Posted by amita gar

Source 1: The Morning Context https://themorningcontext.com/ Source 2: The Ken https://the-ken.com/ In today’s video, we take a look at Ola’s journey of building their flagship electric scooter Ola S1 and S1 Pro. And how a promised EV revolution turned out to be a catastrophe. 00:00 Introduction 01:03 Start of an EV revolution 05:52 Ola’s S1 and S1 Pro launched 07:04 Everything starts to go wrong for Ola 10:06 Why did a revolution turn into a catastrophe? Start of an EV revolution: The mission of Ola Electric was simple: start an EV revolution in India. In May of 2020, when Ola acquired Amsterdam-based electric scooter startup Etergo that Indian consumers started to get excited. See, the plan was to make some minor tweaks to Etergo’s AppScooter and then simply launch it in India. And that sounds easy enough, right? But of course, AppScooters were designed for the Netherlands, a country that’s known for having some of the best roads in the world. They also have very cold weather over there, with an average summer high of between 20 and 25 degrees Celsius. India, in contrast, is a fairly hot country with more challenging road conditions. See, Bhavish Aggarwal is a resourceful and ambitious man - that’s how he’s come so far as an entrepreneur. He knew that there would be challenges. Ola Electric went on a massive hiring spree. They hired 2,000 people around the world, with more than 1,000 of them being engineers - the objective here was to solve all of the problems that Ola Electric would inevitably face, like the software in the scooters, the vehicle’s mismatched design, and the battery technology - the goal was to build a state-of-the-art, flagship electric scooter, and for this they would need a state-of-the-art facility. In December of 2020, Bhavish announced Ola Electric’s plans to build the world’s largest electric scooter factory, named the ‘Futurefactory’. Ola’s S1 and S1 Pro launched: On the 2nd of July of 2021, Bhavish Aggarwal shared a video of himself riding Ola Electric’s scooter on the streets of Bengaluru - this created a ton of excitement, both for Indian EV enthusiasts and also just regular, everyday people. The hype grew so intense that when Ola opened up pre-bookings for these scooters on the 15th of July, more than 1 lakh people reserved a scooter. And keep in mind here, there were no specs available at this time - the scooters top speed, range, and charging time were all unknowns. Then, exactly one month later on the 15th of August, the scooters were officially launched as two variants: the S1 and the S1 Pro. And much to everyone’s delight, the specs of these scooters didn’t disappoint! They had an impressive range of 181 km, and some cool software features like hill hold, cruise control, remote unlocking, and more. Everything starts to go wrong for Ola’s flagship electric scooter: Finally, on the 15th of December of 2021, after multiple delays, Ola started delivering their electric scooters. And that’s when things went from bad to worse. See, that launch video - where Bhavish was proudly talking about the Ola S1 Pro’s 181 KM range, was way off-base. In reality, the scooter’s true range was just 135 KM, and the officially advertised range that had been listed as 181 KM was just an ideal range, tested in a controlled lab environment that was very different from the actual roads of India. Oh, and those cool software features that I mentioned earlier? Hill hold, cruise control, remote unlocking - customers would have to wait another six months to be able to use them. Then, multiple reports of battery overheating started coming in, and complaints from customers about receiving damaged scooters as well. Angry customers started flooding the internet with complaints and criticism. Why did a revolution turn into a catastrophe: Well, to start with, the timeframe was unrealistic. Expecting Ola Electric to re-invent Etergo’s AppScooter, build the FutureFactory, and get the scooters out the door in a year’s time just wasn’t a smart move, and resulted in corner-cutting and a product that looked great on paper, and in photographs and videos, but didn’t perform anywhere near as well as was promised. Things were exasperated further by many of Ola’s top executives leaving the company in the middle of all of this. And when senior people left too - the burden fell on the shoulders of junior employees, the people who were least equipped to carry it. Follow Backstage with Millionaires to remain updated with our latest developments. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/backstagewithmillionaires/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/bwmillionaires/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/backstagewithmillionaires/ Discord: https://discord.gg/XySGGhXKep #ola #electriscooter #backstagewithmillionaires