Accelerating India's EV Transition with BOLT
Today's guest is Mohit Yadav, CEO and co-founder of BOLT.
BOLT was founded in 2017 with the dream of making electric vehicles more accessible by easing and accelerating the transition of emerging markets to cleaner mobility. Currently, the company manages India’s largest EV charging network with over 10,000 charging points across 100 different cities.
Although we haven't spent much time on the region here on the My Climate Journey podcast, this episode is particularly important given India's population and emerging economy. How the country’s economy evolves in the years to come will be critical to global emissions reduction as its population is unfortunately feeling the effects of climate change today in a major way.
We have a great discussion about the state of the EV market in India, BOLT's business model, their future expansion plans, and how the company started in software and evolved to include a hardware component.
Enjoy the show!
In today’s episode, we cover:
An overview of BOLT
The company's focus on emerging markets and peer-to-peer network approach
Mohit's background in software tech and journey into climate
How BOLT sought to improve the two-wheeler experience and early challenges the company faced
BOLT's beginning as a software solution for making "smart" two and three-wheeler EVs and how they evolved to include a hardware component
Cost challenges of building a charging infrastructure in India
Comparisons between EVs and smartphones
An overview of India's renewable energy sources
Passive income incentives for BOLT customers
BOLT's partnerships with retail chains, governments, etc.
Future uses for BOLT's anonymous OS data
BOLT's expansion from a global perspective, including trials in Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, etc.
Running costs of EVs vs. ICE vehicles
BOLT's funding to date
The company's open engineering roles
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