Ather Energy has expanded its use of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio of industry software to help reduce design and engineering cycle times, improve product quality, and achieve faster time to market. Pictures courtesy of Ather Energy

Siemens Digital Industries Software has announced that Ather Energy, one of India’s leading electric motorcycle brands, has expanded its adoption of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio to help the company reduce its design and engineering cycle time, improve product quality, and achieve faster time to market. Ather Energy was founded in 2013 by Indian institute of Technology (IIT) Madras alumni, Tarun Mehta, and Swapnil Jain. In 2018, the company launched ‘India’s first truly intelligent electric scooter’ — the Ather 450. This was followed by the Ather 450X in 2020, the 450S in 2023 and Ather’s special edition scooter — the Ather 450 Apex — in January 2024.

Ather has also installed a comprehensive public charging network, Ather Grid. Designed and built in India, it has more than 1,600 charging points and is one of the country’s largest fast-charging networks for electric scooters. The company currently has more than 175 ‘Experience Centres’ throughout India and plans to have some 250 outlets by March 2024; it has also ventured into the international market with two Experience Centres in Nepal.

Swapnil Jain, Ather Energy’s co-founder and CTO (pictured left), said: “In the fast-evolving EV industry, speed to market is an important lever to succeed. Siemens’ expanded PLM management enables parallel processing of engineering deliverables; a departure from the sequential approach, it reduces the lead time for introducing new products and features.”

During a recent visit to the Ather Energy facility, Robert Jones — Siemens Digital Industries Software’s executive vice president of ‘Global Sales and Customer Success’, said: “Start-ups are the lifeblood of the electrification revolution in mobility, and we are proud to work alongside the Ather Energy team to help them expand their capabilities to bring their products to the Indian market. Our work with Ather Energy is another proof point of leading innovators and pioneers choosing the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio as the platform of choice for product development in the electrification of mobility and helping the world achieve cleaner, more sustainable transportation.”

Ather Energy adopted Siemens’ Teamcenter software for product lifecycle management (PLM) in 2018, to help it achieve its critical key performance indictors (KPIs). These include faster time to market, reducing design and engineering cycle times with the removal of design iterations, and adopting a right first-time approach.

Since then, the Ather Energy team has also been using Simcenter STAR-CCM+ software for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and Simcenter ‘physical testing solutions’ to help with its in-house testing regime for durability, and noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH). Most recently, the Ather Energy vehicle engineering team has moved from its legacy system to Siemens’ NX software for new product development and engineering for all existing and new vehicle platforms.

Mr Jain added: “The simulations and virtual testing we perform using Siemens’ tools enable us to crush timing and provide us with great savings in resources and money spent on repeating testing. The stack-up analysis enables us to get the design right the first time and avoids engineering changes. We are looking at expanding the Siemens tools into controlling the manufacturing processes by introducing the management of ‘Bill of Processes’.”

Further details of the Siemens Xcelerator can be found at the website (www.sw.siemens.com/en-US/digital-transformation).