With an aim to further enhance synergies between its Passenger Vehicle (PV) and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) businesses, Tata Motors said its greenfield facility at Tamil Nadu will be building models from its own stable as well as that from its British luxury carmaking arm. This was revealed by a senior company official, who also said the plant will be building both ICEVs and EVs for domestic and global markets.
"As far as the Chennai plant is concerned, it's run by Tata Motors and will be a combination of both EVs and ICEVs. It is going to be a flexible plant that and the timeline for completing the project is the 2032,” Chief Financial Officer P.B. Balaji said in a post-earnings media conference call on November 8.
Tata Motors on September 28 signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Tamil Nadu government to establish a vehicle manufacturing facility, at Tamil Nadu's Ranipet. The company has earmarked Rs 9,000 crore for the unit, which is expected to generate about 5,000 jobs.
“At the same time, we will obviously would want the plant to commence (manufacturing vehicles) sooner rather than later, depending on our existing capacities at Sanand Plant (acquired from Ford Motors India) fill up. So, it is a next phase of expansion of Tata Motors. Once we consume the Ford's Sanand plant, the Chennai plant will come through,” added Balaji.
Tata Motors, which had earlier clarified that it has no plans to leverage on EV Policy of the government, had also revealed that some of the JLR models will be based on the Electrified Modular Architecture (EMA) that the company had developed for its premium EVs.
Meanwhile, Tata Motors stated that it has yet not decided on Battery-as-a-Service (BaaS) option in order to push its electric PV volumes in the future.
“We have done the mathematics (and) have seen the process there. We still remain unconvinced particularly in passenger vehicles. Whatever data that we have seen so far, we believe most of the customers (who) are still buying the car are not necessarily using the service offering that is out there," Balaji noted.
However, he clarified that it is ready to experiment with BaaS if consumers demand it. In his view, “The point is that it is good that people are doing the mathematics (and are) understanding the economics of that because that means the TCO proposition is being very well understood. What we've always been saying that EVs make a lot of more sense in terms of delivery."
Moneycontrol, on October 7, has exclusively reported that Tata Motors is mulling BaaS offering for some of its EVs such as electric variants of Tiago, Tigor and Nexon.
"If it has to be done, we have no problem in putting in a battery as a service. However, there are also GST angles on this that we need to think through. There may be some leakage that may be happening on that. Therefore, it needs to be seen as an end -to-end process as well, not just the consumer proposition that is out there. So at this point in time, we remain unconvinced that there is a viable economic proposition on that front,” stated Balaji.
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