India’s heaviest freight runs on diesel, and the trucks that carry it burn through fuel, time and patience on every long haul. Energy In Motion, a Pune-area company, is betting that the answer is not a bigger battery or a longer charging stop, but a battery that can be swapped in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea. On 14 October 2026, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis inaugurated the company’s new electric heavy commercial vehicle complex at Ambi near Talegaon, Pune, giving that bet a factory, a battery plant and a testing laboratory under one roof.
The complex is the first phase of Energy In Motion’s planned Rs 1,000-crore investment in Maharashtra, built at a cost of Rs 500 crore. Spread over 35,000 square metres, it brings together an electric truck assembly plant, a lithium-ion battery-pack assembly unit and an independent battery-testing laboratory. The company says the assembly plant has an initial capacity of 5,000 vehicles per shift each year, and the project is expected to create more than 2,000 direct and indirect jobs across engineering, research, information technology and related work. The battery-testing laboratory, developed with Automotive Test Systems, will put packs through electrical, thermal, mechanical, environmental and safety testing before they ever reach a truck.
At the heart of the complex is Ashwa, the company’s 55-tonne 4×2 electric tractor. The company says Ashwa is India’s first battery-swappable, fully certified 55-tonne electric tractor, having received its CMVR type approval from the Automotive Research Association of India (ARAI) in August 2025, when it also completed its first commercial sale. Ashwa is offered with 282 kWh and 350 kWh swappable battery configurations, and the company says a depleted battery can be replaced in under seven minutes. That single number changes the economics of heavy freight: a truck that swaps instead of charging keeps earning through the hours a charging truck would spend parked.
The battery stays with the company, the truck keeps moving
Energy In Motion sells the tractor without its battery and supplies the battery, swapping, charging and energy through long-term contracts under its Maitryi model. The company says the arrangement cuts the upfront cost of the vehicle by about 40% and lets fleet operators focus on running their fleets while Energy In Motion looks after the energy. Alongside the swap network, the company is preparing its Luna lithium iron phosphate battery system, which it says will deliver more than 200 km of range against about 150 km for the existing 282 kWh configuration. Its battery technology partnership with CATL, the world’s largest battery maker, covers 500 MWh of LFP cells and pack kits, while its technology licensing agreement with BAIC Foton covers electric commercial vehicles above 18 tonnes in India, and Shanghai Enneagon supplies the robotic battery-swapping technology.
The trucks are already hauling. The company says it had sold more than 500 electric tractors by September 2026, and its deployments include 66 trucks with Transvolt Mobility at Kandla Port in Gujarat and Jawaharlal Nehru Port near Mumbai, and about 45 Ashwa tractors hauling clinker for UltraTech Cement from Rajasthan to grinding units in the Delhi-NCR region, a corridor of about 250 km. Energy In Motion has also signed an agreement with Oil Field Warehouse and Services and Radiance Green Mobility to deploy 500 electric heavy commercial vehicles across the Mumbai-Pune, Mundra-Morbi-Ahmedabad and Mumbai-Delhi corridors, starting with 50 vehicles on the Mumbai-Pune route in October 2026, backed by a swapping network the company plans to grow to 40 stations by March 2027.
Two more trucks, and a much bigger stage
The Talegaon complex is only the start of the product plan. Energy In Motion says it will add two more electric heavy commercial vehicles within the next 15 months: a heavy electric tipper for mining and road construction, and a rigid-body truck for general freight. Together with the proposed merger of Energy In Motion with its associate company Ravindra Energy, which would bring vehicle manufacturing, battery swapping, charging and renewable energy under one listed company, the Pune plant puts the company at the centre of India’s shift to electric heavy freight. The trucks are built, the batteries swap in minutes, and the corridors are opening one by one.
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