City Logistics is Best Suited for EV Fleets: Prasad Sreeram

COGOS, calls itself India’s fastest growing intra-city logistics company, with plans to induct 1000 EV’s in its fleet this year and a target of having 30% of the total COGOS fleet as EV by 2025.

Their e-commerce customers like Flipkart, Bigbasket, Amazon have shown interest in EV deliveries and have started their pilot projects across India. We caught up with Prasad Sreeram, the Bengaluru-based Founder and CEO at COGOS Technologies for a quick catch up on COGOS.

Q. What is the current size of COGOS fleet size? Break up by type of vehicles and EV versus non EV if possible. Where do you expect to be in size by 2022, 2025?

COGOS has 10K+ fleet in the platform currently and growing rapidly. We will be deploying 1K EV in this year and making renewable fleet contribute 25% of the total trips by 2023

Q. What is the business case for COGOS for your clients? What are the key insights you have had so far?

More than 50% of the logistics cost for a package or goods is influenced by City logistics and we believe EV would achieve ROI in commercial goods transport first than the passenger market and city logistics is best suited for EV.

Q. For electrification of transportation, logistics is clearly a low hanging fruit, just like e-rickshaws worked at a personal transport level. How do you see the market changing? What are the key challenges to faster adoption?

Renewable energy transport choices are needed for sustenance of the world and need of the hour for the Indian economy. EV being at the forefront of the revolution, for wider adoption we need both a strong policy framework and investments. These would lead to great solutions for the businesses and the public.

Q. For your own fleet, are you looking to the emergence of a public charging network for EV’s, or your owned charging points?

We would love to be able to charge anywhere, unlike gas stations and oil distribution network, EV charging should be more democratic and omnipresent. We are working for both our own charge points and the emergence of public charging.

Q. Considering traffic, and other restrictions for larger commercial vehicles, do you see an opportunity in smaller, specialised cargo EVs for last-mile deliveries? Do you see Indian firms grabbing the opportunities here or foreign firms filling such need gaps?

City Logistics is a wider gamut with Last mile, milk runs, a mid mile and first mile, which has varied sizes of the fleet with a wide variety of business workflows, this is where tech platforms like COGOS can fill in the gaps with innovative solutions. We need large firm participation in EV, while innovation and production is currently led by startups and smaller firms.

Q. Tell us a little more about COGOS, in terms of company size number of employees, investors etc?

COGOS is an AI-led technology platform digitally transforming 60 billion City logistics in India, we help the enterprises by providing fleet and deliveries, with the network in 300+ cities in 21 states is fast becoming a preferred player for marquee clients like Flipkart, Amazon, ITC, Supr Daily, Udaan, Coca-cola, etc., COGOS is founded by Prasad Sreeram and Dr K. R. Mohan, serial entrepreneurs with decades of experience in logistics, technology, scaling and global operations, assisted by a 150+ member strong team and funded by VCs IAN and EV2 (Emergent Ventures) and Angels.

Q. What are the firms, global markets you watch for cues on the future evolution of your sector? Or do you see India evolving in its own unique way?

India is unique by itself with various cultures and as a market is quite large 200+ billion USD, we see similar trends in emerging markets around the world with parallels in South Asia, Middle East and Africa.