargers were temporarily shown offline on the app. Zeon is known for its reliable charging network, thus it was surprising to see 40% of the network offline.

After a lovely afternoon, we headed to Tiruppur, around 50km away. The city is best known for its dyeing and textile industries, and Zeon spun out (pun intended) from a similar clothing and yarn company. We spoke at length with Karthikeyan, founder of Zeon charging, on the company’s plans.

For the night, I chose Hotel Sri Sakthi in Tiruppur because it had a Type2 7.4kW slow charger. The charger, a Type2 BrightBlu charger on Zeon’s network, was located in the basement.

In my room, I checked my phone to see how the charging was proceeding. To my shock, it showed that the charging had been interrupted or that it had not started. Both, the Zeon app and the MG app, didn’t show charging.

I waited a few minutes before calling the customer support line. The call centre picked up quickly and confirmed they couldn’t see that the charging had started.

I returned to the basement, disconnected the gun, rebooted the charger via the MCB and waited for the lights to come back on. No charge, and even the customer support confirmed that there was no session triggered from their end. I spent around 20 minutes trying various combinations of restarting the power supply, resetting the charger, refreshing the app, to no success.

Looking back, there could be two reasons. Maybe, the charger wasn’t getting enough power and the MCB kept tripping again and again. Or, maybe, the chargers are connected by SIM Card and the basement had patchy network. It was barely strong enough there for me to speak to customer care. Perhaps.

It was already 11 p.m. and the car was at 24% SoC. Frustrating. We had to slot in 30 minutes of charging before we headed to Thiruvananthapuram.

Tiruppur to Varkala

Route: Tiruppur - Palakkad - Pathanamthitta - Thiruvanathapuram - Varkala

Distance: 508km

Time taken: 17h30m

Number of charging stops: 4

It was an early morning start again. 5.30 a.m. from Tiruppur. Our immediate plan was to head to Palladam, some 20 minute drive away, where Zeon had a 120kW Exicom charger.

The great thing about 120kW chargers is that even if the gun is shared, each car would get 60kW. This was the maximum input for most EV cars anyway.

By the time filter coffee and samosas was had, the car was at 51% SoC. Enough to get us deep into Kerala.

Our initial plan for the day was to attend a meeting in Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram. This means cutting through Palakkad - the gap in the Western Ghats - and then through rivers and fields to the coastal town. But, at the start of the journey, we found out that our Kochi meeting was cancelled. We had to re-route to Varkala near Thiruvananthapuram. The advantage is that we had to drive through the central vein of Kerala. Otherwise, if we knew we had to head to Varkala, we’d have taken the boring highway running down Tamil Nadu towards Kanyakumari. The other advantage of this route was that we could stop at Phil’s hub, some 300km away. We thought it’ll be a fun new type of charging station to see.

I’m not one to be evocative or descriptive about my road trips, but I must mention that our drive today was gorgeous.

The crossing at Pallakkad was one of the most beautiful state crossings I’ve seen. The roads in Tamil Nadu are buttery smooth. It’s a downhill ride with verdant green forests and mountains on either side. A bit of mist. Freshness in the air. It was golden hour too. We kept stopping to take photos. We hadn’t expected this, and we were reminded that this is what makes road trips across this country magical.

Back to chargers. Right across the Tamil Nadu border, there were a couple of charging stations by GoEC and ESYGo in Kerala. It made sense to capitalise on the massive tariff difference between the two states (much like how Haryana’s liquor shops are priced cheaper and are located close to the Delhi border). In Tamil Nadu, the per unit charge is ~INR 25, while in Kerala, it is ~INR 17.50.

A 100km later, we started looking at a charger. We wanted one that had a restaurant too. We narrowed down on Zeon’s charger at Chennai Ananda Bhawan. We know that dosas here are usually good.

We connected the car to the Exicom charger and the car started charging via autocharge. We didn’t need to do a full charge as Phil’s hub was just 174km away.

We drove on. A mixture of plantations, paddy fields, forests, compact villages and hills. There was perhaps no straight stretch of road. Always winding. None of these roads have a toll also. Somewhere in the middle, we stopped for coconut water. It was a way to celebrate the 3,000km mark on our trip. Nearly half way!

Kerala just after the monsoons is a delight. We were lucky to have chosen a route that goes through the Western Ghats. At one point, we were driving along a river. Perhaps the calmest point of our journey so far.

At 2.30 p.m., we reached Phil’s hub at Pathanamittha. This is the pilgrimage town from where millions embark on their journey to Sabrimala, a famous Hindu temple on the hill.

It also means a lot of people drive here. Many with Electric Vehicles. It makes a great spot to set-up a hub like this.

Phil’s hub is a great new model for charging infrastructure. They have multiple chargers by multiple CPOs using multiple hardware at the same location, allowing ten cars to charge at one go. They have a 50 kW solar plant generating electricity. There’s snacking options and an air-conditioned lounge, clean washrooms and even a place to nap. This is how an ideal charging station should be: prioritising the comforts of the EV owner.

We’d a long discussion with the installer and a distributor for a major charger OEM.

From Phil’s hub, it was a four-hour drive to Thiruvanthapuram. Another beautiful journey.

As we came close to Kerala’s capital city, the traffic increased. We also took a diversion and got lost. Fortunately, we spotted a bus heading to Thiruvanthapuram and decided to follow it.

The bus took us through patches where we had dense forests on either side, but also through single-lane roads where traffic seemed to be pouring in from all sides. Chaos and adventure.

By 7.30 p.m., we were in the city where our agenda was to meet Manu. He has clocked nearly 2 lakh km in his Tata Nexon EV and has kept meticulous logs of his trips, issues and feedback. The entire documentation - which is fascinating and worth looking at if you’re in the industry - is available free in both English and Malayalam. If you are from South India, you must have encountered his Tips or recommended solutions when you’ve been stuck with an issue with your Tata EV car. Manu’s methodical tracking is a blueprint for someone wanting to understand India’s e4W Car ecosystem.

We left Thiruvanthapuram at 10 p.m. and an hour later, I was at my friend’s hostel, Molly’s, in Varkala. It’s been a long day. Heck, it seems like we left Delhi years ago. So much had happened. A vacation here was needed before the long journey back to Delhi.

P.S.: There’s EV charging available at Molly’s via a 15A socket!

Cost and Savings

These trips aren’t meant to be merely joy rides. They allow me to evaluate charging infrastructure along the way (which has become useful for charging companies to understand customer POVs).

They also, hopefully, encourage others to adopt EV technology if they are still under the impression that long journeys in electric cars are still not possible due to the nascent charging infrastructure in the country. We hope we are changing these minds.

EVs are the future: better for the wallet and the environment.

Share

Series Index

1. The Epic EV Roadtrip! (Published - 16 February 2026)

2. New Delhi to Bengaluru (Published - 24 February 2026 )

3. Bengaluru to Varkala (This one!)

4. Varkala to Hyderabad

5. Hyderabad to New Delhi

6. Chargers, Charging and Commentary

This is an index of articles to come. The links will be updated as the articles are published. You can bookmark this section or subscribe to get them straight to your inbox.

This series of articles wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our team. The trip, time, effort - everything was self sponsored and costs money. We do not take advertising or sponsorship money. It allows us to say the uncomfortable truth without compromising on our ethics. You can do your bit by buying us a pizza or getting a premium subscription to the Substack.

Buy us a pizza

Upgrade to a paid subscription

Behind the wheel, Photos : Garvit, Priyans. Special acknowledgement for Phil’s hub photo by Liju.

Words and Graphics : Priyans

Edit : Mohit Rao

Map : Siddharth Agarwal

All rights reserved with Priyans Murarka @ ExpWithEVs.

The data from here and this article cannot be repackaged or sold without explicit written permission of ExpWithEVs.

In this leg, we’ll cover the drive from Delhi to Bengaluru, at nearly 2,300km, that was done in three days. It was near continuous driving, with only brief night halts.

Our motive for this trip is to show you that it’s not just possible to do these long trips on an EV vehicle, but it’s pretty easy and cost effective.

It’s a long journey and a long article. I’ve divided it into three parts: one for each day. I’ll also be publishing a separate article on observations from the charging infrastructure through the entire trip.

Here’s an index of the journey. Each section takes about 5 minutes to read.

Index

New Delhi to Jaora

Jaora to Yedshi

Yedshi to Bengaluru

Costs and Savings

Housekeeping

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We are in Gandhinagar on 25th and 26th February. We will be in Hyderabad on 12th and 13th March. Drop us a line if you are around.

New Delhi to Jaora

Route: New Delhi - Sawai Madhopur (National Expressway 4) - Kota - Jaora

Distance: 769km

Time taken: 15h30m

Number of charging stops: 2 (and one charger that wasn’t working)

The first day of this trip was something I’d done plenty of times before. This would be the ninth time: I’ve written about it before (here & here for reference).

I didn’t have to think much to plan this day. Delhi to Ranthambore is a stretch I could do with my eyes closed (figuratively). When starting with a full or an almost full charge from Delhi, I have been able to make it to the charger at Oberoi Vanyavilas Wildlife Resort in Ranthambore, some 350km away, without charging. The times when I’ve not been able to do it was because it was done in summers where air conditioning had to be on full blast or when I was not trying to optimise my charging stops.

I left my house at 3.49 a.m. Empty roads, empty expressways. Cruise control in the car and mind.

By the time the SoC dropped to 50%, I had done 180km in 2.5 hours. I had 165km to go to Sawai Madhopur, which had a charger in a resort I had been to multiple times before. The arrival SoC was predicted to be under 2%. Touch and go.

As dawn broke, it started to rain. Around 8 a.m., the rains became heavy. This meant that I had to shut windows, rely on air conditioning and switch on the defogger. All of this consumes battery.

In times like this, the mind races with figures, possibilities and scenarios.

I still had 24km to go to a charger and my SoC was at 4%. This means I can cover 16km.

I reduced my speed to 60kmph (from 80kmph). You never know if this extra few meters gained will be useful later on. Every bit of juice matters.

I still had 8km before I could turn off the expressway. This was important as a back-up plan. If my car stopped in town roads or village roads, I could always ask someone to let me charge at their shop via a regular 15A socket. This would be enough charge to get me to the charging point. But on this access-controlled Expressway, I did not have the option now to get this extra charge.

The car hit the 0% SoC mark somewhere before Sawai Madhopur town.

I used the On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) to figure out exactly how much buffer capacity (like a reserve on a fuel tank) is left on the battery. It showed 4% battery left. In an ideal world, this should be enough for 16km. For those keeping count, just enough to reach the charger at the periphery of Ranthambore Tiger Reserve.

The last time I drove below 0% SoC was at Bandhavgarh forest in Madhya Pradesh. Maybe the universe was telling me to plan better near forests!

Through Sawai Madhopur town, I used regenerative braking as much as I could. It was nerve-wracking. Not an ideal start to a trip planned to show that cross-country driving of EVs was easy. To be honest, though, I aimed for this charger knowing it would be tight. For those doing the same route, it is advisable to use the options in rest stops along the way, or take a short detour at Dausa, to top up for 15 minutes or so.

But all’s well that ends well. I arrived at the charger which is in the wildlife resort. The entrance is easy to miss, so keep a look out.

Previously, you had to sign some paperwork. This time, it was digital: You had to give your ID proof and phone number. I didn’t switch off the car because at such a low SoC, who knows whether it will even turn on.

The previous times I’ve used the charger, I ate at the property. Too posh for my liking: very little food for the price they charge. Instead, I attempted to head out and walk 700m to a couple of eateries. At the gate, I was stopped.

According to the staff, many people had left their cars on charge, went out, did a safari, and returned late in the evening to collect the car. That is, many used the space as a parking spot.

Needless to say, if you’re an EV owner, don’t do that. Once your car is charged, unplug and leave so someone else can use that spot. Or, if you’re the owner of a charger, charge waiting fees. Automatically, people will move their car.

I pleaded with the staff. Eventually, I kept my car keys with the security as deposit and left. The hotel, like the resort, was just opening up. During the monsoons, safaris are closed. Restaurants close down, and resorts become ghost palaces.

I returned after 30 minutes. The security guard let out a visible sigh of relief, as if his faith in humanity had been restored. It took about 83 minutes to charge to full.

My plan was to reach Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh by the end of the day. That was a distance of 342km, which might again end in close to 0% SoC.

It would be along the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway or whatever sections of it were open. Unfortunately, the route was impacted by floods in Rajasthan. Google Maps wasn’t advising to take this route either. My good friend Siddharth Agarwal, founder of Veditum India Foundation that works with Rivers (who also makes the maps for us) checked the flood markings on Chambal river, and they seemed below the alert mark.

But, I was driving solo. I didn’t want to risk floods, diversions and delays. Moreover, there were no chargers along the expressway until Jaora/Ratlam. A drive on the expressway would be cutting it too close for my comfort.

And so, I decided on the conservative route: through Nainwa, Bundi (where I knew a reliable charger was present) and to Kota. It was 60km longer and an hour’s extra drive. It was a narrower highway that needed me to be on high alert throughout. But it had a lot more charging options.

The above video shows the state of roads in this section of the trip.

2.5 hours later, I reached the Jio-BP charger at Bundi. The sight of an unoccupied charger means dil mein laddu foota.

The joy was short-lived. An error flashed on the screen: “Charging was stopped by the grid”. There was power at the fuel station though. There was an electricity supply at the fuel pump. I couldn’t understand this. Weirdly, I’d encounter this issue through the trip.

The next charger was a few kilometers away, a BPCL charger. It was just before one enters Kota city and before Chambal River. There are a couple of restaurants within a five minute walk. Decent spots for lunch.

The charging was complete before I finished my lunch. For some reason, the BPCL charger cut off my charging at 98%.

Just out of Kota, I’d be entering Madhya Pradesh. My final stop of the day would be dependent on the charger. Odd, I know: but that’s what we do here at ExpWithEVs.

I had enough charge to reach Jaora’s 30kW BPCL charger or Ratlam’s 60kW ChargeZone charger. Jaora’s charger was 33% cheaper than Ratlam’s. Since I was going to halt for the night, I was in no rush to charge quickly. Jaora it is, then.

At Jaora, I chose a hotel next to the charger. There was no Type2 slow charger in these towns. So, I’d to keep an eye on the app, and when the car was charged, it was time to bring it into the hotel and fall asleep.

Jaora to Yedshi

Route: Jaora-Dhule-Aurangabad-Yedshi

Distance: 751 km

Time taken: 16h30m

Number of charging stops: 6 (4 working, 2 not working)

The next morning, Garvit joined me for the trip. You’d have seen his articles on the website before. I’ve been working with him for over a year now. He’d helped TeslaClubIndia become a leading voice in the Indian EV ecosystem before joining ExpWithEVs full time.

These kinds of road trips always have early morning starts. This time, it was 4.28 a.m. There was deathly silence in Jaora. Even this early in the morning, the exciting thing about Madhya Pradesh is that a good bowl of poha is never far away!

Unlike yesterday’s journey, today’s was not on the Expressway. Instead, we’d be driving on a series of national highways towards Dhule.

National highways are replete with stray cattle, stray dogs, speed breakers, potholes or bumpy roads that rattle the car. Sometimes, it was a four-laned highway, sometimes just two, making overtaking slow vehicles tricky. One really misses the ten-laned, smooth, access-controlled expressway.

But, what these highways lack in quality, they make up for in sights. Expressways are dull with very little to see on either side. But highways are bustling. There are dhabas frequently and small towns with their own charm and history.

An hour into our journey, we reached Dhar. The town drips with history, with impressive forts and mahals. But it was too early in the morning to see any of them. But, by the side of the road, we spotted a 16th-century Mughal monument, “Kharbuja Mahal” or “Muskmelon Mahal” because its domes are shaped like muskmelons.

A little while later, the road twisted and turned through the Vindhyas. The sun was rising and there was rain. Dark clouds hung around and the ghats looked green. It reminded me of the Western ghats near Mumbai during the monsoons.

Around 7.40 a.m., we stopped at a Jio-BP charger, which was attached to a restaurant, in Dhanmod. The town sits between the Vindhyas and the Satpura hill range - like a transition between North India (which ends at the Vindhyas) and Southern part of India.

The charger was online, but wouldn’t charge. An error flashed on the screen: “Charging stopped by charger 262 - Grid Fall.” I think it meant, Grid “fail”.

This usually happens when the voltage at the charger is either too high or low. There was a meter box right next to the charger. The voltage was 255V on all three phases, compared to the typical 240V. For some reason, the charger felt this was too high to allow charging to happen.

Sigh. disappointing. We had to continue forward. I knew there was a charger attached to a restaurant at Julwaniya, some 50km away. One more hour of hunger.

ChargeZone forces you to book a slot. But, it allows booking only at even time slots. The slot was 9 a.m., which means we had to wait till that slot opened up, despite our car being parked by the charger a few minutes before that.

The main hotel was under renovation. Fortunately, they had put a small stall where we got pohas. It’s amazing how ubiquitous Pohas are in Madhya Pradesh, but also amazing how their taste changes city to city. Garvit, whose home is barely 140km away, says the poha here is entirely different to what he gets at his hometown.

40 minutes later, breakfast was done and the car had charged to 80%. We found out that though the ChargeZone charger was previously a 60kW charger, it had been upgraded to a 120kW charger. (We covered about this in our report here)

From Julwania, Dhule is only 120km. But it felt much longer. The road, which snakes around the relatively-sparsely populated Satpura ranges, had taken a beating in the monsoons. With the amount of potholes and speedbreakers, it was hard to cross 40kmph.

This journey was stalled for over an hour at the Tapi river crossing. We had to wait for an hour due to processions to immerse Ganpati idols.

Dhule is where I’d usually take a turn towards Malegaon and then towards Mumbai. You can read about those trips here.

But this time, we took the deviation towards Aurangabad or Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar. New territory, but smooth roads.

Around 40km later, we came across a BPCL charger in the village of Mehunbare. We decided to do a quick top-up. The Servotech charger was rated as 60kW, but could only charge at 30kW. These stops could be a useful restroom break. But the petrol station washrooms are in a very bad shape.

A few minutes later, we were climbing another hill range: Chalisgaon ghats of the Sahyadris or Western Ghats. Our third hill range since the morning. We saw a massive 135MW solar plant before the climb. India powered by EVs and solar plants would be a great thing!

We’d stopped for a late lunch at ChargeZone’s charger at Ellora Heritage Resort, on the outskirts of Aurangabad and close to the world-famous Ellora caves. Unfortunately, the charging kept getting interrupted as the power supply kept going on and off. While the hotel had power back-up, the charger did not.

It was already late afternoon, and our plan was to drive to Solapur. That’s another 350km. And this stretch had little charging infrastructure and I wasn’t keen on driving without full charge.

Our patience wore thin. The power supply was very irritating. By 4.30 p.m., we left towards Solapur with 80% charge in our car - or, enough for 290km. We needed another little top-up along the way.

The route largely passes through the plains, though an occasional hill could be spotted. We crossed another one of India’s great rivers, Godavari.

There were multiple charging options along the way, but most operated by Public-Sector Units such as IOCL, BPCL and HPCL. None of them were really online. That’s the problem with PSU’s charging network: it is very extensive, very cheap, but quite unreliable.

Meanwhile, during the drive, we planned the charging for the night. We wanted to slow charge through the night at Solapur. We looked at multiple apps but couldn’t find good options. Eventually, we found an option through Plugshare, a global community platform to locate and rate EV charging locations. An 800 sq.feet garage with slow charging had been listed by someone who had two EV cars himself. This seemed like a great option, even though we’d reach Solapur after 10 p.m. It’s been a long day, and a long day still ahead.

Close to Beed, we came across a BPCL charger at the M. Khan petrol station. It would be the top up we needed to cover the remaining 200km.

The hardware at the charger says 60kW, but the Statiq app says 30kW. That’s not the only issue with the app. I find that it is very difficult to operate the app when charging has started. The app is over-ridden by a blue screen that will not let you fiddle with the app until it has retrieved data from the charger. Essentially, one can’t plan the next charging stop. And it is very irritating if the starting session has failed. The app will not let you initiate another one until the information is updated.

After all of this, the charging didn’t work at all. We were at 34% SoC and reaching Solapur was becoming difficult. There was a BPCL charger at Yedshi, some 80km away. But considering our luck with the PSU chargers, we just didn’t know. We moved on through the dark of the night.

While I did say that charging was not reliable on this route, things are changing quickly. We saw a new charging being set-up by Adani at Manjarsumbha, a good half-way stop between Aurangabad and Solapur. Private chargers, though expensive, are usually reliable as they have separate dedicated power supply.

But for now, our aim was the BPCL charger at Yedshi and we’d keep checking the app to see if it was online. Thankfully, a car was charging there. It was working for now.

When we pulled up, our SoC was at 15%. But both connectors were occupied. Sigh. After a long, long day, we had to wait more.

It was already past 9 p.m. I eyed a hotel and restaurant opposite our charger. We decided to call it a day. It took 73 minutes for the car to charge to 98%. The night sky was a delight, and we saw glimpses of a lunar eclipse.

While we couldn’t capture the Lunar Eclipse, here’s our charging curve.

We reached the charger at around 9 P.M. The chart shows the flatlining of Battery Amps and Battery Power. Our charging started at around 9:30 P.M. From this data, we can say that the queuing was for atleast 10 minutes after we started charging. The Battery Amps jumped to 140A after the other car disconnected.

The negative data indicates that the car is receiving the amperage and power instead of dispensing it.

For nerdier data, check out our motor temperature and battery temperature charts.

Here, we can see that the motor temperature drops significantly when the car comes to a halt at 9 P.M. The motor coolant and the ambient temperature play a key role to regulate the motor temperature.

Similarly, the lowest and highest battery temperatures rise in steps, indicating that the battery is being heated as it is being charged at higher amps. The heating process starts only after the current goes above 100 Amps, i.e. after the second car leaves the charger. The higher amps heat the battery pack.

Yedshi to Bengaluru

Route: Yedshi-Solapur-Vijayapura-Ilkal-Sira-Bengaluru

Km: 708km

Time taken: 15h15m

Number of charging stops: 2

At 5 a.m., we left the hotel. It was a misty morning and the car was coated in fresh dew. I love this feeling. I prefer to drive at dawn when the earth feels fresh, rather than drive late at night when the air feels dirty and stale.

A couple of hours later, we were in Karnataka. We realised that this trip was so rushed that we didn’t eat a good Vada Pav in Maharashtra. Oh well, at least the road quality here in Karnataka improved drastically.

Between Solapur and Vijayapura, there are multiple charging options. Almost all chargers by the Oil Public sector Units (IOCL, HPCL and BPCL) were 30kW, while private players were 60kW. IOCL, on this route had two 120kW chargers from Solapur to Vijayapura in Karnataka. However, they were offline.

We settled with ChargeZone’s charger at a Hyundai dealership in Vijayapura, Karnataka. It was a quick charge: from 45% SoC to 83%.

While we charged, we wrote up the third part of the Battery Insights series, based on our observations from The Battery Show Asia, a Battery, Energy Storage and Mobility Technology conference that was held in Hong Kong.

We decided that the next charging stop would be one with a good breakfast stop. We were in South India, and we could eat dosas for all three meals if we chose.

We checked out our PowerBI dashboard and narrowed down on a Jio-BP 60kW charger by a Udupi-style restaurant at Ilkal (a small town known for its saris). EVInfraBI users get access to the dashboard that allows you to see the whole charging infrastructure across apps.

It’s a straight, broad national highway. An absolute pleasure to drive. We crossed on another major river, Krishna. This season, every river brimmed with water.

The charger at Ilkal was smooth. An hour later, our SoC was at 99% and our stomachs were full with a hearty breakfast.

We were driving through the Deccan plateau and we had a buffet of options to charge. This was Zeon’s territory. We decided on their classic high power charging setup, Kempower, at Sira on the Bengaluru-Mumbai highway. It was 300km away and we had enough range.

The National Highway 55 is a relatively new highway, and built primarily for trucks transporting iron ore from Ballari. It’s relatively empty and passes close to Hampi, over the Tungabhadra River and joins the busy Bengaluru-Mumbai Highway.

Four hours later, we arrived at Sira. 18% SoC and hungry. High power charging set-ups like the Kempower dispenser are always preferable for EV customers. No matter how many people are charging, you’ll be guaranteed full charging speed for your car. They are usually very reliable too.

If the car is registered for auto-charge on Zeon’s network, charging becomes a breeze. Just plug in and charge. No need to fiddle around on the app.

Kempower also gives a power chart versus time. That is not permanent, so we have ours.

The car went from 18% SoC to 78% SoC in around 35 minutes. The input battery amps stay flat at three distinct levels. From 18% to 30%, the car takes in around 140 Amps, yielding a charging speed of 56kW.
In the next 6 minutes, the battery reduced the inward amps to 120A, yielding 50kW. The battery maintained this from 40% to 50%. The pattern repeated, the current dropped to 100 Amps and stayed consistent between 60% to 70% SoC.

The other great advantage was it had a restaurant attached: Paakashala, an iconic Bengaluru eatery that has a great network of restaurants at highways.

I’d like to imagine a time when these chargers will become commonplace across the country. By the time we were done ordering breakfast, we had more than enough charge to reach Bengaluru, some 130km away. By the time we had our breakfast, the car was at 76% SoC.

The Bengaluru-Mumbai Expressway, particularly after Tumakuru, is extremely busy and is just four-laned. For highway standards, it’s quite mediocre. But it is a good preparation for Bengaluru traffic.

By 8 p.m., the three-day journey from New Delhi to Domlur in Bengaluru had ended. 2,228 km, the longest continuous trip done by me so far. It felt like an achievement.

Costs and savings

These trips aren’t meant to be merely joy rides. They allow me to evaluate charging infrastructure along the way (which has become useful for charging companies to understand customer POVs).

They also, hopefully, encourage others to adopt EV technology if they are still under the impression that long journeys in electric cars are still not possible due to the nascent charging infrastructure in the country. We hope we are changing these minds.

EVs are the future: better for the wallet and the environment.

We must add here that we used the annual road toll pass for the trip. We passed through 34 tolls in this section, bringing our total toll cost to Rs. 693 (we paid Rs. 183 as other toll charges). This is 0.3 Rs. per km, compared to Rs. 2.5 per km on my other trips pre annual toll passs. It’s a real value saver if one does these trips regularly.

Series Index

1. The Epic EV Roadtrip! (Publishing date - 16 February 2026)

2. New Delhi to Bengaluru (This one!)

3. Bengaluru to Varkala (Publishing date - 11 March 2026)

4. Varkala to Hyderabad

5. Hyderabad to New Delhi

6. Chargers, Charging and Commentary

This is an index of articles to come. The links will be updated as the articles are published. You can bookmark this section or subscribe to get them straight to your inbox.

Subscribe now

This series of articles wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our team. The trip, time, effort - everything was self sponsored and costs money. We do not take advertising or sponsorship money. It allows us to say the uncomfortable truth without compromising on our ethics. You can do your bit by buying us a pizza or getting a premium subscription to the Substack.

Buy us a pizza

Upgrade to a paid subscription

Behind the wheel : Garvit, Priyans

Words and Graphics : Priyans

Edit : Mohit Rao

Map : Siddharth Agarwal

All rights reserved with Priyans Murarka @ ExpWithEVs.

The data from here and this article cannot be repackaged or sold without explicit written permission of ExpWithEVs.

This was our most epic trip yet. Delhi to Bengaluru, then further South to Varkala in Kerala, then back up to Delhi through Hyderabad and Nagpur.

I was joined by Garvit during this trip. Along the way, we met many from our EV community, those from the industry and many like us, just aficionados exploring the country through EVs.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll publish our observations and notes from the trip. Including this introduction, we’ll be publishing six parts. Stay tuned!

Are EV Road Trips easy?

In the initial weeks, we’ll publish the ‘Road Trip’ articles, a general account of how we went from Point A to Point B: the roads we took, the sights we saw, the places we halted.

The point of these articles is to bust an important myth among petrol heads who think that EVs may be viable in cities, which have established charging infrastructure, and are not meant for the chaos and scarcity of the great Indian outdoors. The point of these articles is to show you the ease by which a 6,300-km trip can be done with an electric vehicle. Only minimal planning was required.

Was there range anxiety? In parts, of course. But who hasn’t driven an internal combustion car with one eye on the fuel tank needle pushing at ‘Reserve’ and another eye on the map showing the distance to the nearest petrol bunk.

Did frequent charging an EV make the trip longer than filling up fuel in a car? Marginally yes. We show how you can incorporate charging during your normal pitstops (breakfast, lunch, chai and so on) on such a long journey.

Importantly, we show you how these minor inconveniences make for big savings. Assuming MG’s calculation of 140gm of Carbon Dioxide emissions saved per kilometer, our 6,300km trip saved nearly 900kg of carbon dioxide when compared to a conventional petrol car.

It’s not just an environmental savings, but a financial one too. By our calculations, we spent INR 16,231 (USD 180) on fuel, or around INR 2.6/km (USD 0.03/km). A conventional fossil fuel-run SUV vehicle runs at around INR 6.5/km (USD 0.07/km), with the tip costing INR 41,000 (USD 453) just for fuel. That is a savings of around 150%.

Calculate your fuel savings!

Hopefully, it’ll make you consider a shift!

For those who already own an EV vehicle, these articles will hopefully give you the confidence and means to plan your own road trip.

Thoughts for the EV heads

We’ve realised there is great interest building up to learn about the world of EVs. It’s no longer just EV industry people who want to figure out the market. It’s also hobbyists and motorists who are interested in the amps and volts and everything technical.

We’ll publish articles from the trip and our previous learnings for those who are in, or want to enter, the fascinating world of EV tech. We’ll look at the details of chargers that work and that don’t. We’ll look at charging aggregates, hubs, public sector unit chargers, pole chargers and others.

We’ll take you into our meetings with the EV community that we had along the way. If you’re in the industry, you might get a point-of-view of what it’s like being a customer at your charger. If you’re a hobbyist, you might see trends that are at play in the country’s charging infrastructure.

Thoughts on the Route

I’ve been itching to go on a really long road trip for a while. Bengaluru made a good choice as I like to visit the city once a year. I cannot fathom living in the city (apologies to the 10 million people who live there), but one trip a year is still doable.

The plan was this: Drive from New Delhi - Bengaluru. Here, I’d take a couple of days of rest, meet some EV folk, meet some friends, check out some chargers. From here, we’d drive from Bengaluru to Coimbatore, where we had a few meetings scheduled. From Coimbatore, we’d drive to Varkala in southern Kerala to take a small break before the long drive back to New Delhi.

The trip was pretty long with a lot of uncertainty. It made no sense to plan in advance. We had a rough idea of the routes for each day. But we decided to fix our stop for the night based on how we felt on that day. It would also reinforce our point: an EV is no different from a Petrol vehicle when it comes to planning these trips.

This is my 27th road trip, and unlike most trips, this trip wasn’t going to be solo. This was a pretty long trip and it would be tiring (and boring) to drive the whole thing alone.

Driving solo for these distances is difficult. Particularly, with much of the driving on National Highway and district roads where one has to be constantly on high alert for diversions, cattle on road, motorists on wrong way and people rushing across the road, bumps and potholes, and generally, a higher proportion of bad drivers.

This time, Garvit, whose articles you’ve also been reading here, joined me on this trip from Day 2.

The trip that is comparable to this is the Delhi - Kolkata - Mumbai - Delhi. That was almost 5,000 km long. What was different in that trip versus this was that I had longer rest days in both Kolkata and Mumbai. Here, we would be near constantly on the move.

In short, the trip would test us and our vehicle. My car has definitely seen some degradation over the 80,000+km covered so far in it. So ya, the trip will push us both to the edge.

Series Index

1. The Epic EV Roadtrip! (Published date - 16 February 2026)

2. New Delhi to Bengaluru (Published date - 24 February 2026)

3. Bengaluru to Varkala (Published date - 11 March 2026)

4. Varkala to Hyderabad

5. Hyderabad to New Delhi

6. Chargers, Charging and Commentary

This is an index of articles to come. The links will be updated as the articles are published. You can bookmark this section or subscribe to get them straight to your inbox.

Subscribe now

This series of articles wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our team. The trip, time, effort - everything was self sponsored and costs money. We do not take advertising or sponsorship money. It allows us to say the uncomfortable truth without compromising on our ethics. You can do your bit by buying us a pizza or getting a premium subscription to the Substack.

Buy us a pizza

Upgrade to a paid subscription

Behind the wheel : Garvit, Priyans

Words and Graphics : Priyans

Edit : Mohit Rao

Map : Siddharth Agarwal

Thanks to Ferrari Rules for providing us with the link to the savings calculator!

All rights reserved with Priyans Murarka @ ExpWithEVs.

The data from here and this article cannot be repackaged or sold without explicit written permission of ExpWithEVs.

This is the 4th edition PowerBI report. With the report, you can dig into trends and build your sales and competitive strategy. You can look at what has happened in the previous quarters and empower your sales team.

3rd edition (Sep 2025), 2nd edition (Jun 2025), 1st edition (Mar 2025).

For the last three weeks, we’ve published three reports - 10,000 ft overview on charging infrastructure and detailed insider’s view (part two) for our subscribers.

We hope that the industry will buy our reports to help us continue to run our business without being dependent on sponsorships and advertisements. This allows us to call a spade a spade. You can also support us by being a premium subscriber.

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House Keeping

We will be in Gandhinagar later this month to attend this event. We will be doing B2B meetings along the sidelines. Drop us a message if you are around!

Index

How to get access

Summary

OEM Market Share

CCS2 Market Share

Type2 Market Share

60kW and above

Average Power

CCS2 Charger Ratings

Non Working CCS2 OEMs

Network Age

Acknowledgement

Incredible thanks to Garvit and our data tagging team to come up with the report and our PowerBI application. We would also like to thank the CPOs who took initiative to help clear our doubts. Our objective is to present the information as accurately as possible.

Disclaimer

All rights reserved with Priyans Murarka @ ExpWithEVs.

The data from here and this article cannot be repackaged or sold without explicit written permission of ExpWithEVs.

Major Caveats

All chargers in this report are public only.

An OEM is identified as a charger manufacturer, white label importer or assembler. We have no distinct way to identify who is what. We have a hunch, but we don’t say it publicly.

We do not include chargers from BPCL, HPCL and IOCL in our report.

Few reasons for exclusion :

• Most of their chargers are offline.

• All charger installations are done via public tenders, making it public information.

• Very few photos of these chargers exist online, making it harder for us to cross verify.

How to get access

Reach out to me via LinkedIn or Email.

Summary

Single connector chargers are the most common, with dual connectors in the second rank. Note, this includes both CCS2 and Type2 chargers.

We will discuss the market share numbers and non working ratios in the following sections.

On an average, a CPO has 4 to 5 charger OEMs in their network.

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OEM Market Share

Exicom leads with over 20% marketshare for all public CCS2 and Type2 chargers, PSUs not included. Some OEMs have gained marketshare whereas some were able to hold on to it. Some OEMs even lost marketshare.

A loss in marketshare can happen due to addition of fewer chargers or net removal of chargers. Among the top players, Exicom, Delta and Tellus lost their marketshare. For Exicom and Delta, it is due to the former, where they increased their network by less than 5%. Tellus chargers were removed on a net basis, leading to a drop.

Tellus and Delta’s marketshare fell in the previous quarter too, indicating an incoming decline for these companies. Exicom had gained market share in the previous report, but it ended up on the losing side this time.

Statiq, Quench and Mindra increased their marketshare this quarter. Among the top players, Mindra jumped the maximum and is now ranked 6th among major OEMs. We strongly believe they will continue their growth and can leapfrog Quench.

There’s enough delta between Quench and Statiq and Statiq and Delta. So we might not see any immediate movement in rankings for the top four.

BrightBlu is the only player in the cumulative top ten OEMs to manufacture only Type2 chargers. Rest manufacture both. Let us look at these markets individually.

CCS2 Market Share

Read more

ICYMI, here are the links - 10,000 ft overview and Part 1 of EVInfraBI

This week, we will talk about Hubs, Highways, Hosts and Jodi chargers for select CPOs in India. If you’d like to get access to the complete interactive tool, please drop us a message!

Reach out

We will be talking about Highways and EV Charging, but you should check out this LiveMint article where we gave our inputs and data.

We hope that the industry will buy our reports to help us continue to run our business without being dependent on sponsorships and advertisements. Alternatively, you can choose to become a premium subscriber.

If you’d like to keep up with our work you can join our Whatsapp community!

Join our Whatsapp Community!

Some of our premium community members got a taste of how things are in Thailand from our recent trip to Bangkok. More articles are in pipeline :)

Index

Summary

Highways

Hosts

Hubs

Jodis

Acknowledgement

EVInfraBI was created by Priyans Murarka and Garvit Singh. This wouldn’t have been possible without the efforts of our data entry team.

All rights reserved with Priyans Murarka @ ExpWithEVs.

The data from here and this article cannot be repackaged or sold without explicit written permission of ExpWithEVs.

Summary

We continue to see growth in charging infrastructure over the year. Chargers on expressways and national highways now represent 47% of the total charging infrastructure. They grew to 7566 chargers by 68% this year.

A charging hub is defined as a space with ten or more connectors by a single operator. We are now at 81 such hubs in India, with a cumulative grid demand of 53.1 MW. Nine of those have a grid demand of over 1MW each. CPOs invest massive CapEx to build out a hub. We’ve wrote about how we see them as the future of EV charging, exactly a year ago.

Jodi is a pair of atleast two chargers by different CPOs within a one minute walk.

We saw over 100% growth Jodis and Jodi chargers in India. Over the year, CPOs in India have collectively put up 1918 chargers next to each other spread across 703 such locations. The Jodis are an interesting way to understand where CPOs believe there’s demand by electric vehicle owners. By studying the pricing, power rating, we can understand which CPO is targeting market share from which CPOs.

We analysed Glida’s in April last year.

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Let’s now look at highways in detail.

Highways

These are the top five highways for CCS2 public charging infrastructure in India. The most chargers are in South India, which has been consistent with rest of the country.

The charging infrastructure on NH48 and NH66 contributed to the high concentration of chargers along the Mumbai - Goa stretch (Bonus - Read about my 2023 road trip from Mumbai to Goa). While the other four highways have contiguous chargers, we do see some gaps on NH44. Rather, potential opportunities for CPOs to setup a charger or two in these gaps.

The picture drastically changes when we look at the same infrastructure from a 60kW and 120kW charger threshold. As the power rating goes up, the gaps increase. The high power charger count too, falls drastically. The highways (NH66 and NH65) no longer feature in the top five list either.

Imagine you are a CPO and would like to setup ten 120kW chargers on each of these highways? What all would you consider? Where would you like to host it? What do you think would be the utilization at the charger if you install it at a particular site?

Reach out for a consult

Hosts

This chart includes both CCS2 and Type2 chargers. The dominant host type is fuel pumps, covering almost 40% of the entire network. The fuel pump host type has seen growth of 100% in 2025. We covered the high growth of Oil PSU CPOs two weeks ago.

The picture becomes a lot more interesting when we take out the Oil PSU CPOs. Other host types shine, with Hotels in the lead.

Tata Power leads in Hotels, Commercial Buildings and Restaurants. The top category, Hotels, saw 50% rise year on year. Restaurants and commercial buildings follow next in the ranking, grew by 100% year on year.

Adani TGas will overtake Tata Power as the most number of chargers at Restaurants in the next report. ChargeZone and Jio-bp are competing to take the second spot in the Hotel category. ChargeZone isn’t surprising because there’s a quick recall - “Oh Marriott brands have ChargeZone chargers” (Data check - almost 40% of ChargeZone’s Hotel host chargers are in Marriott). There’s value to have a strong brand associated with your CPO brand.

Another such branded category is Indian malls. They host less than 5% of India’s infrastructure. There was a muted 33% growth in this category.

The dealerships also saw only 16% growth year on year. The category will see a massive jump once, now restricted Maruti Suzuki charging network, becomes public. We put up the photo of their Exicom charger back in October 2024.

You can subscribe to continue reading the analysis for hubs and Jodis, and more from our archive! It will help us continue publishing these reports and to do more.

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Read more

We will talk about top ten CCS2 CPOs in India. We will understand charging station configuration, density, average charging station capacity, average power, average rating, average pricing and non working ratios. This will give us a holistic insight as to how the top ten CPOs in India are performing.

All of this information is also available in our interactive PowerBI tool called EVInfraBI. You can reach out to me to get your hands on it today!

We hope that the industry will buy our reports to help us continue to run our business without being dependent on sponsorships and advertisements. Alternatively, you can choose to become a premium subscriber.

Index

Summary

Overview

Charging station configuration

Density

Average Charging Station Capacity

Average Power

Pricing

Non working chargers

Housekeeping

Our data and comments got quoted in Mint! Read here.

We are posting this from Bangkok. We attended EVCharge Live event and stay tuned for our insights.

If you’ve been in our community group, you must’ve seen a photo of upcoming road trip! Stay tuned, the articles are shaping up really well :)

Join our WA Community!

Acknowledgement

EVInfraBI was created by Priyans Murarka and Garvit Singh. This wouldn’t have been possible without the efforts of our data entry team.

All rights reserved with Priyans Murarka @ ExpWithEVs.

The data from here and this article cannot be repackaged or sold without explicit written permission of ExpWithEVs.

Summary

We have almost breached the 25000 public connector mark with the coverage of 79 CPOs. The charging infrastructure is showing great signs of growth and improvement. It is now present in 29.3% of the pincodes in India.

The public charging infrastructure grid demand is mere 0.15% of the installed power capacity in India. As noted in our previous report, the average non working chargers have gone down to 36.53%.

The cumulative grid demand is up 12% QoQ, 100% YoY. The average charger rating is up 28% YoY. Both of these metrics point that the industry is expanding its infrastructure both in terms of number of chargers as well as the capacity of these chargers.

Part 2 is now live.

We are changing the way we are publishing our market reports. From now on, reports will be behind the paywall only.

You can subscribe to read the article, and more from our archive! It will help us continue publishing these reports and to do more.

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Alternatively, if you’d like access to the insights you can get access to our PowerBI dashboard, by reaching out to me.

Overview

The charging infrastructure has become

Read more

Here are our reports for 2025:

December 2024, March 2025, June 2025, September 2025

And now, December 2025.

A quick primer on the details about various Charging Infrastructure reports are available here.

This report is hosted on PowerBI and you can get your hands on it today.

We hope that the industry will buy our reports to help us continue to run our business without being dependent on sponsorships and advertisements. Alternatively, you can choose to become a premium subscriber.

ExpWithEVs has consistently provided value to the Indian EV ecosystem without bias and we hope to continue doing that.

Annual premium subscribers to this blog will be able to request a 24h access to this PowerBI instantly. Monthly subscribers can request for any chart of their choosing from the report. More details here.

Subscribe now

Index

Summary

Overview

Pan India Growth

States

CPOs

Metro Cities

Non working CPOs

Housekeeping

Last week, we wrote about TataEV and their contribution to the CPO ecosystem.

We published a piece on 25-30kW chargers, what is in store for them when the industry is moving to high power and faster charging.

While the PSUs lead EV charger growth, as you will see in this report, they are usually never the first choice for a road trip. We wrote about a bull case scenario for the oil PSUs.

We will be attending the EVCharge Live event next week in Bangkok. Drop us a message if you are around!

Acknowledgement

EVTrendsBI was created by Priyans Murarka and Garvit Singh. This wouldn’t have been possible without the efforts of our data entry team.

All rights reserved with Priyans Murarka @ ExpWithEVs.

The data from here and this article cannot be repackaged or sold without explicit written permission of ExpWithEVs.

Summary

As of December 2025, there are 20658 public CCS2 connectors and 4308 public Type2 connectors. Maharashtra leads in both types of connectors. It piped Karnataka in Type2 connectors to take the first place. The top cities have stayed the same.

The non working chargers has seen a remarkable drop of 4.75%, to 35.62%, in CCS2 connectors. Type2 connector’s non working ratio also improved slightly to 39.3%.

BPCL is the new leader for public CCS2 connectors.

New CPOs added to the list : CHARGE_iN, Go ElectriQ/ChargeZone, PATH/Gulf, Roadgrid, ZECT, and a bunch of TataEV supported CPOs. The total coverage is of 79 CPOs.

You can subscribe to read the article, and more from our archive! It will help us continue publishing these reports and to do more.

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Let’s dig in

We are just shy of 25,000 CCS2 and Type2 connectors as of December 2025. In 2025, the public charging infrastructure has grown by 77%. Year on year, CCS2 infrastructure has almost doubled, whereas Type2 connectors have grown 22%. CCS2 infrastructure has maintained its consistent growth trajectory. Public Type2 infrastructure has been declining with a peak in middle of the year.

There’s more money

Read more

We look at how TataEV has supported the charging infrastructure across India, what their help really means and what has translated to the real world.

➞ Index

Introduction

TataEV Partners in numbers - Zonal Coverage, Network Age, Meme

TataEV charger ratings - Average charger ratings, Comparison with CPOs, kW ratings, Charger OEMs, Non Working Chargers

TataEV Jodis - Is TataEV piggy-backing someone?

Conclusion

➞ Housekeeping

Our home page navigation has been updated. It is now easy to search for different types of stories.

We’ve been sharing musings in our Premium WhatsApp group based on our observations around the charging industry in India! The first musing for the year was about key people joining different EV companies and Jio-bp raising their prices. The second one was around my experience of charging in New Delhi.

➞ Meet us!

We will be visiting EVChargeLive in Bangkok later this month. If you are around, please drop us a message.

Introduction

In December 2023, Tata announced partnerships with ChargeZone, Glida, Statiq and Zeon. The MoU mainly said that TataEV (then Tata Passenger Electric Mobility Ltd) would assist these CPOs with anonymised data. This would help CPOs plan their charging infrastructure based on anonymised travel data of TataEV customers. TataEV also shared insights on how customers charged, to further improve the charging user experience.

A notable signatory missing in the above was their group company, Tata Power.

Fourteen months later, in Feb 2025, TataEV signed another MoU with similar set of CPOs. Tata Power replaced Glida in this MoU. This MoU talked about how TataEV will help partner CPOs to setup charging infrastructure in India by putting money on the table. The CPOs would get branding fee and in exchange, they would offer discounts for TataEV customers. They also spoke a lot about the existing charging infrastructure. We broke down their numbers in our Feb 2025 article titled Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics.

The MoU talked about installing 120kW “Mega” chargers by the partner CPOs. For the uninitiated, “Mega” means 1000kW and not 120kW. Their highest rated branded charging station - not chargers - is 407kW. It is less than half of what a “Mega” “charger” is. I am surprised to see this blunder from the management and the branding team.

We look at how these branded stations have grown, what real changes did they bring about and some more insights. The information quoted in this article is based on our December 2025 data collection for the EV ecosystem. Let’s dive in.

TataEV Partners in numbers

TataEV has 195 co-branded chargers as of December 2025, which is spread across 101 charging stations and 373 connectors. TataEV has a target of 500+ chargers under this partnership. Achieving almost 40% of that in the first year is commendable.

The biggest beneficiary of TataEV chargers is ChargeZone, followed by Voltran and Statiq.

Around 50% of their infrastructure is focused on South India. The other half of their network is split across the West and North region, with a solitary charger in the Central region.

Voltran and Zeon are

Read more

We’ve documented in our previous report how the industry has graduated from 25-30kW to 60kW and to now 120kW chargers.

What happens to the existing infrastructure that is already installed? Are there any takers for that? How can the CPOs repurpose this hardware? We delve into some of these questions today.

When will CPOs face these issues?

Existing sites at high utilization are prime to upgrade hardware. When queuing starts happening regularly at your chargers, it is already too late to do so. CPOs can enhance customer experience by installing higher capacity chargers or supplement the existing low capacity chargers with higher ones.

If you are a CPO and are unable to identify any of these patterns, you can reach out to us and we will help you with it.

Reach out

Detailed chart is available below!

Before we get to the article, we recently mapped out Tesla’s global Supercharging infrastructure. It is one of our most ambitious projects so far. Take a look, test and play with the sample! Your feedback will help improve the user experience for our clients.

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Read more

Quick, picture the global benchmark for EV charging networks, in your head.

… who did you see?

You were thinking of the Tesla Supercharging network, weren’t you?

Now, imagine if you could take a peek under the hood of that Supercharging network.
Actually, not even just a peek.

Imagine you could find all the details of the Supercharging network globally. Every stall they have put up, in every location, with their price throughout the day, power, stall count per station, everything.

If you’re working on an EV business, charging or otherwise, something like this might prick up your ears.

And that’s exactly what we’ve created with EVWire:

The 2025 Supercharging Network Report

As far as I can tell, there is nothing quite like it out there in the industry so far.

See our landing page for the report here: The Supercharging Report.

We’ve gathered the details of

72,335 Supercharging Stalls in
7,586 Stations across
57 Countries

and created a way to go through it all in an interactive dashboard.

You can dig through all insights per continent, country, or province/state — or compare them.
You’ll find the station and stall counts, their powers, max/min/average stalls per station in a country, the type of plug… and more.

My favorites are charts showing which % of Superchargers are open to all per country, and the Time of Day pricing charts showing how Superchargers are priced within each region.

To top it off, Jaan has written a 4,000-word research piece “The Supercharging Story”, which shows where the Supercharging network places among regional competition and all the details that make their work special, from PSUs to regional competition comparisons to the new site concepts they’ve developed.

This resource is aimed at the EV industry professionals among us. Hence the price tag. That’s because there were high costs in building it all up.

We will, however, use the revenue to create more accessible EV resources for everyone.

I will also start picking a few surprising local insights from this and sharing them with you all, but the full report itself is directed to the EV professionals reading this.

Take a look, test it, and share with a colleague:

The SuperCharging Report Sample

Tesla has built 75,000 public stalls globally and our report covers 96.4% of these.

The Intelligence dashboard

Your global view across any market(s) you want to explore. All interactive, inviting to dig deeper with just a click.

You can view and filter the data by:
Continent level
Country level
State / Province level
Station location level

Dig deeper into Stalls & Stalls per Station

You can explore the exact number of Supercharging stalls per Station of any location, or averages per state/province, country, or continent.

These, like all the data here, can also be filtered by power output level.

Where exactly are Superchargers open to all?

Exploring the Open to all vs Tesla-only ratio over countries and states reveals surprising patterns.

Pricing per kWh

Compare the pricing of Supercharging per state, country or even continents.

Note: pricing data from China and Macau is not included in this report.
Pricing data as of end of August, 2025.

… even Time of Day pricing charts

See how Tesla changes the pricing dynamically, and compare the practices across countries.

…and there’s more.

The Supercharging Story

We’ve created a written 4,000-word research essay covering the network’s history, competition, tech & latest developments.

The Supercharging Story report is useful for added context next to the main dashboards and the personal onboarding call.

Purchase the
Supercharging Intelligence Report

Choose the suitable package below.
If you have any questions, or would like to pay via INR, please reach out to Priyans, at priyans@expwithevs.in

Supercharge Intelligence Global

US$4,990/package (INR pricing available)

Full platform access with all 72,335 stalls across 57 countries.
2 seats, for one company.

• Access to the full Supercharging Intelligence dashboard, within hours

• Personal onboarding call

• 72,335 Supercharging stalls with Location, Power, Pricing data

• Access to all filters, all views and drill downs across the dataset

• Access to The Supercharging Story research

• Can request customized charts.

  ---

Supercharging Intelligence per Region

US$3,990/package (INR pricing available)

Partial geographical data access (choose Europe + Middle East / Americas / Asia + RoW), full dashboard capabilities & resources access.
2 seats, for one company.

• Access to the Supercharging Intelligence dashboard within hours (within your geographical choice)

• Personal onboarding call

• Access to all filters, all views and drill downs within selected region

• Access to The Supercharging Story research

Contents of the dashboard:

Geographical filters included on the dashboard: Continent, Country, State/Province, Station Name
Other filters: Type (NACS; CCS), Max Power (per Stall); Number of Stalls
Curated pages (views) available to dig deeper: Guide, Overview dashboard, Stations, Average Stalls per Station, Map, Country Piechart, Power Piechart, Station Type, Open to All (%), Price per kWh (or per minute), Time of Day charts, Pareto Stalls & Stations.

All these views and filters can be tested in our live example with partial data here.

FAQ:

Who is this Supercharging Intelligence Report best for?

The Tesla Intelligence report is a business-oriented product that can be used to analyze the Supercharging network.
Our deep knowledge and accurate data on the network makes it the best tool for competitive analysis of charging networks (CPOs), the different layers of the EV ecosystem working to provide services in the industry (eMSPs), and any EV-related businesses that have skin in the game (OEMs, suppliers, service providers)

Can I play with a live dashboard sample first?

Yes, you can find a sample with all filters and views with real partial data here.

How is this data gathered & how accurate is it?

The data is accurate as of end of August 2025, as it is gathered directly from Tesla’s publicly available sources, such as the Tesla app for its customers Google Maps and PlugShare.

Is there an onboarding call available?

Yes, we will offer an onboarding call for the first five customers for all packages.
We will send you the details to agree on a suitable time within the first email after the purchase of any package.

Can I share the data publicly?

No, the access to the Supercharging Intelligence Report is only meant for the purchaser. If there is a need for more seats, or you would like to discuss licensing the content, let us know.

Is this a subscription or a one-time report?

This is not a subscription and you will not be charged again. We do plan to offer updates with added layers of data for our existing customers in the future

Do you get access to underlying raw data on purchase?

No. Summarized exports are available on-demand for extra fees.

I have a question. Who do I write to?

priyans@expwithevs.in

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Credits

Garvit Singh

Priyans Murarka

Jaan Jurrikas

We’ve been monitoring CPOs for a while now and are now ready to present our first CMS report. We identified the companies that these CPOs rely on and we drew up some insights.

Please note, the data of CPOs and CMS is as of September 2025.

In India, we have many companies providing CMS as a service to customers. It is possible that these companies might be serving other CPO customers too that are not covered in our report.

We’ve written about the role of CMS and eMSP players in e-mobility space previously.

Housekeeping

Thank you for attending our LinkedIn Live event last week! Incase you’ve missed it, you can view the recording here.

We had asked a couple of questions in our Live, here are the answers :

Zeon Charging swaps chargers across their sites proactively.

On Tata Power’s chargers, Delta’s chargers were the first ones to enable AutoCharge.

The winners have been identified and sent a complementary 1 month premium subscription to ExpWithEVs!

What are we focused on here?

We identified top CMS companies based on our CPO list. There are two types of CMS companies. One, where multiple CPOs are on the same platform, usually using a service provider and the other case where there’s a single CMS for a single CPO. In the latter’s case, it is usually the case that the CPO has built their own CMS platform or is using a white labelled solution with the CPO’s branding.

We also measured market share based on the number of chargers being serviced by the CMS companies. We see that ElectreeFi is the top CMS company when it comes to both CCS2 and Type2 infrastructure. When we select only CCS2, the number naturally changes with Statiq leading the space.

It is possible to drill down on each CMS player and understand which CPOs (and their charger count) is being served by each CMS player. This information is critical to understand the scale of CPOs being supported by each CMS player.

For example,

Almost 90% of the chargers on ElectreeFi’s CMS is from IOCL.

We take a look at how many OEMs are supported by each CMS player. Each Charger OEM has a different level of firmware maturity, making it critical for CMS player to sometimes do the heavy lifting. Broadly, if a CMS player can work with multiple OEMs, then it is an indicator of a mature CMS product.

Please note, since we do not track the OEMs for Oil PSUs like BPCL, HPCL and IOCL, their OEMs are marked as Unknown. The information is publicly available through the tenders and clients are advised to look at those to get an OEM distribution for the same.

Some other insights from the data :

The report is available for you to buy and dig deeper. We will provide the PowerBI license and if you buy in December 2025, you will get the January update for free!

Get access today!

Access will be granted to you within 24 hours. GST invoice available. Terms and conditions and the list of report pages is mentioned here.

Prominent CMS players covered - ChargeZone ‘s ChargeCloud, chargeMOD , ElectreeFi , Steam-A ‘s Iris, Kazam , Numocity , Pulse Energy & Statiq.

We look at the scenario today when these chargers are online and how it transforms electric mobility in India.

Before we get to that, here are some of the reasons why their infrastructure is not working :

• Poor quality hardware

• Unavailable grid demand

• Poorly trained staff

• Incorrect incentives and policies around chargers

• Poor app experience

Let us see what is working in the Oil PSU’s favour :

• Widespread infrastructure

• Per kWh pricing

• Subsidies to setup charging infrastructure

The bull case is dependent on increasing revenue from these chargers, which can only happen when they are online and working. In phase one, let us focus only on city chargers. We know that utilisation in cities is better than on highways. Ask any CPO and they would agree.

Our organisation is supported by readers like you. We do not rely on any promotions or advertisements by corporates or companies in the EV industry. Become a paying subscriber to help maintain our independence.

Subscribe now

P.S. : We are going live on LinkedIn today at 4:30 PM. Do join in and ask us questions!

We have the data for the following cities :

Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar Bengaluru. Chandigarh Chennai Delhi NCR

Hyderabad Indore Jaipur Kochi Kolkata Kozhikode Lucknow

Mumbai MR Pune Surat Thiruvananthapuram Vadodara Visakhapatnam

Despite having one out of almost every four chargers in the above cities, Oil PSUs have been able to manage to get less than one out of ten chargers online and working.

The cost of procurement of the chargers put up by Oil PSUs is far lower than the hardware being procured by Private players. The Oil PSUs follow a tendering process and the lowest bidder (L1) gets to supply the goods. The second reason for cheaper procurement is the subsidies being given by the Central Government to Oil PSUs to setup charging infrastructure.

We do not have the data on quality of hardware being procured by the Oil PSUs, but we will assume that the hardware installed is certified and approved by the relevant authorities to charge cars.

Related reading - In July 2023, I had written an article on the state of poor EV charging infrastructure by BPCL for The Ken.

🔒Read The Ken article

The PSUs started their journey in EV charging infrastructure with 25-30kW chargers but have now graduated to 60kW and 120kW chargers. They are leading the trends when it comes to high capacity charging infrastructure. IOCL* is a clear winner when it comes to 120kW chargers and above. No private CPO is even close to matching the coverage and scale of the Public CPOs.

I believe you have your answer to my LinkedIn poll!

They are not stopping here though. From a recent press release by Servotech :

And another one from Zetwerk :

It is a detriment to the industry if these high capacity chargers are not being put to use.

The average rate of charging in these cities for Non Oil PSU chargers is as follows

On an average, the market charges around INR 18.5 / kWh (US$0.2) when the PSUs are not included.

The three Oil PSUs charge roughly INR 13.5 / kWh (US$0.15) in these metro cities as seen in the chart below.

The advantage here is that when their chargers are working, it is usually the cheapest option. There are some other players like EVMithra (public) and NKDA - New Town Kolkata Development Authority (public) charging lower than the Oil PSUs, on an average. These players are restricted to Bengaluru and Kolkata respectively. Unlike the Oil PSUs.

EVMithra is run by BESCOM, Bengaluru city’s electricity board. They charge roughly INR 7 / kWh (US$0.08) which is significantly cheaper than all other players in the market.

In our premium WhatsApp community group, we discussed how difficult it is to charge on EVMithra’s network in Bengaluru. For EV community owners in Bengaluru, you already know why. Most of their charging stations are occupied by fleet cabs.

Fleet cabs are the silver bullet to push e-mobility story forward for Oil PSUs.

For any fleet operator, the biggest cost is the upfront CapEx, which is usually backed by loans, thus leading to recurring EMI payments. There’s driver fees and then there’s fuel, maintenance and other admin expenses. The intracity cabs are mostly in CNG in major metro cities. Next time you are visiting a CNG pump, observe the queue and count the number of cars lined up to fill in CNG.

The above image is a clipping from a recent Times Of India article, posted by Somit Sen of Times of India. 12,00,000 CNG cars for 400 CNG stations, implying 3000 cars per CNG station. This ratio is far worse than EV cars to EV Charging Stations ratio.

For any fleet operator, any marginal gain in fuel savings will result in tremendous savings as fuel forms a considerable part of the expense. From ‘s post on Twitter about erstwhile Blusmart, we see that electric cars, on an average, spend between INR 120 to INR 180 for charging per day per car. Keeping in mind that this analysis was for BluSmart and from 2023, we can assume that with slight increase in pricing, this number is closer to INR 200 on an average.

We know that operators like Blusmart have preferential pricing with large private Charge Point Operators because of demand predictability. These CPOs are private and install captive charging hubs for fleets. As we’ve seen above, the pricing by CPOs is around INR 18.5 / unit. When a fleet asks for a discount from a private CPO, their charging costs can be closer to INR 16 / unit, which translates to a saving of INR 20 - INR 30 per car per day.

If the Oil PSU chargers are working everywhere in the city, and if fleet owners move to such CPOs, then the fleet owners can save additional INR 2 / unit, translating to INR 20 to INR 30 per car per day. This is assuming that there is no bulk discount negotiation with the OMCs.

In Bengaluru’s BESCOM, the fleet operators are saving around INR 9-10 / kWh, resulting in atleast INR 120 per cab per charging session. When you have a network as wide as the PSUs or concentrated like BESCOM, then the only way to make money is through volumes. This is a low margin business but volumes make up for a healthy profit margin.

It is best interest for small fleet operators with 10 - 20 cabs to charge at PSUs. They do not have the volume to negotiate a bulk discount with private CPOs. We know that there are plenty of such small fleet operators in India.

When these chargers start working, the immediate impact will be felt on private CPOs catering exclusively to the fleet business. This will happen irrespective of PSUs because bigger CPOs - say JioBP, can drop prices to capture all the fleet volume to their charging hubs.

Location availability in cities is low than on highways. The PSUs already have the land and the infrastructure to support it. Private CPOs have to pay a premium to get land at prime locations to service business districts, airports, etc.

While in rural regions, power availability can be a bottle neck to get the Oil PSUs charging infrastructure up and ready to run, but that is not the case in urban regions. It is a function of will and the rest will follow.

Let us look at some of the other examples in our country.

Tata Power, Shell Recharge and Jio-bp are other major players to have chargers at fuel pumps in major metro cities in India.

We see that there are 191 CCS2 chargers across fuel pumps in major metro cities in India.

Of these, 108 are at government fuel pumps - including those of HPCL, BPCL and IOCL. Among those 108, only 14 chargers are not working, making it only 13%, whereas the Oil PSUs are at staggering 78% non working.

One more value addition of having chargers online in cities for PSUs is to capture the carbon credit. They are in a massively polluting industry and by having working chargers, they can earn carbon credits instead of buying them.

At the Oil PSU level, they can have conversations with the State Discoms to improve the grid availability for their chargers. It is in a Discom’s best interest to have electricity available as they get captive customers. A fleet electric car can consume 300 units of electricity every month, which is equivalent to atleast two households in Delhi NCR. For the fuel pump owners, the Oil PSUs can incentivise them on volume of electricity dispensed via their chargers.

If the Oil PSUs are short staffed or believe that they do not have adequate resources to handle this new business vertical, they can always outsource the work to a big four company (like how BESCOM did) or to certain sector experts.

We hope that the Oil PSUs are looking at this opportunity closely and are willing to set the right standards at their fuel pumps, especially the ones owned and operated by them directly. The PSUs have a right to penalise the Charger OEM incase the hardware stops working within the warranty period.

Other low hanging fruit is having clean washrooms at the fuel pumps. The Oil PSUs can align the incentives to be in sync with the Prime Minister’s Swacch Bharat campaign. Having clean washrooms will not only welcome customers but also help reduce diseases among their own staff.

The grand old PSUs need to see that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, the country will transition to electric, with or without their support. They can be a part of the revolution or sit by the sidelines and become less relevant day by day while wasting public resources.

* - IOCL’s app has often been buggy and we try our best to collect data as diligently as possible.

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