It was on a cold January morning earlier this year that the country’s largest carmaker, Maruti-Suzuki, took the wraps off the eVitara, its first electric vehicle, at the Auto Expo in New Delhi. Yet, it is only now, as the year comes to a close, that the company is preparing to finally launch the vehicle. So it was with a sense of irony, perhaps, that I found myself on the outskirts of Milton-Keynes in England to drive the eVitara.
This was probably exacerbated by the fact that the car that I was driving came off a production line in Hansalpur, Gujarat. Suzuki Motor Corporation, the Japanese parent company of Maruti-Suzuki has decided to make India the global production base for this important new vehicle and exports have begun wholeheartedly with cars being shipped off not only to the United Kingdom but also to Suzuki’s home market of Japan.
How is the vehicle to drive? Truth be told, a hundred-mile drive through the scenic English countryside is really not much of a road test. But there were some things that I really liked about this new car. The first was its excellent road characteristics. While most electric vehicles handle very well because they have a low centre of gravity and a balanced mass distribution, thanks to the big heavy battery pack underneath, they also feel a bit heavy at times. This eVitara actually felt nimble, just like any other modern Maruti-Suzuki car does, excellent around the corners.
Speed and battery pack issue
As for speed, well, the United Kingdom has far too many speed cameras and extremely strict speed limits. In fact, I found myself using automation such as adaptive cruise control more often than not, just to make sure that I behaved myself. In the UK, the eVitara has a restricted top speed of 150 kilometers per hour, which is a common feature across many electric vehicles across Europe. The maximum speed I touched was 70 miles per hour (approximately 115 km/h) on a short section of motorway. However, the eVitara does accelerate very fast from low speeds.
It’s because of the almost 175-horsepower motor on the SUV. I was driving the ‘Ultra’ variant of the vehicle that featured a 61-kilowatt-hour (kWh) battery with a front-wheel drive system. According to Maruti-Suzuki executives travelling with us, other than some minor changes, like swapping the indicator and wiper stalks and a dual-tone interior, this was going to be the specification that would be launched in India in the coming weeks. We are not going to get the ‘AllGrip’ all-wheel drive version, at least for the time being. It has slightly more power, thanks to a motor on each axle.
The battery pack for the eVitara comes fully assembled from Chinese manufacturer BYD, and there will be two capacities, 49kWh and 61kWh, making them bigger comparatively than those offered by Hyundai and Kia on the electric variants of the Creta and Carens Clavis, which have 42kWh and 51.4kWh battery options. That said, the eVitara uses Lithium Iron-Phosphate (LFP) cells compared to the LG-manufactured Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC) cells on the Korean cars. There are advantages and disadvantages to both chemistries, but LFP cells are cheaper than NMC cells. Mahindra also uses BYD LFP cells on their BE6 and XEV9e but assembles the battery pack in-house at Chakan.
The debate about the size of battery packs on electric vehicles is as useless as comparing the size of internal combustion engines. A small one-litre three-cylinder turbocharged motor can get a lot more power than a 1.5-litre engine. It is all about the packaging and in the case of electric vehicles, the battery management software, which determines almost every aspect of performance.
This is especially true of the way an electric vehicle manages regeneration modes and ultimately the range. The eVitara does have the ability to select a ‘single pedal’ driving mode, which allows the driver to only use the accelerator pedal to drive. There are multiple regenerative modes on the eVitara as well, but as mentioned above, I let the car’s brain do a lot of the work as the eVitara has Level 2 ADAS-which kept the speed under the limit and in between the lines.
Do remember, though, ADAS is only an assistant; you have to always keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel.
Also read: Why CAFE 3 norms are fuelling the case for hybrids
What about range?
The WLTP (worldwide harmonised light vehicles test procedure) range of the eVitara, according to the spec-sheet handed to us by Suzuki Great Britain, was 426 kilometers. While WLTP is a very good indicator of real-world range, using the car’s trip computer, I was getting around 215 miles of range, which is around 350 kilometres. That said, because of always regenerating power from the brakes, most electric vehicles have better range in normal urban conditions than on the open road. And as we know, Indian conditions and testing procedures are unique, one can guess that the eVitara will have a claimed range of 500 kilometres and a real-world range of over 400 kilometers when it is launched in India on 2 December.
The eVitara really scores in its design. While it will compete against the likes of the Hyundai Creta electric and Tata Curvv, being a dedicated electric vehicle platform, it is a very well-packaged car. Suzuki designers have given the eVitara a very impressive SUV stance and look. And while it might feel diminutive from the outside, it is surprisingly spacious inside. I sat at the rear for a part of my journey and I found rear-seat comfort excellent, and the eVitara achieves this without sacrificing boot space. There is a lot of storage area up front and because it is born electric, it has a flat floor.
Personally, I think electric vehicles have come a long way and owning one in a city like Delhi and its satellite towns with its long travel distances, especially if you own a charger at home, is eminently sensible. The problem with EVs comes during long-distance drives, not so much about range anxiety anymore, as any EV can now comfortably manage medium distances such as Delhi-Chandigarh or Bengaluru-Chennai but charging anxiety.
I have experienced this personally on multiple drives with EVs. It isn’t about finding a charger, but will it be free and working. It is like those mobile phone charging towers at airports. You know that there will be one, but will it be working and even if it is, will there be an open plug or USB point? And if the latter is there, will it be a slow 1 amp point or a faster 2A point?
Same with car chargers, on most highways, I am now confident enough to know that I’ll find one. But will it be free? And will it be fast enough? Finding a 60kW charger isn’t a problem, but because most such chargers divide the output between two charging ‘guns’, they can get quite slow. But for city commuting with home charging, nothing beats an electric vehicle.
Maruti-Suzuki’s Senior Executive-Director, Marketing and Sales, Partho Banerjee, who travelled with us to the UK, said that the carmaker will solve this problem by having a large charging ecosystem and support. If anyone can grow the passenger vehicle EV ecosystem to over five percent, it will have to be Maruti-Suzuki.
But in the end, the real decider will be price and infrastructure. The eVitara has already done its bit.
Kushan Mitra is an automotive journalist based in New Delhi. He tweets @kushanmitra. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)