Bajaj Auto has announced that it’s establishing a new manufacturing unit for electric vehicles in India. Located at Akurdi, Pune, this plant will be ready to roll out electric two-wheelers for domestic and export markets by June 2022.

The Chakan-based two-wheeler manufacturer is investing Rs 300 crore on this project. Spread over half a million square feet area, it will have an annual capacity to churn out as many as 500,000 electric vehicles per annum. There will be a bunch of in-house operations like fabrication, painting, assembly, and quality assurance. Subsequently, the new manufacturing unit is expected to generate incremental employment for 800 people.

The new facility will be located in the same area as the Bajaj Chetak’s

Bajaj Chetak  production base in Akurdi. We believe the new unit is being set up for producing the electric scooter which was recently spied testing. A camouflaged unit of this e-scooter was spotted undergoing test runs alongside a few units of the Chetak. The test mule was fully camouflaged but its all-new styling and slightly different hardware than the Chetak were quite evident. This might be a more premium offering than the Chetak.

The whole R&D department of Bajaj will now be focused on developing future technologies for EVs. However, as Rajiv Bajaj’s statement mentions in the release, there’s one state-of-the-art ICE platform under development, which is certainly the result of the Bajaj-Triumph  collaboration.