According to the IESA (India Energy Storage Alliance), the electric vehicle (EV) market in India is expected to hit the over-63 lakh unit mark per annum by 2027. Today, that number is around 1,50,000 EVs.

This provides a massive opportunity for India, the largest two-wheeler market in the world, to pivot into a cleaner and more affordable mobility option—and new-age players like Ola Electric are making the most of it.

The Bengaluru-based unicorn, with its ambitious plan of building the world's largest two-wheeler factory with 10 million annual capacity, is already at the forefront of the paradigm shift that Ola's chairman and group CEO Bhavish Aggarwal, 35, feels has the potential to put India on the global map.

This 500-acre integrated manufacturing facility in Krishnagiri district, Tamil Nadu, will have everything from a battery manufacturing unit to supplier parks and even a test track inside the factory itself. Ola says that Phase 1 will be ready with initial annual capacity of 2 million by June 2021.

In a virtual discussion with Fortune India, Aggarwal explained his vision of disruption at scale, Ola's pilot project in Nagpur, and India's role in the future of electric mobility.

Edited Excerpts:

How did the idea of getting into EVs germinate in your head?

We started off as a ride-hailing company in 2010 and we’ve built one of the world’s top five ride-hailing companies. We’re a leader in India and also a strong player in the commonwealth—the UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc. The mission for us is to transform mobility for the future. When we started, that meant to help people access mobility in a convenient way which is what our ride-hailing business is, and we’ve continued to scale that. Somewhere around 2017, we realised the need for transitioning mobility for a more sustainable future and we did a pilot in Nagpur. The objective of that pilot was to learn about what will be needed to drive electric transition in India. The insight was that pollution due to mobility needs to change and sustainability can be driven by electrification and the technology is getting to an inflection point. This fit into our mission well. After our pilot we realised that the technology was not ready for India and the products were not ready for India. None of the projects that were deployed in the pilot have ended up scaling in India. We actually took a call to then make our own products. We started off early enough before the hype. When we looked at the opportunity we realised that the only way to play the game is at scale because you can’t produce EVs at low cost unless you play at scale.

When we started off with electric mobility, we had two choices to make: do we play incremental and small or do we play disruptive and big? We chose to play disruptive and big and that comes with its own challenges of the scale of thinking, execution and resources required. That’s why we have put out a vision and are executing fast for our factory. It will be the largest two-wheeler factory in the world at 500 acres and in addition to that it will be producing 10 million units a year. It’s a big project. That’s why we played at scale so that we can price it aggressively and not just our manufacturing but so that even our suppliers can bring down their costs. The second thing we did was to control the key technologies in house unlike most OEMs in India who are assemblers. We are not assemblers, we are actually designing, engineering and manufacturing key components ourselves, for example battery packs, the motor, the vehicle computer and battery management systems, the software.

Future Factory

We’re not the Tesla of India, we’re the Ola of the world: Bhavish Aggarwal