Days after Ola Electric voluntarily recalled its Ola S1 and Ola S1 Pro electric scooters over a front suspension quality issue, the company’s CEO Bhavish Agarwal in a detailed blog revealed the reasons behind the recall and Talked about it too. The engineering behind electric scooters. He also took a dig at various media reports and social media posts accusing Ola Electric of deliberately ignoring the issue of front suspension breakage. In a Twitter post, Bhavish wrote, “There has been a lot of myth building and mudslinging on us since last few days. Today we are publishing a tech blog to share our engineering facts, and counter the fake and agenda driven Breaking the narrative.”
What’s the issue?
Ever since the first Ola electric scooter was launched in the Indian market, reports of problems with the EV have been doing the rounds on social media handles. Several issues have been reported with Ola scooters in the past, including malfunctioning operating systems, scooters going into reverse, etc. But the one problem that has raised maximum eyebrows and forced the CEO to write a detailed blog has to do with the malfunctioning front suspension of the EV.
According to various Ola users, the front shocker of the EV broke, resulting in serious injuries in several cases. Several users took to social media to report the incident. Later, some media reports blamed Ola Electric for willfully ignoring this serious issue. In fact, according to Bhavish’s blog, 218 failures have been reported so far in 1.5 years, of which 184 are accident cases and 34 are inconclusive or not linked to an accident.
Cleaning of Bhavish Agarwal
Around 1.5 years back when we launched our products, India’s 2W industry changed. We have brought to the market a world class product that has been engineered and manufactured in India. And it has become the best selling EV in India within a year. And is one of the best selling scooters of all time in India.
For nearly 100 years, there has been a template in automotive for product planning, manufacturing, how to sell to customers, and more. OEMs plan incremental products, acquire technology from suppliers, assemble in-house, and sell to dealers who sell to consumers. It is a reality that EVs and especially Ola have disrupted. We make over 50% of the value of our products in-house, bring world-class features to customers ahead of the curve, and have direct relationships with our customers.
This reality has been hard on our critics and for the last 1.5 years there has been a constant attempt to malign us in one form or the other. In the last 2 days we have seen another such attempt. And I’m sure it won’t be the last. So for those who want to know the facts, we are publishing this technical blog about the engineering behind Ola scooter, which will dispel many myths and bust many fake narratives.
In this blog, we will address the following points:
We walk you through the engineering behind the Ola S1, including security and testing
Deep dive into specific Front Fork issues – data, engineering, misleading campaigns and our continuous engineering improvement activities
What is the process followed by Ola for the upgrade? Also, what is a recall, when do automakers do it and what is the process followed
