Ola Electric ups the ante on e-scooter production capacity

Ola Electric's founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal recently revealed that the E2W brand is stepping up its electric scooter production in the country, with the expansion of its manufacturing facility located at Hosur, Tamil Nadu going in full swing.

In a statement via a virtual press conference, Aggarwal said, "We have sold upwards of a lakh unit now (since the company made a foray into the electric two-wheeler space last year in August). Now, we have very significant momentum behind us. We are already producing more than 1,000 a day now at the future factory. We will be scaling it up significantly beyond that".

"We feel that in the next six to eight months we will exhaust the (current) installed capacity and we are also in parallel expanding our capacity in the future factory", he observed. Ola's current production capacity stands at 20 lakh units per annum. Post the expansion of its facility, the company has stated that the capacity would expand to support one crore e-scooters per year.

This week, Ola Electric launched a new iteration of its e-scooter – the 'S1 Air', powered by a 2.5KWh battery pack that runs a 4.5KW hub motor. The new e-scooter weighs 99 kg, and can accelerate 0-40 kmph in 4.3 seconds with a top-speed of 85Kmph. This is the brand's third E2W variant since its inception last year.

Asked on the new product, Bhavish replied that the S1 Air is quite comparable to a conventional petrol scooter in terms of all buying parameters, except for the low running cost of EVs. "We are very confident that this model will be a market success", he added.

Expected for customer deliveries in early next year, the Ola S1 Air electric scooter will be sold at an introductory price of ₹ 79,999. The brand's other E2Ws S1 and S1 Pro are priced at ₹ 99,999 and ₹1,29,999 respectively.

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