India Has Ambitious Plan For All Of Its Cars To Be Electric By 2030

An Indian minister believes that his country should become the first fully electric car nation in the world.

India’s minister of state for power, coal, and new and renewable energy, Piyush Goyal, told attendees at an investment conference in Mumbai that Indian leaders are planning on making every car on the country’s roads electric by the year 2030, reports Clean Technica.

Such an ambitious target won’t be easy to achieve. In fact, 13 cities in India are home to at least 1 million cars each, with Delhi leading the way with over 7.35 million cars on the streets, followed by Bangalore at 4.1 million and Chennai at 3.7 million.

Of those tens of millions of cars flooding the streets of India, just 22,000 electric vehicles were sold nationally in the year ending 31 March 2016. While that was 37.5 per cent more than the previous year, it only represents a fraction of the country’s automotive industry and isn’t within sight of the government’s target of selling 6 million electric vehicles by 2020.

In order to boost EV sales in India, prices for such vehicles need to fall rapidly. Additionally, lobby group, Society of Manufacturers of Electric Vehicles (SMEV), believes that the process of purchasing an electric car needs to be made easier for locals.

The United States has the most electric vehicles on the roads of any country. Between 2008 and December 2015, about 410,000 EVs were sold.