It Always Seems Impossible Until It Is Done
The Electric Bharatmala
Here’s the Story of Orxa Energies, StartupnRev & how the Mantis Motorcycles beat the previous world record!
It always seems impossible until it is done.
When John and Gautam first approached Prajwal & me with the idea of a 14000 km record breaking ride on the Mantis motorcycles, we were excited by the idea. but a little apprehensive.
Then we had the 1st meeting with the team at the Brigade REAP office — and BOOM! The weight of everything that could go terribly wrong fell on us like a ton of bricks! . Right after the meeting, Prajwal and I went to the Geist in Orion Mall, and over a beer, wrote down every potential issue. By the end of the beer, we had about 3 pages, 2 columns wide, of every single thing that could possibly go wrong. We went through every possible risk — safety, technical, engineering, regulatory, legal… And then decided, you know what, let’s do this!
Why “Electric Bharatmala” ?
The core idea was to travel to the smaller cities and towns in India and bring the stories of the #MadeInIndia startups to these places. By traveling around the perimeter of India, along the coasts, and the Himalayas, we would “garland India” with the Electric Motorcycles, and hence the name “Electric Bharatmala”.
It will be Difficult, but not Impossible!
This map below was the “Original Ride Plan”. This was the route that we used to map out the hotels, charging stations, colleges, and other logistics. Easy, right?
And this is what we finally achieved! We completed 13510km in 54 days. The Manali-Leh roads were still closed and the rains and poor roads in the Silchar-Cherrapunji segment had us retrace our route to Guwahati.
In order to attain the impossible one must attempt the absurd.
One of the major objectives for Orxa Energies was to test our Mantis motorcycles to the absolute extreme. With the end of the ride, we have 27000km of data, from across the length & breadth of India, under extremes of conditions.
There were 2 Mantis motorcycles on the ride. Each electric motorcycle went with 4 sets of battery packs. Each Mantis covered 13510km+ in 54 days from Feb 4th, 2022, to March 29th, 2022.
On average, the team was riding ~300–350km a day. Average speeds maintained were ~70–75kmph. The ride proved the Mantis range — 150+km per charge on highways (at 70–75kmph average speed) and 200+km per charge in city riding.
Extreme Endurance : To test the vehicle under extreme endurance, 15% of the rides were over ~450km per day. Longest was 470+km from Forbesganj to Gorakhpur. But most punishing was the 460km from Sangrur (Punjab) to Kuchaman City (Rajasthan) in a heat wave of 42+deg C!
Extreme Temperatures: In fact the entire week in Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat was punishing heat wave of 40+deg C. The Mantises rode nearly 2000km in the heat wave. And just one week before, they were in Manali at -2 deg C! From one week at near zero deg C to the next week at +40Deg C heat wave!
Extreme Terrain: Sitapur to Nainital, with a climb from 100m altitude to 2000+m altitude in a day’s ride. The road to Dimapur, with nearly 65km of “off-road” conditions under rains.
And we made it home!
It’s kind of fun to do the impossible. — Walt Disney
I will be posting the stories of each of the riders and the partners on the ride, told in their own words:
Gautam Khot, CTO, Brigade REAP, who will hold the world record, once validated
Dr. Prajwal Sabnis, my cofounder at Orxa Energies
Akhil Prabhu, benki boss, our team mate who rode the Mantis till Guwahati.
Janmejay Mishra, a.k.a JJ, our team mate who rode till Dehradun & then till Pune
Akshay Tippannavar, our team mate who rode the Himalayan section
Tales from the War-Room: from BOLT, Highway Delite and CEAT
Orxa Energies’ mission is to rapidly electrify all transport. We build performance Electric Vehicles & the associated Energy Ecosystem. We believe that battery swap will rapidly electrify shared mobility. Our first vehicle is the Mantis — a fully-electric performance motorcycle, designed to fit seamlessly into your lifestyle.
We also build powerful Battery Packs that manage the specific challenges of performance vehicles — longevity, thermals, weight, and volume. Our battery packs are already in pilots with our customers
