The Tejas Project

Naveen Rabelli

Naveen and his electric solar tuk-tuk!

Stuck in traffic on the way to a kite festival, he had a sudden brainwave—why not build a solar powered tuk-tuk, and drive it across Asia to London? In the event the rickshaw had to charge overnight in some places, but this only increased the social dimension of the project as in each place he had to ask villagers for electricity to charge up. In exchange for his fantastical story he not only got power and a place to sleep in this vehicle, creating a chain of supporters all the way through Iran, Turkey and Europe.

In his own words: “They are all over India—they are loud and smoky and somehow have some Indianness in them. Everyone has been brought up in one”

He started the process of converting one for his journey and in the two-year process so shared his dream in schools around India.  He recalls one father saying his son had dreamed of owning a Lamborghini – now he just wants a solar tuk-tuk. The basic Piaggo Ape model auto-rickshaw was converted into a solar-powered zero-emission vehicle, with the same specifications as a petrol-driven one, in which Rabelli slept on his 10,000km journey to London.

The Tejas Project (meaning Radiance in Sanskrit) is an example of a single inventor’s crazy persistence, thinking like an artist to subvert our expectations about impossible transport infrastructures and link together ordinary people with a viral thought-process that may, somehow lead to a step-change in thinking about sustainability.