No plans to mandate a single charging standard for electric scooters: MoS for Heavy Industries

Electric vehicle (EV) charging connector standards are conceptually similar to charging connector standards for mobile phones, such as the USB Type-C charger or Apple’s lightning charger. Making a specific charging standard mandatory can help ease range anxiety as EV owners will be able to access any public charging station due to guaranteed compatibility. Currently, EV owners have to ensure whether a public charging station is compatible with the charging standard used by their EV.

For instance, Ola’s proprietary Hyperchargers are designed for charging Ola Electric scooters only. Ather Energy’s open source charging standard is used by its own scooters and by Hero Vida V1 e-scooters, since Hero MotoCorp owns a major stake in Ather. Ultraviolette’s e-motorcycles are only compatible with charging connectors using IEC 62196-6, an international charging standard.

In other countries, some degree of standardisation has taken place, both through regulatory compliance and consensus building amongst EV makers. In Europe, CCS is the predominant charging connector standard, and is also a European Union (EU) requirement for EV charging networks. For its European market, Tesla equips all its cars with CCS charging ports, and also integrates CCS in its public chargers, known as Superchargers, which can be accessed by both Tesla and other EV drivers. In the US, Ford and General Motors (GM) are adopting the North American Charging Standard (NACS) developed by Tesla, so that their EVs can access Tesla’s network of fast chargers across North America.

Under the Ministry of Heavy Industries’ phase-II of FAME India scheme, the electric two-wheeler segment led with 10,16,887 units sold, followed by 1,21,374 electric three-wheelers, and 14,818 electric four-wheelers.