Astro Navya, an electric 3 wheeler, manufactured by Astro Motors, successfully set the record, of reaching the world’s highest motorable road at Umling La Pass, located in Ladakh at 19,024 FT. By achieving this feat Astro Motors effectively demonstrated its capabilities of penetrating the EV market with its range of high performance 3 wheeler cargo vehicles.
Astro Navya is designed to cater to various geographical needs within India, right from the cold and steep mountain lands of Ladakh to the extreme heat of Delhi and Gujarat to hilly and extremely high moisture areas of Maharashtra and to high traffic zones of Bengaluru. Astro Navya is a 3-wheeler cargo vehicle powered by a 10.2kwh battery with a payload capacity of 630 kgs and a top speed of 50kmph.
Astro Navya was driven by India’s first female B.E.S.T licensed driver Pratiksha Das, backed by a strong team from Astro Motors. Commenting on this achievement, Vitan Jagada, Founder, Astro Motors said, “We are extremely thrilled about achieving this milestone and are happy to present a product that has demonstrated its capability at the highest level. Even the high altitude of the Ladakh region with thinner air and temperatures sub zero at 1pm did not impact the performance of the vehicle, so this is very encouraging as the drive was carried out with a full payload. We are the only company to have successfully mated a manual gearbox to an electric motor and synchronised the same to maximise the performance and made it available for the public. We are on a mission to create trust in Electric Vehicles for people to transition from ICE vehicles with complete peace of mind and this is the first step in our journey.”
“Our first offering falls under the cargo 3 wheeler L5 segment and has been engineered to overcome the challenges being faced by end users and complete with ICE vehicles. Currently electric vehicle sales comprise of 2% of all automobile sales up from less than 1% last year and the government has set a target to increase this to 30% by 2030 opening up a US $206 billion opportunity. As per the current data the adoption of 3 wheeler EV’s have seen a YOY growth of 101.32% and with the help of the government backed FAME Policy there is alot of incentive for people to switch to electric as the entire infrastructure required to support the migration to EV’s is coming online pan India. At Astro Motors we are focused on catering to various segments of the market and also plan to expand our territorial reach globally”, said Kunal Chandra, Co-founder of Astro Motors.
Hardik Dhanak, Co-founder and industrial designer who played a key role in designing Astro Navya added, “We identified the challenges that were being faced by the fleet operators who were deploying electric 3 wheelers and worked towards bridging the gap by out of the box thinking and engineered the product to meet the clients need and expectation. A cargo vehicle is constantly on the move in different conditions like bad roads, uncertain weather, etc. so keeping all factors in mind we achieved the final design and ran multiple tests for clients across the country. We tested Astro Navya on the toughest roads, under harshest weather conditions and roughest driving patterns. So The final frontier of Conquering the highest motorable road in the world without any difficulties or breakdowns was a milestone achievement for us and now we are extremely confident about our upcoming designs for future product launches. We are working towards making these extreme drives possible for individual buyers as well by providing unique solutions for their unique requirements.”
