Panasonic Life Solutions India, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Panasonic Corporation, has joined hands with PMI Electro Mobility Solutions, a manufacturer of ‘zero-emission’ commercial vehicles, to set up electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure across 17 cities in India for over 1,000 electric buses.

PMI has to provide electric buses, which can cover 200-220 kilometers daily, in four states in India. For these electric buses, Panasonic will provide fast charging solutions that can charge the bus within 40 minutes.

Panasonic said that its electric mobility ecosystem portfolio incorporates both alternating current (AC) chargers and direct current (DC) chargers. It provides its charging solutions to EV fleet owners, e-commerce, and logistics companies to help manage their fleets efficiently.

Dinesh Aggarwal, Joint Managing Director of Panasonic Life Solutions India, said, “We are excited about extending our e-mobility services across the states of Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, West Bengal, and Odisha in the first phase. With this, we aim to create an infrastructure that will cater to the unsatiated needs of multiple stakeholders and inspire the public to use sustainable technologies such as EV.”

“The opportunity for electric mobility in the country is huge, and it is paving the pathway for electrification across other modes of transport. To encourage wider adoption of e-mobility, the central government introduced the second phase of the FAME program, which was required to encourage EVs through an ecosystem of research, manufacturing, storage, and charging infrastructure,” he added.

As of January 2020, the Department of Heavy Industries approved 2,636 electric vehicle charging stations in 62 cities across 24 states and union territories under the second phase of the FAME India program.

In November 2020, Okaya Power bagged a World Bank-funded contract from the state-run Energy Efficiency Services Limited to deploy 1,020 EV charging stations across the country.

Recently, Mercom spoke to a cross-section of several industry stakeholders to get a sense of what the EV segment expects from the upcoming budget. You can read the findings here.