Indian electric car pioneer plans biggest plug-in car plant

NEW DELHI: Chetan Maini, the engineer who pioneered India's first electric car, had his eureka moment two decades ago when he drove a vehicle
fuelled by solar power across the blazing Australian outback.

Now Maini, the man behind Reva Electric Car Co., is building in southern India what he says will be the world's biggest factory making battery-powered city commuter cars.

"It's the first attempt at mass production of a green car," said Maini, who studied hybrid electric technology at California's Stanford University and developed the no-clutch, no-gears Reva as head of a 75-member engineering team.

"With growing climate change awareness, I think we're at the tipping point for electric cars," Maini told AFP in an interview.

The drive in 1990 which set Maini on his career track was a General Motors-sponsored solar-powered race in which his car finished third, beating many of the global car companies.

"Driving across the continent on the sun's energy made me think how we could use alternative energy to power cars in the Indian context," he said.

"When I saw how our cities were getting polluted, I realised employing clean, alternative energy could make a lot of sense -- we needed to develop this kind of technology," he said.

Maini has put some 3,000 of the zero-polluting three-door Revas on the roads in India and Britain -- where it is known as the G-Wiz -- in the eight years since the company started selling the cars.

The Reva was formed in 1994 as a joint venture between the family-owned Maini Group and AEV of the United States to manufacture environment-friendly vehicles.

But it took seven years for the first Reva to go on sale as Maini and his team worked on the design.

Afterward, "we were in a test marketing phase, trying to see how people used electric cars, what were their needs. But that's now over and we're ready to move to the mass-market stage," Maini said.

In September, Reva got a big endorsement when GM announced it would team up with the tiny car company to develop a plug-in version of the best-selling GM Spark mini-car as the US giant embraces electrically powered driving