Mahindra Electric and cab service Meru on Sunday announced a joint electric vehicle (EV) pilot project in Hyderabad, to be replicated in other cities soon.
Their joint statement here on Earth Day said that under the pilot project, Meru will deploy Mahindra's eVeritos all-electric sedans.
Speaking on the occasion, Mahindra Electric Chief Executive Mahesh Babu said: "As pioneers of electric mobility, we at Mahindra Electric are happy to lead electric fleet adoption in India and are glad to partner with Meru for pilot deployment of eVeritos in Hyderabad. This is definitely going to make it easier for the city to adopt EV technology and will also be in line with our constant endeavour to make EVs more accessible to a larger urban population."
"We are now looking forward to working with Meru to get this project rolled out to more cities," he added.
Meru Chief Executive Nilesh Sangoi said: " We are launching a pilot in Hyderabad with Mahindra eVerito sedan cars in association with AimGreen. Based on the experience from this pilot, we will expand this initiative to induct more EVs in our network in other cities that we operate in. Over the next four years, we intend to move major parts of our fleet to EVs. We believe that this initiative will greatly benefit the society, consumers and also enhance the earnings of our driver partners."
The Mahindra eVerito will be available for booking in Hyderabad through Meru's mobile apps and can be boarded from the Meru Zone at Hyderabad airport, the statement said.
The services will be available at the same fare as governed by the Telangana government's radio taxi fares for sedans," it added.
In September 2016, Mahindra & Mahindra partnered with Ola to supply 40,000 cars in two years. The electric cars deployed by Ola in Nagpur are also from Mahindra. Ola runs the e20 Plus electric sedans.
In November 2017, it signed a non-exclusive partnership with Uber to deploy its electric vehicles on the Uber platform in select cities.
The company had announced in February that it would invest Rs 900 crore in electric vehicles over the next four years.