Ola Electric To Spend USD 500 Million In Battery R&D With Battery Innovation Centre

Ola Electric has announced that it will be $500 million in the development of a battery innovation centre in Bangalore for the development of indigenous batteries. The facility will span half a million square feet and will be one of the largest R&D centres in the world specifically created for batteries. Ola Electric has said it will hire 500 PhD candidates and engineers and the facility will have 165 unique labs to cover all aspects of development. Interestingly, this batter facility will be developing all kinds of batteries like cylindrical batteries that Ola has announced already, pouch-based batteries which it uses currently and coin-based and prismatic cells.

This facility will also cater to production and will develop complete packages for the battery pack design, fabrication and testing under one roof. The production capacity will also manage mg to kg scale of the anode, cathode material and integrated nanoscale analysis and molecular dynamics with simulation and an in-house crystal structure analysis for the development of new batteries.

“Electric mobility is a high growth sector which is R&D intensive. Ola’s battery innovation centre in Bangalore will be the cornerstone for core cell tech development and battery innovation out of India for the world. BIC will house advanced labs and high-tech equipment for battery innovation and will power India’s journey towards becoming a global EV hub,” said Bhavish Aggarwal, the founder and CEO of Ola Electric.

This facility will also come equipped with physical characteristics lobes that have high-tech research equipment like x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy machines, latest generation CT scan equipment and non-destructive testing for cell and pack imaging.

This all comes after the announcement of the NMC 2170 li-ion cell which Ola will also be manufactured at its gigafactory starting in 2023. The company has been allocated 20GWh of capacity under the ACC PLI scheme by the Indian government. 

Apart from electric two-wheelers, Ola is hard at work developing its first electric car which recently Bhavish Aggarwal described as one of the sportiest cars to have been created for Indian roads.