Let me try to sum up my thoughts on the Ola launch with a simple analogy. In a world of smartphones where battery life of the best phones, lasts only for a day or two, a new company emerges and promises to rewrite the game of battery life and extended usability. It takes money from people for pre-bookings and builds up expectation levels with the carrot of never before seen features and functionality. But instead of focusing on the best battery or the most optimized software, the new company loads in the latest Snapdragon 999 chipset for the fastest performance to run Halo 5, when everyone and their grandmother is looking for the longest battery life and is happy to play Candy Crush on it.
Also, when the media gets its hands on the supposed cutting edge phone, all that the device can do, is make calls. That too with the phone hanging during a call and / or overheating and / or lagging. As for the rest of the expected features, none of them work on the phones sent to the media or the display pieces that are in Croma and Reliance Digital and your neighbourhood mobile dealer. So you will have to wait for bluetooth and wifi and hotspot features to be enabled on the phones, in the near (
or distant) future, with no time lines being committed.
Would you still pay Rs 70,000 for the said phone, just because it is cheaper than the Samsung S21 and Iphone 13, or would you wait for it to be a finished product before you part with your money?
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Originally Posted by CrAzY dRiVeR That said - a lot of this is still just 'promises', 'promises'. Like you said, they could have made a much better 'first impression' without rushing the timelines so much! |
For a scooter that 'promised' (
there is that word again) so many features, it is baffling that almost all of them were not available on the official test rides that the company organized and invited the media to. I cannot recall a single two wheeler launch in India where the media had to say that it is better not to buy this vehicle now, but to wait and see.
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Originally Posted by muni ABS is a miss but would have driven costs by another 10K easily which they dint have to plan in the first place if they had toned down the performance part. |
Actually, it should be the opposite. Considering the volumes in question, an annual capacity of 10 million units, as per our official review, the incremental cost of offering ABS would have been negligible considering the economies of scale.
Or did the rushed schedule lead to ABS being removed from this performance EV? Bear in mind, that Ola cant add ABS through an OTA update. For a performance oriented scooter that is promising the longest range (!!!), not having ABS can be downright dangerous. Here we scoff at manufacturers cutting corners and offering single channel ABS instead of dual channel ABS but this scooter doesnt even get ABS!
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Originally Posted by aargee Because of 2 reasons...
1. Ola brand image
2. Price (both Rs 499 & Rs 99999) |
If the Ola brand wasnt on the exact same scooter, and the launch went exactly as it did, would people still wait in line to buy the same product?
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Originally Posted by aargee Time my friend, Time!! When did this all hoopla start? Jul 15 & what's today's date? Nov 16. 4 months already over; another 6 more months, market will be dominated by someone else. I was saying to my Wife jokingly that the scooter visits all bakeries & roads except where it should actually go - ARAI |
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Originally Posted by sri_tesla Even with all those missing features, it's one of the best scooters in the market today and it's an EV. It's not like there are competing scooters with hill hold assist, cruise control, navigation, etc... in the market today. |
Keeping aside the missing features and all that baggage, just the fact that the scooter doesnt have ABS, is dying on test rides, the throttle doesnt cut when you let it go, is overheating in cool Bangalore weather, itself is really concerning. God forbid, people start having accidents due to some of these current flaws. Ola can say goodbye to any dreams of success and all that investor cash will go up in flames.
Between paying money for petrol at Rs 110 / litre for riding a traditional scooter with 100% peace of mind and paying Rs 1 per km for riding an incomplete, poorly calibrated, potentially dangerous EV that has no end date for software updates, I will play it safe and stick to a traditional scooter. I respect the choice of others to go the Ola way, but I cannot recommend it in good faith.