Ola announces foray into electric scooters segment

The company is all set to launch the scooter on 15th August 2021 and has put out a call for pre-booking the vehicles.

Ola has announced that it is entering the electric scooters category. The CEO Bhavish Aggarwal took to Twitter to announce that the company was planning a launch event for the new product and that it will make the specifications of the vehicle public soon.

Thanks to all who have reserved our scooter!

Planning a launch event for the Ola Scooter on 15th August. Will share full specs and details on product and availability dates. Looking forward to it! 😀

— Bhavish Aggarwal (@bhash) August 3, 2021

According to the Business Standard, the scooters are expected to be priced between Rs. 85,000 and Rs. 1,10,000. The scooters will be available in 10 colour options which includes blue, black, white, grey, red and yellow.

On a microsite designed for this purpose, Ola Electric opened reservations for its electric scooter for a refundable deposit of Rs 499 on July 15. The company claims that it had received over 1 lakh bookings in 24 hours.

"We're on a mission to transition the world to sustainable mobility. An important milestone in this journey is our first electric scooter - a revolutionary product with breathtaking design, cutting-edge technology and benchmark-setting range and acceleration," reads the company's statement in a mailer.

In order to make using electric scooters feasible, there has to be corresponding infrastructure and charging stations in place. Ola claims that it is building the world’s largest, densest two wheeler charging network. This network will be spread across 400 cities, with more than 100,000 charging points. This network is called the Ola Hypercharger Network.

In May 2020, Ola announced that it had acquired Etergo, a Dutch firm that has built a scooter that uses swappable, high energy battery that delivers a range of up to 240 km (149 miles). The scooter’s built, design, and efficiency is so impressive that its maker has been called “the Tesla of the scooter world” — by many. Ola did not reveal the terms of the deal, but Etergo was valued at around $90 million in its previous financing round, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.