Volta Motors is gunning for India's first crossover e-bike and it’s packed to the brim with potential

The Volta Zap that has yet to go up on sale, is said to offer a mileage of 60km on a single charge even without pedaling and will cost just about Rs 7 paise per km. With the recent announcement of Indian IoT company Smartron investing in an e-bike company that has yet to roll out its first product. I got a bit inquisitive. As it turns out, there’s a lot more going on here. It’s not just a race to the finish line with a conversion kit on a makeshift bicycle. Smartron’s IoT and software expertise are indeed expected to make Volta Motors’s products a lot smarter, but there’s a big story behind how they came up with the idea and where they are headed; as I found out in an interview with Volta Motors founder and CEO Anoop Nishanth. How is the Volta Zap doing in terms of demand? The product is getting good traction. And now people have already taken a test ride. The response is phenomenal. Being a product from India competing in terms of technology, design the Volta Zap makes for an interesting package. The pricing is the icing on the cake. The name Volta Motors will continue to remain Volta Motors? The name Tron is sort of a name conflict for the global market. In India we have no issues in using the name Volta. We are looking at the future plans ourselves. We are going to highlight that we will be changing our name to Tron Motors to avoid any issues. The intent with Tron Motors is going to be just e-bikes or are you looking at something bigger in the two wheeler segment? Our dreams are big. There have been company’s who have been selling e-bikes in the market for 8-9 years. These were non-gearable ones, they had technology, spares and service in mind. There were about 58 manufacturers when the trend started back in 2010, today that number is down to 2 big names and this is solely because of the trading gap in the market. So we were waiting for these guys to see how the market is working and we believed that e-bikes would bridge the gap between petrol-based two-wheelers and wholly electric two-wheelers. This is because when you run out of charge, you have to look for a charging station, if something goes wrong, it shuts down automatically. Anything can go wrong on an electric two-wheeler, and even if this happens to one out of ten people, it may affect the buying decisions of new users to adopt this kind of a lifestyle.  Which is why we chose a crossover with an electric bike which is also powered by the commuter. It has the health and fitness factor in it and if anything goes wrong with the bike, you can still use your gears and pedal you way to your destination. With cloud connectivity on the horizon, we will be able to know if something goes wrong with the bike, we will be notified immediately to get the bike fixed. This is an idea that is yet to be implemented but since we are soon to enter the production stage and these inputs coming from different cities will help us build a better product. Feedback that we have got from users so far are being implemented into the actual product. Different cities have different opinions. Cities like Mumbai and Pune have issues with the material used in making bikes. In Delhi cyclists had issues with speeding vehicles (the need for safety features). Every city has a small problem so we are trying to build a bike that tries to solve the problems in all these cities. Design is important when it comes to your product. So how is the Zap so different? Any e-bike you see in the Indian market is built on a conventional bicycle frame. The battery either sits like an additional box on the carrier or the downtube which appears to be more of a convertion kit. When we went to develop such a product, we worked on the core design by factoring details like downforce, the weight of the bike, even weight distribution. There were a lot of constraints and that is why we had to take a different approach.  So when a customer is looking for an e-bike, I don’t want that customer to look at a product that replicates the same 100-year old design. And the approach is, “How does one know you are driving an e-bike?” While many will buy an e-bike for health and fitness reasons, many ride it around as a style statement as well. The design we went in for is a unisex design, one that works for both men and women. Even kids and senior citizens can ride it. So where did the inspiration for this product come from? The idea for this crossover product comes not from a bicycle but from a moped (TVS Luna etc.) We thought why don’t we build a product that is a mix of classic design on a modern platform. So we have a solid e-bike that has been designed from the ground up to tackle the brunt of tough roads and also be as smooth as possible on any terrain. How does Volta benefit from Smartron’s investments? To develop a technology one needs a lot of manpower and capital and this always takes some time. So when you collaborate with a company that has an established base of IoT, cloud, hardware, software, apps it makes a lot more sense. More importantly, we both have similar synergies, Smartron is a company that wants to build indigenous home built products. Whether its IoT or automotive products or how we are trying to position them, our synergies and thoughts are almost similar. So we thought lets together build Indian made products for India. What’s on the agenda for Tron Motors? It’s not too different from what we had with Volta Motors. I will still be frontrunning the company and we will go with our previous ideas to build a product with integrated IoT features and all of this will be designed and built in India.