“The Mainis are certainly good guys, but I don’t think they have the resources to make that happen,” said Rishikesha T. Krishnan, a professor of corporate strategy at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. They have to “align themselves with a bigger player.”
Reva officials agree that they need partners and they are trying to develop three businesses: building cars under the Reva brand; franchising production of Reva cars to other manufacturers like Bannon; and licensing Reva technology to automakers like G.M.
The company also says it believes that its coming cars will be much more enticing. It has such faith in the NXR that it is building a factory that can produce 30,000 cars a year. The company plans to release one new model every year; it has a sporty coupe, the NXG, ready to be released in 2011.
“It was very clear to the management and the board that we have to do something truly game-changing, and hopefully that’s what we have done with the new design,” said Mohanjit Jolly, a Reva board member and the executive director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley that has invested in both Reva and Tesla Motors.
In many ways, Reva is the opposite of Tesla, a Silicon Valley company that has grabbed the limelight with its high-performance electric sports cars. Whereas Tesla’s cars are fast and expensive — in the case of the Tesla Roadster, $101,500 — Reva’s vehicles are small, slow and, by electric car standards, cheap.
And Reva’s compound on the outskirts of Bangalore is a far cry from the Bay Area. To get to it, visitors must drive through dusty, potholed streets in an old industrial area south of the city.
“If Tesla is on one end producing cars to compete with Ferrari, we are on the other end,” said R. Chandramouli, who heads sales and marketing at Reva. “We believe in really small cars.”
Mr. Maini said electric cars have to be small and affordable to succeed in places like India and Europe, where most car trips are short and involve stop-and-go driving, unlike in the United States where commuters can drive 50 miles or more a day, mostly on highways.
The NXR, which is about a foot and a half shorter than the Mini Cooper, will come in two variations. In Europe, the higher-end model will sell for about 15,000 euros, or $22,000, not including batteries, which the company will lease for a monthly fee.
By contrast, Tesla’s Model S sedan will cost $49,900 after a $7,500 tax rebate. That car will seat five adults and two children and have a range of 300 miles. Tesla is taking reservations for the car, but deliveries will start in 2011. It has sold nearly 900 of its Roadster sports cars.
If all goes according to plan — a big if — Reva, which is named after Mr. Maini’s mother, should turn a profit sometime next year, he said. For him, that milestone would be the culmination of a long journey.
His love for motors began early. He built remote-controlled cars and planes when he was 10, and motorized go-carts as a teenager. Because specialized components were hard to come by in India, he asked his father’s friends to buy spare parts when they traveled abroad.
His well-to-do business family supported him then and continues to finance him today. “When I was 11 or 12, I had a hobby room that was bigger than the room where the three of us slept at night,” he said, referring to the room he shared with his two older brothers. “I had my own lathe and mill.”
Mr. Maini studied mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, where he was on a team that built an award-winning solar car in 1990, and then at Stanford. After working in California for a few years at AEV, he returned to Bangalore in the late 1990s to start Reva as a joint venture between his family and AEV. (His family owns two other companies that make auto parts, golf carts and forklifts.)
The Maini family and its partners have invested more than $50 million, and in-kind services like office space, in Reva.
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