REVA, the first Indian electrical passeneger car launched last year is to go global by January next year when exports were expected to start in a regular manner, a top executive of the Bangalore-based REVA Electric Car Ltd said.

"We expect to have at least 25 percent of our sales revenues to come from exports from next year," Chetan Maini, managing director of the company, told reporters while launching the "REVA Classe", the luxury version of the car in the city on Wednesday.

He said that at least 270 REVA cars were on the roads today adding that responses to trial exports to countries like Nepal, Malta, UK, USA and Switzerland were quite encouraging. Maini said that the demand for small electric cars were growing across the globe especially in Europe in view of its environment friendly features. The world demand for such cars around the world at present is estimated to be around 80,000 units per annum.

He said the company was in talks with major hotels, supermarket chains and movie theatres in Indian cities for providing to adopt advanced battery technologies for offering increased mileage for REVA cars in the near future.

Maini said that REVA was, at present, 92 percent indigenised, adding that the company is also planning a solar chargeable version of the car. "Plans are also a foot to enter with vehicles for the public and private transport sector," he said. REVA's existing manufacturing facility in Karnataka, has a capacity to produce 1,500 units per shift at present. This would go up to 12,000 cars by 2004.

Referring to the price of the car which is now around Rs 2.8 lakh in cities like Chennai, he said that once the excise duty, sales tax and road taxes were waived which some states had already done, the price would come down to Rs 2.1 lakh. He said the Centre had already written to all the state governments to waive these duties in respect of electric vehicles, adding that the governments of Karnataka, Rajasthan, Goa and Pondicherry had exempted REVA from sales tax while road tax has been waived in AP, Karnataka and Rajasthan.

"These exemptions have helped us in reducing the overall cost burden to the consumers and we are hoping to get a similar support from the government of Tamil Nadu," he said. Maini said that as many as 80 percent of the consumers of REVA had bought the car as a second buy and the rest as their first car.