It is a familiar scene in any Indian apartment complex: the electric car is parked three floors below, its battery is running low, and there is nowhere to plug it in. The building will not allow a private charger, the nearest public fast charger is a drive away, and the evening is already spoken for. Hopcharge, a Gurugram startup, looked at that everyday frustration and flipped the problem around. If the car cannot go to the charger, the charger will come to the car.
That simple reversal is the whole idea. Book a slot on the Hopcharge app, and a van rolls up to wherever the car is parked — home, office, or anywhere in between — and fast-charges it on the spot. The company describes itself as the world’s first on-demand, doorstep, fast EV charging service, and it has been running the idea in the real world since its launch across Gurugram in 2022, after a successful pilot in parts of the city.
A power bank on wheels
The van is not just a vehicle with a cable. Inside it sits Hopcharge’s own made-in-India rapid-charging technology: modular, mobile energy pods built around lithium-ion storage and a rapid charger, designed from scratch for exactly this job. The company says the pods charge an EV at speeds matching a public fast charger, and the whole service runs through an app — book, track, pay — backed by an energy management system that orchestrates the fleet.
Hopcharge was founded in 2019 by Arjun Singh, who is the company’s co-founder and chief executive. The engineering bet is that charging does not have to mean concrete, cables and grid upgrades. A van carrying stored energy can serve any parking spot in the city, and a fleet of such vans can move with demand through the day instead of waiting for drivers to come to it.
The Tata.ev moment
The idea found its biggest stage in March 2026, when Tata.ev partnered with Hopcharge to bring on-demand doorstep charging to Tata EV owners across Delhi NCR. Under the partnership, Hopcharge deploys mobile fast-charging vans across the region, and customers buying a Tata.ev from an authorised dealership are eligible for complimentary doorstep charging under a promotional offer.
Three subscription plans sit behind the service. The Success 3.3 plan runs for 12 months with 48 fast-charging sessions at the doorstep; Success 7.2 stretches to 24 months with 96 sessions; and the Experience plan covers 6 months with 24 sessions. Each plan also includes RescueCharge sessions of up to 5 kWh — a rapid top-up for the night the battery runs lower than planned — with unlimited rescheduling across the plans.
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From a service to a grid
Hopcharge’s bigger ambition is what it calls a Virtual Power Grid: an infrastructure-light, software-led energy system that pools mobile storage so a city can charge thousands of EVs without piling new load onto the grid. The company says a cluster of EV demand that would otherwise need 15 MW of grid capacity can be served with about 2.2 MW once its mobile storage is doing the heavy lifting — charging becomes something the grid barely notices.
The model is now opening up beyond the company’s own fleet. Hopcharge has begun signing franchise partners to run doorstep charging in new cities, with the company saying a partner can go from agreement to live operations in about a week. Its partner roster already spans carmakers, fleets, insurers and energy companies — the names behind the vans are becoming the names India’s EV owners already trust.
It is a quietly practical kind of Indian engineering: no new building, no digging up the parking lot, no waiting for the grid to catch up. Just a van, a battery, and a charger that arrives where the car already is. For the millions of Indians whose next car will be electric — and whose homes will never have a private charger — that may be the most useful innovation of all.
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