Fires in EV much less frequent than ICE: Ola CEO

NEW DELHI: Ola Founder-CEO Bhavish Aggarwal on Thursday had another opportunity to take a dig at the mainstream media after reports surfaced that a Tata Nexon EV caught fire in Mumbai.

In a tweet, Aggarwal said EV fires will continue to happen.

“EV fires will happen. Happens in all global products too. EV fires are much less frequent than ICE (internal combustion engine) fires,” he said in a tweet, tagging Hormazd Sorabjee, Editor of Autocar India. Earlier this year, Aggarwal called a senior auto journalist “Petrol Media”, and mockingly shared pictures of Burnol in response to the criticism he faced on Twitter.

Meanwhile, Ola Electric is also planning to launch its own electric car in a couple of years, and recently displayed a prototype.

Aggarwal’s latest tweet came at a time when Ola Electric, along with several other prominent Electric two-wheeler makers, is facing intense scrutiny over faulty battery and poor design that led to several EV fire incidents in the country in the last 2-3 months. In March, an Ola S1 Pro electric scooter caught fire in Pune on the side of a road, and a preliminary assessment found that it was an “isolated incident”.

Ola Electric later voluntarily recalled 1,441 scooters as a pre-emptive measure to conduct a detailed health check of the concerned batch. Amid cases of electric scooters catching fire, a man in Tamil Nadu in April set his Ola e-scooter on fire after being fed up with its poor performance.

G Prithviraj, who is a physiotherapist, had bought Ola scooter in January this year, but “I had set my Ola scooter on fire as it did not give the mileage as promised by the manufacturer, and the poor service,” he had said.