The Green Route December 2025 Volume 1 Issue 9

Engineering for the Real World

By Veer Karan Goyal, CTO & Founder, Zenergize, and Navneet Daga, Founder, Zenergize

India’s shift to electric mobility is no longer an idea discussed only in policy papers or conference halls. It is being tested every day on the ground—inside warehouses where delivery vans line up before dawn, across industrial corridors where chargers operate in 48°C heat, and in district logistics hubs where power fluctuations are a daily reality. In these settings, a charger is more than just a machine. It is the backbone of the operation, as essential to keeping fleets moving as the vehicles themselves. This reality fundamentally changes how we must think about engineering.

Where theory meets dust, heat, and voltage drops

The environments in which EV charging infrastructure must operate in India are among the toughest in the world. Chargers are deployed in particulate-heavy industrial zones, exposed to dust, moisture, vibration, and extreme heat. Many are expected to run almost continuously, often with limited downtime for maintenance. Add to this fluctuating grid conditions—voltage swings, brief outages, and uneven power quality—and the challenge becomes clear. In such conditions, reliability is not a line item in a specification sheet. It is the heart of fleet uptime. For a logistics operator running hundreds or thousands of electric vehicles, the difference between 90% and 99% charger uptime is not marginal. It can redefine delivery schedules, driver productivity, asset utilization, and ultimately the economics of electrification itself. A single charger failure during peak hours can cascade into missed routes, delayed shipments, and increased operational stress. Engineering for the real world means designing with these realities at the center, not as edge cases.

From “smart features” to dependable performance

The EV ecosystem often celebrates advanced features—connectivity, dashboards, remote control, and software-driven optimization. These are important, but in high-utilization fleet environments, they are secondary to one foundational requirement: the charger must work, every time, under stress. This demands a shift in engineering priorities. Components must be selected not just for efficiency or cost, but for endurance. Thermal management cannot assume ideal ambient conditions. Enclosures must be designed to withstand dust ingress and rough handling. Power electronics must tolerate unstable grids without tripping or degrading prematurely. Equally critical is serviceability. In many industrial locations, specialized technicians are not immediately available. Chargers must be modular, diagnosable, and repairable on-site, with minimal downtime. Software must be resilient to intermittent connectivity and capable of graceful recovery, not complete shutdowns. In short, real-world engineering is about reducing fragility at every level.

Uptime as a design philosophy

At Zenergize, our experience working closely with fleet operators has reinforced one lesson repeatedly: uptime is not achieved through a single breakthrough. It is the outcome of hundreds of small, disciplined engineering decisions. It starts with understanding how chargers are actually used. Fleet chargers are not plugged in once or twice a day; they are connected and disconnected repeatedly, often by different drivers, sometimes in a hurry. Cables are bent, connectors are dropped, and systems are pushed to their limits during peak operations. Designing for this means overengineering the points of highest wear and treating human behavior as a design input, not an afterthought. It also means building systems that can adapt. As fleets scale, charging demand patterns change. Chargers must handle higher duty cycles without degradation. Software updates should improve performance, not introduce instability. Monitoring systems should identify issues before they cause failures, enabling preventive maintenance rather than reactive firefighting. When uptime becomes a core design philosophy, reliability stops being reactive and becomes proactive.

Electrification succeeds or fails at the last mile

India’s electric mobility transition will not be judged by the number of announcements made or targets set. It will be judged by whether electric vehicles show up on time, every day, in the real world. That outcome depends as much on charging infrastructure as it does on vehicles. Warehouses, factories, ports, and logistics hubs are where electrification must prove itself economically and operationally. These are unforgiving environments, but they are also where the impact is greatest—on emissions, costs, and efficiency. Engineering for these contexts requires humility. It requires accepting that perfect lab conditions do not exist in the field, and that success lies in designing systems that keep working despite that fact.

Building for India, not just deploying in India

As the country accelerates toward electric mobility, there is a temptation to import solutions and adapt them minimally. But India’s operating conditions demand solutions engineered specifically for its realities. Engineering for the real world means listening closely to operators, drivers, and technicians. It means measuring success not by feature lists, but by hours of uninterrupted operation. And it means recognizing that in the EV ecosystem, the most powerful innovation is often the one that quietly works, day after day, without drawing attention to itself. Because when chargers are reliable, fleets move. When fleets move, electrification scales. And when electrification scales reliably, the transition stops being a promise—and becomes everyday infrastructure.