Produced over 50,000 electric scooters so far: Ola’s Aggarwal
Ola Electric Mobility Pvt. Ltd has manufactured more than 50,000 Ola S1 Pro scooters, servicing nearly all its orders from the first and second booking windows the electric two-wheeler maker had opened up, said Bhavish Aggarwal, chief executive officer, Ola Electric.
The company had said it received over 100,000 reservations (against ₹499) for its S1 Pro and S1 in 24 hours in July last year.
Ola Electric is at a production run rate of up to 800 vehicles a day with three shifts, which Aggarwal hopes can be ramped up in a few months to 2,000 scooters a day from its assembly line, as the supply chain ramps up. The firm’s production line is capable of producing about 1.5 million scooters annually. However, the ramp-up is hindered by the pace of cell and parts supply, Aggarwal said. Ola claims that at full capacity its Futurefactory, in Tamil Nadu, will be able to produce 10 million units annually.
Work is on to expand scale of operations, it said.
Last year, Ola Electric had decided to not manufacture the lower-end variant of its scooter, the S1, as more than 70% of the bookings it had received were for the higher-spec Ola S1 Pro, Aggarwal said. However, the company now hopes to launch the S1 as a more affordable scooter in this calendar year. It also hopes to start exports to several markets in a few months.
Even as Ola Electric has quickly snagged a significant chunk of the electric twowheeler market in India, an incident of thermal runaway in one of its scooters in Pune in March had sparked concerns with respect to the safety and build of the vehicle. The firm announced that it will recall more than 1,400 of its Ola S1 Pro scooters as a “pre-emptive measure” to conduct “thorough diagnostics across all battery systems, thermal and safety systems”.
This comes just days after Union minister for road transport and highways Nitin Gadkari’s remarks on the need for original equipment manufacturers to act proactively and recall defective vehicles.
“We have commissioned world class agencies to give us an assessment of the root cause, what we can do better and what our suppliers can do better. We are awaiting those reports,” Aggarwal said on Saturday. The firm will order a recall of scooters that are using the batch of batteries as the incident in Pune as a matter of abundant caution and to ensure that “customer confidence”.