Ather Energy has started manufacturing electric scooters at its new plant in Hosur, Tamil Nadu. Since December 2020, the company had stopped production of Ather scooters at its Whitefield plant in Bengaluru.
“We have moved our manufacturing unit from Whitefield to Hosur, and we marked the new beginning with a pooja and with our team members in attendance. It’s a huge boost to our morale that we managed this despite the lockdown and related disruptions,” Ather Energy said in a statement on its LinkedIn page.
Electric vehicles and Lithium-ion batteries will be manufactured here.
Ather Energy is looking at a monthly production of around 3,000 units initially from this new plant, which is planned to be expanded to 8,000 units by early 2022. The Bengaluru plant production capacity averaged around 300 units a month.
The company had entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Tamil Nadu government in Dec 2019 for setting up the 4,000 sqft plant. The company had committed INR 635 crore for this plant.
The factory supported by the Tamil Nadu EV Policy is designed to produce 100,000 units annually and is scalable to half a million units. Further, it is expected to create 4,000 jobs over the next few years.
The Tamil Nadu government’s nodal agency for investment promotion and single window facilitation congratulated Ather Energy on the commencement of the operations with a tweet which said- “This is an important milestone for Tamil Nadu in propelling the electric mobility goals.”
Tarun Mehta, co-founder and CEO, Ather Energy, at the time of signing the MoU had said, “A manufacturing facility at Hosur was an ideal choice considering that it is close to our Research & Development facilities in Bengaluru and most of the existing and potential future supply base is operating in the region. The availability of a built-up option of our desired scale and proximity helped in the decision-making.”
Apart from this, the company is looking to expand to 20 cities by the end of 2021. As part of phase-2 of expansion, the EV manufacturer had announced the launch of Ather 450X in 16 additional cities: Mysore, Hubli, Jaipur, Indore, Panaji, Bhubaneshwar, Nasik, Surat, Chandigarh, Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam, Guwahati, Nagpur, Noida, Lucknow and Siliguri. Ather 450X will be available across 27 cities by Q1 2021.
