Ola Electric delays e-scooter sale due to website glitch

Ola Electric has postponed the sale process of its electric scooter S1 by a week to September 15 as it faced “technical difficulties” in making the website for purchases live for customers on Wednesday. The company had last month launched the Ola S1 electric scooter in two variants — S1 and S1 Pro — at Rs 99,999 and Rs 1,29,999, respectively (ex-showroom including FAME II subsidy and excluding state subsidies).

It had announced that the scooter would be available for purchase from September 8 and the actual deliveries would start in October. In a late night statement on Twitter, Ola Chairman and Group CEO Bhavish Aggarwal said the purchase process has been delayed by a week and would commence from September 15. “We had committed to start purchases today for our Ola S1 scooter. But unfortunately we have had many technical difficulties in making our website for purchases live today.

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“I want to apologise to all of you, who had to wait for several hours. The website was just not up to our expectations on quality. I know we have disappointed you and I sincerely apologise to each of you for what was clearly a very frustrating experience,” he stated. The company has built a completely digital purchase journey, including a fully digital loan process without any paperwork, Aggarwal informed customers. “We wanted to provide this first of its kind digital purchase journey and today we haven’t been able to. Getting you the right experience will take us another week. I want to let you know that we will now be starting our purchase on 15th September, 8 AM.

“Your reservation and your position in the purchase queue remains unchanged, so if you reserved first, you will still be able to buy it first. Our delivery dates also remain unchanged,” he noted. Ola Electric had opened pre-launch bookings of its electric scooters in July for Rs 499 and had received 1 lakh orders in just 24 hours. However, the company has not disclosed how many orders it has received so far. On August 15, the company formally announced its foray into the green mobility space with the launch of its first electric scooter, Ola S1.

The scooter comes in 10 colours with in-house developed 8.5 KW motor and 3.97 kWh battery packs. Ola is setting up a manufacturing plant, spread across 500 acres, in Tamil Nadu. The company had stated that it would initially start with 10 lakh annual production capacity and then scale it up to 20 lakh, in line with market demand, in the first phase. When fully completed, Ola Electric had claimed that its plant would have an annual capacity of one crore units, “that is 15 per cent of the world’s entire total two-wheeler production”.