German mobility startup wants in on India’s transportation industry

The first Indo-German startup boot camp was held in India in late March and the results of the collaboration are now taking shape with Munich’s ACM planning it’s introduction to the Indian transport market.

Adaptive City Mobility (ACM) was awarded the best German mobility startup of the boot camp. And the company is now set to introduce a fleet of ACM’s small alternatively powered urban vehicles, together with the “holistic system” that will power them: ACM is offering the ability to replace batteries, meaning the user is able to swap out the car’s supply source and carry on, leaving the drained battery to charge.

“I am serious. This is not a fun trip for me. I want to enter the Indian market. I want to get to know investors, potential partners and I want to start tomorrow,” Paul Leibold, Initiator and Project Leader of ACM told Your Story.

Leibold’s ambitions are not small, as he told Your Story: “While developing the system we had the business model in mind, never the technology. We wanted to create a solution—not for the individual customer but for the city of tomorrow, with different groups sharing the vehicle and hence needing different technology and design requirements.”

But perhaps these tiny city cars are actually too big. With the help of the 2015 government initiative, FAME India (Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of hybrid and Electric vehicles). Individuals have had support purchasing such vehicles, and past figures for vehicles bought now stand at 22,000 electric vehicles countrywide in 2016, but only 2,000 of them (that’s only 9%)  were four-wheeled automobiles.

Price could be an influencing factor, or, with India’s notoriously chaotic roads, it may be that smaller, two-wheeled transport is more pragmatic, nevermind cheaper.

Either way, India is looking to take its transportation electric quickly. This will require more government investment and a far bigger effort than in most countries, considering India has a less developed tech ecosystem.

In more developed countries the ability to move quickly from one tech solution to the next is possible partly due to the infrastructure, data and culture around technology are not far behind on a nationwide level. However, this is a battle India seems up for, with the government heavily focused on technology and willing to cough up the necessary funds.