Ola CEO’S mobility vision: Electric scooters, drones, flying cars
Electric scooters, cars, drones and flying cars will be the future of mobility, Ola chairman and group CEO Bhavish Aggarwal wrote in a company blog post.
In India, just 2 per cent (30 million) people own a fourwheeler and only 12 per cent (160 million) own a two-wheeler. “That means, more than a billion people in India have been shut out of mobility by this system!,” Bhavish wrote.
New mobility is fixing this archaic system by making mobility universally accessible, sustainable, personalised and convenient. To do this, shared and personal mobility will grow significantly in India through a combination of purpose-built EVS, lowering costs, digital retail driving convenience and the cloud enabling personalisation.
Aggarwal said Softbank-backed Ola was building this New Mobility ecosystem with the consumer at the core. The three pillars of this new ecosystem include new mobility services, energy vehicles and auto retail. These three pillars amplify and enhance the impact of each other as part of an integrated Ola New Mobility Platform.
Today, Ola provides multimodal mobility access to 100 million people through taxis, auto-rickshaws, two-wheelers, day hires and outstation rides. But this is just 7 per cent of India’s population.
“We will bring this multimodal mobility to all 1.3 billion people by Ola-designed EVS (electric vehicles) customised for the diverse shared mobility needs,” said Aggarwal.
He said EVS were 80 per cent cheaper to run, making the service more affordable. Further, with miniaturisation and highenergy density (neither possible in traditional vehicles), Ola said its EVS also create the opportunity for custom vehicle form factors.
The company is seeing strong adoption of its multi-modal platform across 150 cities. As the firm expands to 500 towns and brings shared mobility to 500 million people, the multi-modal offerings will grow substantially and will be central to driving affordability, he said.
Aggarwal said 40 per cent of air pollution in India was due to vehicles. “This is when just 15 per cent of India owns a vehicle today. This number will grow exponentially as the firm provides more affordable options for shared and personal mobility. So we will do this through EVS.”
The firm has already moved forward here with its Futurefactory, the largest two-wheeler factory in the world. It is building the first in the company’s range of scooters — the Ola S1. “In the coming quarters, we will expand our EV range with more scooters, bikes and cars,” said Aggarwal.
“Our EVS are smart, connected AI machines and will leapfrog current personal vehicles that are dumb mechanical devices.”
He said Ola will serve diverse needs through a variety of form factors, including kick scooters, e-bikes and even drones and flying cars, while costing 80 per cent less to run, compared to IC engines. This will cause vehicle ownership to explode to 40 per cent of the population with 50 million two-wheelers and 10 million four-wheelers sold per year in India in the coming years.
Not just vehicles, but the 100-year-old model of dealership-based sales and service, standard financing, insurance and unorganised used vehicle sale and purchase is also out of date and needs to change, Aggarwal opined.
He said the firm had already built a powerful digital retail platform that bypasses physical infrastructure and hosted the largest automotive launch in history with the Ola S1. In future, the firm will open up this platform to other OEMS too, giving them unparalleled digital distribution. It will bring consumers wide multi-brand choice online.
This will also create a more trustworthy e-commerce marketplace for used vehicles with real-time pricing and digital access. This is what the company is doing with Ola Cars — reimagining not just buying and selling but the end-to-end ownership experience of used and new vehicles. Ola Cars is in 30 cities today and will scale up to 100 next year.
WE WILL BRING THIS MULTI-MODAL MOBILITY TO ALL 1.3 BILLION PEOPLE BY OLA-DESIGNED EVS CUSTOMISED FOR THE DIVERSE SHARED MOBILITY NEEDS BHAVISH AGGARWAL
Chairman and group CEO, Ola