The offer price, which the company said is less than what conventional scooters cost, is for those customers who reserve the vehicle on or before Diwali.
Deliveries will only begin from April.
Ola Electric said the new scooter will have a real-life range of 100 kilometres on a full charge when used in eco-mode.
The S1 Air is built on the S1 platform and retains the same design, but Ola has re-engineered the powertrain and battery pack.
“This product will shake up the market and that is an understatement,” said Bhavish Aggarwal, founder of Ola Electric, in a media briefing at the company headquarters.
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The sixth generation Honda Activa, one of the largest selling petrol scooters in India, costs more than Rs 90,000 in Bengaluru.
“Our objective was never to build a premium scooter or never to build only a scooter. It has been to transform the Indian mobility landscape to electric, and also make India a global leader in electrification,” he said. “And towards that goal, the next logical step for us is to launch a mass-market scooter and that is what we have done today.”
Aggarwal said the company had been able to reduce costs by bringing down the cost of every core component. Not only does the S1 come with a smaller battery, but there have also been cost reductions across the body panels and electronics.
“A lot of cost reduction has happened by common-ising parts, by reducing weight, so we follow a different product development process than the traditional automotive incumbents,” he said. “We follow a continuous engineering process versus an annual or a waterfall engineering process that most global traditional Original Equipment Manufacturers follow.”
The company said it would start rolling out the updated version of its vehicle software called the MoveOS 3, which will finally give all Ola Electric customers access to features like hill-hold, proximity unlocks, and user-specific profiles, all of which were announced last year.
A section of customers had been unhappy with the
delay in the roll-out of these features and there had been multiple complaints across online forums over the past year.
Ola Electric started delivering its flagship Ola S1 Pro in December 2021.
The company faced criticism soon after over quality control issues, with one scooter even catching fire in March this year. As sales dropped, the company launched an affordable variant of the S1 Pro, called the Ola S1 on August 15.
New launches, multiple software updates to fix bugs since December, setting up of experience centres and heavy discounting during the festive season have led to a pick-up in sales.
On profitability
The EV industry has been facing challenges related to component supply and costs.
On the reason for the discounts, Aggarwal said that the Rs 10,000 discount on S1 scooters was a way “to share happiness with the customers during the festive season”, and that the company would extend the discount till the end of the year.
Aggarwal had said in August that the company would achieve profitability in its two-wheeler business in a “few quarters”. He reiterated that the company would be profitable quickly and that it had a better cost structure compared to other vehicle makers.
“On the point about profitability, I am very happy and excited by the way our business model is scaling up also along with the products, and you will be surprised how quickly we will achieve profitability,” he said.
Aggarwal said the company’s business model ensures that it does not consume as much capital as other automotive companies since it has a direct-to-consumer distribution channel without any dealerships in India.
He declined to comment on when the company would look to raise more capital.
Following an announcement in September that the company would enter the Nepal market through a dealership, Ola Electric said it would start selling its scooter in Europe and Latin America in the first half of next year.
Charging stations go live
The company also said that its charging network, called Hyperchargers, was going live with more than 50 Hyperchargers initially.
In August,
Aggarwal said its charging stations were not yet operational as the company was prioritising scaling its service network.
“When we re-looked at the Hyperchargers network, we redesigned the scale required, we redesigned the places where we wanted to deploy and then we started deploying a few months back,” he said.
Aggarwal said that Ola’s partnership with Bharat Petroleum Corporation was key to scaling up its charging network. ET was the first to report about the partnership on December 29.
“The basic proposition is that the consumers should always get a quick charging experience whenever they are in need, which is largely intercity, or in some high-street areas where you will be keeping the vehicle for a while,” he said. “So, it is not as if the charging need is a 1:1 replacement of the petrol station needs. It is a different use case and a different need.”
