Ola CEO tweets concept pic of electric car, trolled with demands to get e-scooters right

“Can you guys keep a secret?” Bhavish Aggarwal wrote on Twitter, while sharing a design teaser. In August last year, the ambitious CEO opened up on his intentions in this direction by tweeting “Never owned a car till 2 months ago. Now a hybrid. Next one will be electric in 2023. Ola’s electric car,” responding to a user’s query on the car he uses. Incidentally, the latest tweet on the electric car status comes a day after a Twitter user featured an electric Tata Nexon and Ola S1 Pro electric scooter, where Aggarwal said “Next car replacement should be the Ola electric car.”

However, his tweet also opened up a can of worms so to say, with even point blank expressions that “such secrets may be good for valuation” but not for its credibility, as Ola is yet to get its act right on the e-scooter front. Aggarwal was advised to “sort out first” on the scooter front “before even thinking cars which is a completely different ball game that can’t be won with cash alone.” Another user also alluded to the valuation game, where rather than customers, Ola’s target audience is perceived to be “investors who are notorious for betting on hype than merit,”

So while his plans to launch Ola’s electric car seems to be on track as the design and R&D teams are working on the concept car, Aggarwal would do well to handle the backlash by despatching the e-scooter orders as committed. This given that some users in their post-delivery complaints, tweeted about the malfunctioning of the vehicle and were frustrated about it, finding no resolution to their problems.

Last year, Ola announced a Rs 2,400-cr investment for setting up its first electric scooter factory in Tamil Nadu. Touted to be the world’s largest scooter manufacturing facility, the company had said it would initially start with 10 lakh annual production capacity and then scale it up to 20 lakh, in line with market demand, in the first phase. When fully completed, Ola Electric claimed its plant would have an annual capacity of one crore units, “that is 15 per cent of the world’s entire total two-wheeler production.”