More than 15 million vehicles crowd the streets of Delhi, and fewer than 8% of them are electric. The city's official target is 30% by 2030. Vehicles are responsible for close to half of Delhi's particulate matter pollution, and every winter the air quality becomes dangerous enough that authorities respond with driving bans, pulling older diesel and gasoline vehicles off the road. For the drivers who depend on those vehicles for their income, the bans are a financial hit with no alternative on offer.
The standard policy response has been to push new EV adoption, but new EVs are expensive, and the charging infrastructure to support them is still scarce enough that even motivated buyers face real operational challenges. DW REV looks at a different approach that is getting some traction: retrofitting.
IX Energy, a Delhi-based company, takes old diesel trucks, removes the polluting components, and installs a new electric powertrain. The chassis, cabin, and body stay. The engine and fuel system go. The result is a truck that has been extended by up to seven years of working life, produces zero direct emissions, and costs significantly less to run. Operating costs drop from around 12 rupees per kilometer under diesel to roughly 4 rupees per kilometer on electric. A conversion takes about two weeks and costs approximately 40% less than buying an equivalent new electric truck.
For commercial operators, the math is reasonably clear. Diesel engines require increasing maintenance as they age. Switching to electric removes those costs and makes the cost per kilometer predictable. One company featured in the report had tested multiple approaches, including natural gas vehicles, before settling on retrofitting as the most sustainable option because it reuses what is already built rather than scrapping functional assets.
The challenge is that the idea is not scaling fast enough. There are very few certified retrofitters operating in India, the regulatory framework for certifying converted vehicles is unclear, and incentives from the government have been limited. Authorities tend to reach for driving bans as the immediate response to pollution spikes rather than offering conversion subsidies or simplified certification pathways that would give drivers a practical route to compliance.
Charging infrastructure remains a separate bottleneck. If a converted truck cannot charge reliably, the economic case collapses regardless of how cheap the conversion was. The report notes that public charging stations are still in short supply, which limits where retrofitted vehicles can realistically operate.
The broader argument the video makes is that megacities with large existing vehicle fleets and limited budgets for new infrastructure may find retrofitting a more practical electrification path than replacing everything with new vehicles. Delhi still has a long way to go either way, but the building blocks for a workable approach are there, waiting for policy to catch up to the technology.