A battle of the billionaires is unfolding in India between Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani and founder of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk.
Ambani’s Reliance Industries has acquired a US-based transportation company developing pod taxis, that the conglomerate initially invested in three years ago, through its subsidiary Reliance Strategic Business Ventures.
Both skyTran and Musk’s Hyperloop are in the business of making pod taxis. Also called personal rapid transit (PRT), these are a type of small public transport facility that feature small automated vehicles that operate within a network of specially built tracks.
Hyperloop, already, has three projects in the works within India. One connecting Mumbai to Pune, another increasing the connectivity to the Bangalore International Airport and the latest endeavour to connect Chandigarh to India’s capital city, New Delhi.
This comes within days of Ambani announcing that he will make batteries for electric vehicles ahead of the boom resonating with Musk’s plans with Tesla. While Tesla makes its lionshare of revenue from the actual cars, Musk has invested in energy generation and storage in a big way.
Musk had earlier revealed that his company may set up a Gigafactory within India once it starts manufacturing electrical vehicles in India. Its office is already set up in Bangalore with plans for a manufacturing plant soon to follow, according to reports.
A year later, in 2017, a panel headed by Indian government’s policy think tank NITI Aayog cleared the ministry’s proposal to test three rapid transport systems using pod taxis. The short-listed candidates were New Zealand’s Metrino Personal Rapid Transit, UK’s Ultra Global PRT and US-based skyTran.
Ultra Global uses rubber tyres that run on specially made tracks and Metrino’s pods are suspended from overhead rails. Of the three, skyTran is the only one that uses magnetic levitation to move pod taxis from point to point, making it the only competitor to Hyperloop’s hopes in India.
In November last year, Hyperloop had a major breakthrough. It successfully carried two humans through a tube in one of its magnetically levitated pods at 160 kilometers per hour.
Reliance started out by acquiring 12.7% of skyTran in October 2018. Next year, in November 2019, ir raised its stake to 17.37%,. By April 2020, Reliance put in a third tranche of investment to bring its stake up to 26.3%.