One of the tenets that Mahindra acknowledged early on in its journey towards making Born Electric, its electric platform developed from the ground up, is that it needed humility if it wanted to embark on the EV journey, according to Rajesh Jejurikar, executive director and CEO, Auto and Farm Sectors, Mahindra & Mahindra.

“When we embarked on the EV journey, we were completely new to it, and the first thing we needed to tell ourselves was the humility to know that we didn’t know,” said Jejurikar at Fortune India’s Best CEOs Awards in Mumbai on Monday. According to him, once Mahindra got into that mindset, it was far more open to figuring out where to get the know-how, technology, and partnerships. “One of the things we did early on was a clear set of what is that we want to be good at and excel in, and what is it that we don’t mind buying out, and will not be the basis of differentiation,” he added. Jejurikar was speaking at a panel discussion titled ‘Leadership in Turbulent Times’.

Mahindra, according to Jejurikar, defined designed software interface—the customer user interface—as one of the key factors that it wanted ownership of, and was open to acquiring everything else. “The other important learning was that we originally thought EVs were new, and let’s create a team in Detroit, which will do the product development from there. Pretty soon, we realised that we would never be able to build scale there,” said Jejurikar. Therefore, the company roped in people who worked on conventional diesel and petrol drivetrains to set up a new EV centre.

“When we made that decision, we literally moved 800 people overnight out of current programs and set up a new EV centre. We did everything differently. It was a completely different set of teams. A key part of the leadership, including my own, though I’m not a tech person, was spent in getting us EV-ready, because it was new, and it needed very agile EV-making on the go. We had to separate teams, and we had to resource strongly for it,” he said.

Jejurikar also highlighted that Mahindra is not obsessed with competition, but rather, be extremely focused on its current and potential customer, and what to do to get the best proposition out to them. The mindset is totally driven by opportunity. He also recounted that while Mahindra owned the authentic SUV category, it was a small category five years ago.

He also revealed that Mahindra faced a lot of scepticism when it launched the three-door Thar SUV in 2020. “When we launched the three-door Thar in 2020, most people didn’t give it any chance because they thought that no one in India would use a three-door SUV—which is two doors, and one in the back—so two doors, essentially. It was a very clear ‘no, this can’t sell in India’. Within a month, we scaled to 6,000 units a month, which is a significant volume. Understanding customers and what drives them at a point in time is what we get obsessed with,” he said.