Mahindra XEV 9e Owners Take 1,000km Road Trips Without Range Anxiety — Nalinikanth Gollagunta, Mahindra

A year out from the market launch of the XEV 9e, has it lived up to expectation?

Last year, we were joking that we were dreaming electric. There were two cars coming out – the XEV 9e and the BE 6, and our hypothesis was that the existing EVs didn’t really excite the customer back then. You had to put a product which looked exciting to make people fall in love with it. And, of course, you had to take away all the barriers of what an EV was. With these two vehicles, we had to show that we were going to go do that. A year out now, by the end of November, we should be at about 35,000 vehicles in the hands of customers. And, these are not cars in the ₹10-15 lakh range, they are well positioned at the higher end of the spectrum. So, customers have really reposed their faith in them, and we are delighted with what the traction we have seen.

People still associate Mahindra with big, butch, internal combustion SUVs. At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got these sleek, modern-looking EVs. How do you rationalise the two ends of the spectrum?

We don’t really need to. I think the gift that we’ve gotten is that there are segments of customers for all of them. There are some customers who would love to be seen in the Bolero, some in the Scorpio Classic, some in the XUV 700, and some in the XEV 9e. What we have not been afraid of is to say that we’re going to have a polarizing design; not all our customers will like all our cars. But as long as you like one of them, and you fall in love with it, we’re quite happy with that. So, that gives us the latitude to make designs which are a little bit edgy — may not be liked by everybody, but there is a segment which goes after it. And that’s really what we are trying to do here.

The Scorpio and Thar are still your best sellers. What sales volume do you expect the EVs to achieve in the next year?

We’re averaging around 4,000 or so currently. Even at that volume, we’re at 8% penetration for eSUVs in our portfolio. With the launch of the XEV 9S, we want to take it higher. My sense is that we’ll reach about 7,000 to 8,000 units then, and that’s where we’re headed in the next twelve months.

In the months since the launch of these EVs, what are some of the charging habits that you have observed?

About 70-75% of customers are home charging. And we see what I would call ‘top-up behaviour.’ On a daily basis, they’re charging 5-10% because they just need a top up. Interestingly, we’re also seeing people taking long end-to-end drives – what I would call ‘destination charging.’ So, people are confident that the vehicle is going to cover 350-450km easily. We have even seen that folks have done 1,000-kilometre journeys in a day. People who buy our vehicles are people who have a sense of adventure. I had one customer go from Kerala to Odisha, and back. They love driving, so they’re now doing in an EV what they would do in an ICE vehicle. It’s really gratifying to see that you don’t need to make compromises to own an EV.

There’s a lot of competition for second place in the Indian market today, between Mahindra, Tata, and Hyundai. How can you cement that spot for yourselves?

At Mahindra, we don’t want to look over shoulders. We are focused on the customer ahead of us. We want to make sure that we have a comprehensive, attractive and relevant portfolio. Numbers will automatically come from that perspective. So, we are not obsessed about being number two, three, or four. I am not saying it is not important, but it’s an outcome!