Ola ramping up e-scooter production, capacity: CEO Bhavish Aggarwal

Ola Electric is ramping up production of its e-scooters and is parallelly expanding capacity at its factory in Krishnagiri in Tamil Nadu to meet future demand, company Founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal said on Saturday.

The company, which launched its new S1 Air electric scooter at an introductory price of ₹79,999, said it will also make a foray into electric motorcycles by next year.

"We have sold upwards of a lakh units now (since the company made a foray into the electric two-wheeler space last year in August). Now, we have very significant momentum behind us. We are already producing more than 1,000 a day now at the future factory. We will be scaling it up significantly beyond that," he said in a virtual press conference.

Aggarwal further said,"We feel that in the next six to eight months we will exhaust the (current) installed capacity and we are also in parallel expanding our capacity in the future factory."

He was responding to a query on how many electric scooters has the company sold so far and by when it expects to fully utilise the initial installed capacity at its manufacturing unit.

The company has a current capacity of 20 lakh units per annum at its factory. When fully completed, Ola Electric has stated that its manufacturing facility will have a capacity to produce 1 crore electric two-wheelers annually.

When asked about the investments for further expanding production capacity, he declined to comment.

On the company's future product plans, including electric motorcycles, Aggarwal said,"We are working on some very exciting concepts. Next year, we will definitely launch..."I'm personally very excited about the motorbike segment and you will see some very major promise next year on that."

He said Ola Electric's product development momentum is only increasing as its platform, software, go-to-market and all the core foundational pillars of the business stabilise.

On the new S1 Air electric scooter, he said the company is very confident about the product considering its specifications and price point of the vehicle, which is comparable to a conventional engine scooter. It has been built on the same platform as the company's existing model S1.

With the existing two models, it would accelerate Ola Electric's overall sales, he added. The S1 Air is powered by a 2.5KWh battery pack and has a 4.5KW hub motor. It weighs 99 kg and has a top-speed of 85Km/hr.

It can accelerate 0-40 kmph in 4.3 seconds, the company claimed.

The company, which in August last year made a foray into the green mobility space with the launch of its electric scooters, S1 and S1 Pro priced at ₹99,999 and ₹1,29,999, respectively, had postponed delivery timelines for its much anticipated products citing global semiconductor shortage issue.

The company, after opening reservations at ₹499 in July last year for S1 Pro and and S1, started online purchase process in September 2021 and initially planned to start deliveries in October but was later pushed to November and then again to the second half of December last year.

In January this year, the company had communicated to customers that it would prioritise production of the S1 Pro model and and S1 manufacturing has been shifted to late 2022 with Aggarwal stating that it was upgrading all of its S1 customers to S1 Pro hardware.

Later, in September it resumed sales of the S1. Apart from delays in deliveries, instances of the company's electric scooter catching fire led to consumer disquiet. In April this year, Ola Electric had recalled 1,441 units of its electric two-wheelers after a fire incident.