JBM Auto Ltd has agreed to supply 500 electric buses to fleet-leasing platform Driven in a deal worth an estimated Rs 800–1,000 crore, even as the company revealed it expects to utilise only 15% of its manufacturing capacity this financial year, according to Nishant Arya, managing director of JBM Group.
Under the arrangement, JBM Auto will sell the buses outright to Driven, which will lease them onward to fleet operators across several Indian cities, easing the upfront capital outlay that typically weighs on electric bus purchases, the JBM Group vice chairperson said.
"Driven will be deploying them with multiple operators across the country," Arya told NDTV Profit, adding that the buses would largely serve intercity and luxury routes, with scope to expand into school transport, staff transportation and airport transit.
On pricing, Arya said the final value would hinge on the mix of buses supplied, with premium models fetching around Rs 2 crore apiece.
"If you take all buses to be in the luxury segment... at the highest specification level, then it can go up to 1,000 crores," he said, confirming Rs 800–1,000 crore as the working estimate. The order is to be executed over 12 to 15 months, with payments made at the point of sale rather than in instalments.
The sharpest detail to emerge, however, was in capacity. JBM Auto sits on an order backlog exceeding 10,000 buses and has an annual production capacity of 20,000 units. Yet Arya said utilisation would rise only marginally to around 15% in FY27, from roughly 10% previously.
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He was clear this was not a supply-side constraint. "It is not dependent purely or primarily on the supply of buses. It is the whole infra being available and then buses are supplied according to that," he said, pointing to power infrastructure and depot readiness at the customer end as the real bottleneck.
Buses, he noted, are built to order against highly customised specifications, unlike passenger cars, which naturally caps sales velocity, though he expects utilisation to climb past 50% within a few years as the market matures.
Arya also flagged the Centre's recently approved Rs 9,585 crore scheme to scrap over 16,000 ageing buses as a likely tailwind for demand, though he said the industry was still awaiting the scheme's detailed guidelines.
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