From Minutes to Margins: How EV Battery Performance is Now the Biggest Profit Lever for Quick Commerce Operators

Not long ago, the story in quick commerce was all about speed. Ten minutes. Fifteen if you were unlucky. Whoever could deliver groceries or dinner fastest, won.

August 20, 2025. By News Bureau

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EV Battery Performance

EV Fleet

That phase is mostly over. The big players now all operate within roughly the same delivery window. Customers aren’t comparing stopwatch times anymore; they just expect it to arrive when promised. The industry has shifted somewhere less glamorous but far more important: unit economics. And inside that, one factor is emerging as the real margin-maker or margin-breaker: how well the EV batteries hold up in the real world. Switching from petrol scooters to electric has already been a huge step for quick commerce operators. The savings on fuel alone are obvious. Maintenance is simpler, and energy prices don’t fluctuate wildly every week.

But after the first wave of electrification, reality sets in. Not all EV deployments perform the same. Two operators can have fleets of the same size and brand of scooters, yet their profitability will diverge sharply after a year. The difference? Often it’s in how those batteries behave after thousands of brutal, short-haul delivery cycles.

When a battery loses range mid-shift, overheats on a busy afternoon, or needs replacing a year earlier than expected, those ‘minor’ issues show up in the P&L. Fast.

Batteries quietly influence every metric that matters:

Vehicle availability – Every extra minute a scooter is on charge or sidelined for a temperature cool-down means fewer deliveries that day.
SLA reliability – A drop in voltage under heavy load can slow a rider down just enough to miss the promised window. That can trigger refunds or credits.
Replacement costs – A pack that lasts 1,000 cycles instead of 2,000 doubles your battery capex over the fleet’s life.
Energy bills – Smarter charging schedules (and batteries that can handle them) let you shift charging to cheaper tariff hours.

For high-utilisation fleets, even a couple of percentage points in uptime or efficiency make a visible difference in annual revenues.

The Brutal Reality of Quick Commerce Duty Cycles

These batteries don’t live in clean lab conditions. They’re in scooters that accelerate hard, stop often, and run nearly full-to-empty multiple times a day. They deal with midday heat, sudden rain, road vibration, and riders in a hurry.

In that environment, cell chemistry alone won’t save you. Thermal management, keeping the battery at a healthy temperature range becomes critical. Without it, performance sags and degradation accelerates. With it, you get more consistent range, faster charging without overheating, and a longer usable life.

Highly scalable energy solutions

Fast charging used to be framed as a “nice to have” for rider convenience. In quick commerce, it’s turning into a scaling weapon.

If you can safely bring a battery to 80 percent in 20 minutes during a mid-shift break, that vehicle can go straight back into service. Over a day, that’s more deliveries per scooter. Over a year, it’s higher revenue without adding more vehicles.

It also means you don’t need a huge “buffer fleet” sitting idle to cover charging downtime. That cuts both capital costs and operating costs. Of course, fast charging puts extra stress on cells so without good design and thermal control, it’s a false economy. But done right, it’s one of the fastest ways to unlock higher throughput from the same fleet.

Unit Economics: The Real Competitive Arena

Think of it this way: the delivery time promise might win you the customer, but the cost per delivery decides whether you make money keeping them.

Let’s take a simple, conservative example:

1,000 scooters in service
25 deliveries per scooter per day
INR 50 earned per delivery
Downtime difference: 5 percent vs. 2 percent

That three-point gap in downtime means roughly 22,500 extra deliveries a month about INR 1.1 crore more in top-line revenue a year. And that’s before counting the savings from fewer battery replacements.

The best-run fleets don’t just react to problems they prevent them. Every battery is a data source, quietly reporting:

State of health
Charge acceptance
Heat patterns under load
The effect of rider behaviour on efficiency

With the right analytics, operators can spot underperforming packs before they cause missed SLAs. They can schedule charging when it’s cheapest and least stressful for the battery. They can compare suppliers based on actual performance in the field, not just the spec sheet.

It’s the shift from firefighting to forecasting. And it’s where the biggest cost savings now hide.

Over the next couple of years, expect procurement teams to:

Value cost per kWh per cycle over the battery’s upfront price
Demand fast charging that doesn’t kill the pack prematurely
Tie warranties to performance in real-world duty cycles, not ideal lab tests
Measure fleet health as carefully as they measure delivery times

The market’s no longer rewarding whoever can just shave a few minutes off delivery. It’s rewarding whoever can scale profitably without burning cash on constant battery swaps and spare vehicles.

The first quick commerce battles were fought with timers. The next ones will be fought with spreadsheets. And when you dig into the numbers, the battery isn’t just a component it’s the lever that can shift the entire unit economics of the business.

- Sheetanshu Tyagi, Co-Founder and CEO, EMO Energy

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