Ola Electric Mobility Pvt Ltd on Sunday launched two variants of its electric scooters in India and will start delivering from October across 1,000 cities.
The basic model S1 is priced at Rs 99,000, excluding registration and insurance, while the S1 Pro is priced at Rs 1,29,000. The S1 and S1 Pro offer a range of up to 121 kilometres (km) and 181 km, respectively. The maximum speed that the vehicles offer are 90 kilometres per hour (kmph) and 115 kmph, respectively.
“I want to underline that it is going to be the best scooter ever made. It has the best design, performance and technology,” Ola chairman and group executive officer Bhavish Aggarwal said.
The Ola Electric scooter will directly compete with not just existing two-wheeler EVs, such as Ather Energy, Ampere Electric, Okinawa Scooters, Tork Motors and Hero Electric, but also with the petrol options offered by Honda Activa and others.
SoftBank-backed unicorn Ola Electric, set up in 2017, is the electric vehicle (EV) arm of transportation platform Ola (ANI Technologies Pvt Ltd).
Its launch has taken off at a time Elon Musk-led Tesla Inc is set to make its India entry, while the government is trying to boost the manufacturing of EVs, their batteries and other components amid soaring petrol prices.
“The EV transition is very important for our country and the whole industry needs to adopt it. We have to build the technology in India. By 2025, all two-wheelers in the country should be electric. The EV revolution is here to stay whether the incumbents like it or not,” Aggarwal said.
Ride-hailing firm Ola’s electric arm is building what it calls a “Future Factory” on around 500 acres of land in Tamil Nadu’s Krishnagiri district. When fully ready, it will produce 10 million e-scooters every year, making it the largest two-wheeler maker globally. The first phase itself will produce two million e-scooters, to be retailed in India and exported.
Market leader Hero MotoCorp produces around 6.5 million two-wheelers annually. Around 22-25 million traditional two-wheelers with internal combustion engines are sold in India every year.
The two variants of the e-scooters offer a “key-less experience” where sensors communicate with the user’s phone, unlocking the scooter when in range and automatically locking it as one leaves. It has an AI speech recognition algorithm and a 7-inch touchscreen display.
The scooters are powered by a proprietary operating system “Ola Moods”, which will change the ride experience, including the look and feel of the display, and how the scooter sounds.
