An Ola S1 Pro accident has allegedly severely injured a 65-year-old in Jodhpur due to catching full speed in the reverse mode. The accident, which was among a series of similar incidents reported in the recent past, has once again questioned user safety of the electric scooter that was launched in India last year. Ola Electric — the manufacturer of the scooter and one of the biggest electric vehicle makers in the country — has not yet publicly responded to complaints related to its reverse mode.
Pallav Maheshwari on Wednesday took to LinkedIn to report the incident in which his father got serious head and arm injuries from the Ola S1 Pro that he was taking out to park inside his house. Maheshwari said that while using the reverse mode, his father lost his control over the scooter as it accelerated in full speed. As a result, the senior citizen is said to have banged his head on a wall.
He received 10 stitches in his head and two plates were inserted in his broken left arm, the son of the injured man said.
“He was the one who even at the age of 65 is very active and was enthusiastic to use Ola electric vehicle,” Maheshwari wrote.
He said that Ola Electric did not fix the bug that was causing the scooter to accelerate in the reverse mode for many users.
Gadgets 360 has reached out to Ola Electric for a comment on the incident and will update this article when the company responds.
Last month, incidents related to the reverse mode were reported by some other Ola S1 Pro users as well. The users reported that they found the scooter to accelerate at its full speed when switched to the reverse mode. In one case, the scooter allegedly switched to reverse mode automatically when it was pulled back in the middle of a road.
Ola Electric did not bother commenting on any of those incidents or announcing a fix for the reported issues. The company also did not confirm whether it has set a certain speed limit in the reverse mode.
However, electric scooter manufacturers normally have a speed limit set in the reverse mode to avoid accidents. Ather Energy is one of those manufacturers as it restricts its scooters to three kilometres per hour speed for the reverse mode and five kilometres per hour when using the reverse mode with parking assist.
Apart from the reverse mode accelerator glitch, some Ola S1 Pro scooters were reported in the recent past with incidents of catching fire. The company did assure investigation in few of the public cases, though it has not yet come back with any further details.
Ola Electric CEO Bhavish Aggarwal at a private company event earlier this week acknowledged fire incidents and said that those are very rare but may continue to happen in the future.
In addition to Ola scooters, some other electric scooters in the country also caught fire in various incidents. Initial probe by the government on these issues suggest that scooter fires could be due to faulty battery cells.
