Clash Of Small EVs Looms As MG Comet Takes Battle To Tiago Camp

The Comet and Tiago EV are the only two EVs at an ex-showroom price below ₹10 lakh in India, as most automakers have so far adopted a top-down approach to the segment, hoping that premium electric vehicles will ultimately pave the way for mass adoption of eco-friendly cars.

Comet EV is also the only mass-market two-door electric hatch in the market at present, and is also India’s smallest passenger vehicle.

While the MG Comet is a city car built on a ground-up, pure electric platform jointly developed by its parent company SAIC Motor and American automaker General Motors, the Tiago EV is a generation-one electric car from Tata Motors, constructed on the same platform on which the internal combustion engine-driven Tiago sits. The MG Comet is fuelled by a 17.3 Kwh lithium-ion-phosphate battery, which, interestingly, is supplied to it by Tata Autocomponents, while the Tiago EV uses a 19kWh and 24kWh battery pack for its lower and top trims, respectively. The certified range on the Comet EV on a full charge is 230km under test conditions, while the claimed range on the Tiago EV (with the smaller battery pack) is 250km and 315km (with the larger battery pack).

MG Motor India hopes that Comet EV, which is sold in China as Wuling Air EV, will strike monthly volumes of 3,000 units, more than three times the sales of its ZS EV, one of first electric sport utility vehicles (SUVs) to be launched in India. MG has, so far, sold over 1 million units of Wuling Mini EV (a de-featured earlier iteration of the Air EV) and Air EV in China.

“This car can be disruptive. We are going market-by-market with this launch. We will start deliveries in select markets in May and add more markets in June and July. Hopefully, by August, we should be covering the whole country," Rajeev Chaba, president and managing director, MG Motor India, told Mint in an interview.

The car will be built at MG Motor India’s factory in Halol, Gujarat. The Comet EV project was developed with an investment of ₹700-800 crore, and is more than 50% localized domestically, Chaba said on the sidelines of the launch of the vehicle.