ELECTRIC CARS ARE SURELY TOPICS OF DISCUSSION BUT THEY HAVE TO BE CHARGED AND THEN THERE IS THE ISSUE OF SAFETY-NEW DEATH TRAPS?

Reva’s cheeky snub-nosed, two-door hatch­back, which seats two in the front and two in the rear, sells for Rs300,000 ($6,132, €4,383, £3,775) in India and £7,000 in Britain. It can run at 8,000 revolutions per minute. This translates into surprisingly quick acceleration – as fast as a conventional car.

The Reva is simple to drive, with no clutch or gears. Maintenance is low – the car has only 1,000 parts, a fifth the number of a conventional vehicle.

After 2½ hours plugged into an ordinary socket, Reva’s eight, six-volt EV lead acid batteries will be 80 per cent charged, although a full charge takes nine to 10 hours. This will power the car for a distance of 80km.

this range is not enough to make the Reva a contender overseas for a family’s main car.

But just reaching this point has been an exhausting journey. After finishing at Stanford in 1993, Mr Maini teamed up a year later with Lon Bell, an inventor friend of his father’s who was involved in early work on the airbag.

The company spent the next seven years researching electric cars and produced 10 patents. Particularly important was its development of the “brain”, or energy management system, of the Reva. The brain regulates the flow of power from the batteries to the motor and other systems. When the charge in the battery falls below a certain level, the car automatically switches to “preserve power” mode to ensure the driver has plenty of warning and does not become stranded.

In 2001, the joint venture released its first battery-powered cars in India and the UK, where they are called the G-wiz. In 2006, Draper Harper Jurvetson, a Silicon Valley early-stage venture capital firm, became a partner. The group has also attracted funding from the Global Environment Fund. Total investment to date from all parties has been $50m-$60m.

To reduce overheads and cut down on management time, Mr Maini has kept the technology behind the Reva in-house while farming out manufacturing of components to contractors.

He says working in India comes with its own challenges. In spite of the country’s plethora of software engineers, it is harder to find experts with the skills to develop an automotive product from the ground up. But, he says, Indian engineers are more innovative in getting round day-to-day obstacles and more cost conscious. “We find ways to get to our objective,” Mr Maini says.

Now, with oil prices high and the world becoming determined to tackle climate change, Mr Maini believes the time has come for his product.

The company has sold only about 3,000 vehicles to date, but he expects sales of up to 2,000 this year, half of them in India and the rest in at least 20 overseas markets, which include Norway, Spain and the Philippines. This would be three to four times the volume of last year, and Mr Maini predicts growth will be of this order for the next few years. “We’ve gone through the slow, testing phase. Now it’s time to take off,” he says.

Chetan MainiThe election of a more environmentally conscious government in the US has reopened North America as a possible market. In Europe, governments are offering incentives to buy electric cars.

In India, however, government policy on electric cars remains muddled. New Delhi has raised and lowered taxes on electric cars in an ad hoc way and there is no co-ordination between the states.

Mr Maini maintains that India needs to take a more entrepreneurial view in its industrial policies. Green technologies play to India’s skills in low-cost engineering, he says, and cleaner energy will be critical to the country’s goal of delivering higher living standards to its 1.1bn people.

Analysts remain sceptical of Reva’s chances of becoming a mass consumer item without help from large corporate rivals, and are particularly wary of a claim that, with the right policies, electric vehicles could account for 10 per cent of Indian passenger car sales by 2015.

For one thing, the Reva faces stiff competition in the petrol-driven mini-car segment from the recently released Tata Nano, the world’s cheapest car, which sells for as little as Rs100,000.

Vikas Sehgal, a Chicago-based partner at Booz & Co, an industry consultant, says: “By 2015, we are looking at India becoming a 2.7m-units-per-year car market. So to sell nearly 300,000 hybrid cars is not possible without Tata or Maruti [Suzuki] or Hyundai – together they have a 90 per cent market share – going the battery-operated way.”

“The world can no longer afford conventional cars,” Mr Maini says. “From an automotive point of view, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

Is it just another politically correct hyped car that is not realistic for the population?