Wow!!!…What a year it was… Year 2015!
PlugInCaroo managed to press out about 100 blogs through the year at a rate of 1 Blog every 3 days!!! Blogs mostly based on Electric Vehicles, Solar & Wind Energy, CNG & BioGas Fuels.
Year 2015’s Popular Blogs
No any Electric Vehicles were launched in the market in-spite of tall promises by many companies. The best electric two wheeler & best electric car titles are still held unconquered by… Continue reading
Recently Mahindra carried out the “Goodness Drive” a 5,000 Km drive unforgettable journey supposedly “never carried out in India”… except for
Our friends at http://www.PlugInIndia.com have successfully created India’s 1st and ONLY community charging infrastructure. Its kind of Zero Budget Infrastructure that was set up by the community to enable Electric cars to travel much beyond their range-boundary of 100kms. The best thing about the charging infrastructure is it pays the Infrastructure-developer an income from anybody who comes to charge the vehicle. The charging fee range from free charging to Rs 100 per hour depending upon the shop that is providing the charging. If charging is done from a shop then charging is done from a commercial meter at commercial rates and thus they charge Rs 100 per hour. Some people have opened their hearts and let the EV community charge free from their house or housing society.
This effort has made trips between Mumbai to Pune and back a distance of 300kms (150kms each way) completely possible for anybody with E2O which has a range of just 100km WITHOUT ANY DIFFICULTY.
The fact remains that Mahindra were NEVER ABLE TO IMPLEMENT highway charging “infrastructure” is proof to our below statement of “incompetence”. These are the same guys who tried to sell Manual Transmission (MT) Scorpio in countries where people do not touch MT without realizing that the “MT-era” had passed in those countries 😉
Lol…looks like the EV community have got pissed off with Mahindra’s go-slow approach and started to implement their own solution while all the petrol car makers have have developed Electric Car since 2010… but refuse to release it and hold the Govt responsible for its delay. Companies like Tata, Maruti & Mahindra talk EVERY YEAR about “releasing the NEW Electric car next year”… and which never got released for 5 straight years. Zero work also on Infrastructure development.
Its time the Government start to fine all who flout the below rule:
We at PlugInCaroo believe as a rule of thumb that Petrol Car companies the world over are incompetent to make electric car… at the efficiency of say Solar Ahmed‘s Vehicle… at the same price, range and distance.
For Eg. The 63yr old Solar Ahmed whose car is robest enough to have traveled above 100,000 Kms with a Rs 100,000 car, and even covered a 3,000kms journey in 30 days. Thus he can travel all over India even the Ghats without a single drop of petrol… At that rate… he was covering a distance of 100kms per day charging from Solar Panels… a task not even equaled by Mahindra’s Rs 9,00,000 E2O especially considering the price of Solar Ahmed’s car. Now dont even mention the BMW’s or Tesla’s price tag for they have to hang their head in SHAME.
…for now lets check out the magic that PlugInIndia has woven…
PlugInIndia’s Electric Car Roadtrips : Baby steps to the futureThe EV community in the cities of Pune and Mumbai did a series of test rides on an electric car – The Mahindra e2o between Mumbai and Pune over the last 2 weeks. A total of 5 electric cars drove around 1500 km with enthusiastic owners feeling green and great!
Together we saved more than 125 liters of petrol for our country and we did not pollute the air in the beautiful western ghat mountains. All of us would want to do this again and again and again! The EV community in India is not blessed with DC Quickcharge stations to make road trips easy for us.
So Level 2, 15 Amp sockets is what we were after. Two normal stations were installed by PluginIndia community and Mahindra Reva at Khandala and Nerul, Mumbai. All of a sudden, Mumbai-Pune was possible.A distance of 150 km, 1 way, might appear trivial. But it is not as trivial as it sounds. The reason for this is the Sahyadri mountains at Khandala/Lonavala, where we descend from an altitude of 625 meters to around 50 meters. This is not an issue while going from Pune to Mumbai as we go down and regenerative braking helps us gain energy! The problem as in all EV’s is the huge energy consumed while climbing uphill. The fear of the ghat (mountain) along with lack of dedicated charge stations ensured many in the community did not dare venture in the expressway! Ultimately the ghat proved to be a non issue due to strategically placed charging stations, efficient EV driving habits and well designed Mumbai-Pune expressway which eliminated steep hairpin bends. All in the terrain
Here are stories of the 5 pioneers!
My exploratory drive – The Explorer!
Pune-Mumbai-Pune : Yellow e2o – Eva There were some test drives on the Mumbai-Pune route done by Mahindra Reva personnel and an occasional dare devil without permanently installed stations. But this resulted in walking to shops asking for a 15 Amps socket and generally indulging in running around, convincing shop owners etc. All this resulting in frustration and wasted time!
Now that we have 2 dedicated stations, i would not have to go through all that and i wanted to find out bout the experience! My video blog sums up the experience pretty well. Eva did great during the trip! Some other fun observations!
http://www.pluginindia.com/blogs/electric-car-roadtrips-baby-steps-to-the-future |
In an era when India is trying to battle the environment pollution and jump onto the clean energy bandwagon it may come to you as a surprise PlugInCaroo announcing that Mahindra could be on a mission to do away with India’s one & only electric vehicle. It is as much of India’s pride as is Tata Nano because E20 was and is the most economically practical & sustainable electric car in the whole wide World.
Who Killed The E2O – the Indian Electric Car?… the answer could be… who else but AN INDIAN!
Why we are saying this is because our voice could be the last desperate & feeble voice in the wilderness before life could be snuffed out of E2O… just like the mother Indrani Mukerjea who smothered the life out of her daughter Sheena Bora in the sensational murder case.. there is a possibility that Mahindra is trying to kill E2O. Right now E2O is lying in ICCU counting the days…
For instance how much advertisement do you see on for E2O?… now compare it with… Continue reading
We at PlugInCaroo would love to bring to your attention that the most looked up post on the site. It is definitely “NanoGenX vs Alto vs Eon vs WagonR“…The comparison is made with other cars which are a direct competition to Nano. These were not randomly picked but were carefully selected from a list of cars as these are the MOST SELLING CARS in INDIA.
PlugInCaroo’s Top Posts for Year 2015!
Going by numbers on our website… which is not even a website but just a blog-site…yet it was able to have effect-ed at least 100 Tata Nano GenX and 10 Mahindra E2O sales since June 2015. Wonder how many of their sales person make 100 sales in 4 Months? Most of their Dealers and sales people hardly know anything about these cars!! And do you think TATA or Mahindra cares for stuff like which salesman sold how much etc? Ha HA..
The cost of 1 GenX Nano car = Rs 220,000 (ave).
The cost of 100 GenX Nano car = Rs 22,000,000 (ave).
Profit for Company (10%) on 100 GenX car = Rs 22,00,000 (Rs 22Lakh) made just from PlugInCaroo blog in 4months… what do you think is the sales possibility in a year?… multiply 22 lakh x 3 (to get 12 month numbers) = 66 Lakhs… What do you think the company should pay as “advertisement” to the blog? … 10% of its profits? 6 Lakhs? Fair enough? Now imagine if this was a website with proper search engine reach, multiple pages, SEO, digital media and social media suppor, with support staff, etc? This websites alone could do a minimum of 500 vehicle sales a year. They would still make a profit even after paying Rs 10 Lakh to PlugInCaroo website. That is the power of Social Media now multiple this with a hundred such websites in India and you can see a Tsunami…but unfortunately there are very few independent websites dedicated to Fuel-efficient Vehicles like Nano, electric vehicles and clean energy in India…. in time they might grow.
Why are we asking these questions? Because it is very relevant… and the answer is in the Power and reach of the Internet, and the social media…
Why is PlugInCaroo a blog-site and not a website?… well… we do not want to put money from our pocket to market and sell the cars for companies who do not want to pay for the effort people put in to sell THEIR product on which THEY earn a profit. We have discussed this with many companies at various levels and the response they have is that of amusement to say the least. Simple as that. companies think why to pay “small time” websites to advertise their vehicles as they are already doing multi-million advertisements.
Many companies also feel that its easy for a million $ company to have a website or a blog or forum with people giving positive review of the various vehicles… this is anything but the truth as people reading on the Tata or Mahindra or any such website do know that these people on the website are either getting paid or could even be their own employees… so you can put in 1,000 positive review on company website and these can carry zero value because PEOPLE KNOW… they are not dumb… thats why they are google searching… AWAY from company blogs and even landing on blogs like PlugInCaroo.
Then why are we doing this blogsite? It is just an effort to counter and remove the myth and shit put out by petrol-heads and their websites. Of course paid advertisements could scale up the proportions of the reach of the site.. and increase the sales by that much. Most Car companies sell cars & bikes in the traditional way… by Radio-TV-Newspaper advertisement… One of the best ways to check if your company is advertising in modern way is to check how much they are
A. Spending via the Social Media +Blogs+ the Internet
V/S
B. Spending on Radio+TV+Newspaper.
If the Budget in your company for “B” is greater than the Budget for “A” it means you are advertising the traditional way and almost 60% of that advertisement is wasted. We can’t imagine any CAR or BIKE company in the world who would have the balls or thought process to have a bigger Social Media+Blog+Internet budget…
Another example is Prashant Kishore who not only orchestrated Narendra Modi’s victory in 2014 General elections but also the victory of the Alliance of Nitish Kumar+Lalu+Congress in Bihar Elections 2015
…And yeah… Just to give you perspective… there are much more people interested in “Holes in Mikhale Bora’s Story” (posted in Sept) than in Electric vehicles… and that post could, by the end of the year, be the top “searched” post on PlugInCaroo…
PlugInCaroo top Posts – 2015
Bill Gates had said that the Tata Nano in its early version did not sell in large enough numbers due to the “Edsel effect”.
What is Edsel? Of all the car he created Edsel was Henry Ford’s favorite car… it was so good that he named in memory of his only son Edsel Ford…. who died at a relatively young age at 49, of stomach cancer. Edsel was supposed to have some truly awesome features and was to be like no other car before it. Edsel Car was long, wide, lavishly decorated with chrome, had a lot of gadgets and was equipped with engine which could really rustle up some serious power.
In fact, even before the Edsel car was launched there was a lot of hype around it. For months, Ford had been telling the industry press that it “knew” (through its market research) that there would be great demand for the vehicle. Ford also insisted that, in the Edsel, it had built exactly the “entirely new kind of car” that Ford had been leading the buying public to expect through its pre-introduction publicity campaign for the car. In reality, however, the Edsel shared its engineering and bodywork with other Ford models, and the similarities were apparent once the vehicle was viewed firsthand.
Two years, two months and fifteen days later, it had only sold 109,446 Edsels (this included cars bought by Ford executives, dealers, salesman, workers etc). The number amounted to less than 1% of the cars sold in America during that period. On November 19, 1959, Ford pulled the plug on the car. Estimates suggested that Ford lost around $350 million on the car.
So what went wrong? Lets find out…
A solar powered car designed by city-based engineering students. A team of 20 students from RV College of Engineering is providing finishing touches to Soleblaze, a single-seater car that will cruise from Darwin to Adelaide – a distance of 3,012 kms – entirely on solar power from October 18-25 in the World Solar Challenge 2015.
E2O takes on the Nano GenX (AMT) vs Alto and barely scrapes through to survive and tell the tale. Nano comes out shining second while Alto gets some respect from the defeat due to its mammoth 35ltr tank!
E2O vs rest – Cost of traveling 1,000 Km on E2O is just Rs 500 which makes it Rs 0.50 per km while Nano CNG is close behind with Rs 1.20 the rest are well over Rs 2.50.
The quadricycle which has a top speed of 70 KMPH and a mileage of 35 KMPL and coupled with CNG, it will be a way cheaper option to run. Thats why it is included in this Blog.
Bajaj RE60 – CNG
Bajaj RE60 – the quadricycle that stunned almost everyone at its unveiling around three years ago – has been spotted testing on the roads of Ahmedabad, Gujarat by auto-enthusiast Aditya Wadhwa. The low-speed four wheeler has been in news ever since its debut as it was expected to be launched by the end of 2014, but it didn’t happen due to some legal reasons. However, it is is expected that it would be launched by the second half of 2015 – fingers crossed, through! Continue reading
Mahindra-E2O
Leading commercial and passenger automobile company Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) would be launching its Electric Vehicles in Europe soon (2015). Continue reading
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