The vehicle will be available at an introductory price of Rs 79,999 for customers who reserve the vehicle on or before Diwali, but the delivery will only commence in April. The company said the new scooter will have a real-life range of 100 kilometers on a full charge when used in eco-mode.
The new 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.
The sixth generation of Honda Activa, one of the highest selling petrol scooter in India, costs above 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.”
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Aggarwal said that the company has 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 commonising parts, by reducing weight, so we follow a different product development process than the traditional automotive incumbents,” he said. “We follow a continues engineering process versus an annual or a waterfall engineering processs that most global traditional OEMs follow.”
The company also said that it will 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 among other features, all of which were announced last year.
A section of the customers has been disgruntled with the delay in the roll-out of these features with multiple complaints emerging online over the past one year. Ola Electric started delivering its flagship Ola S1 Pro in December last year. The company came under 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.
Following new launches, multiple software updates to fix the bugs in the vehicle since December last, and heavy discounting during the festive season, Ola Electric sales have picked up again.
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