Delays, dangerous scooters, and bad customer service are pushing former fans to light scooters on fire and protest against the much-vaunted company.
Until March, Raj, a Bengaluru-based tech worker, was a superfan of Ola, the SoftBank-backed mobility startup that manufactures e-scooters targeted at millennials. Now, he vows never to lay hands on an electric scooter again.
Raj was among the first customers of Ola’s much-hyped e-scooters, putting his name down for a top-end S1 Pro model soon after the company started taking orders in August 2021. He received his scooter on March 6 after many delays and was initially impressed by the smooth ride.
Then, a few weeks later, when Raj was taking his scooter for a spin in the outskirts of Bengaluru, something went wrong. While he was waiting at a stoplight, he briefly pulled the scooter back to create distance with the car ahead. But the maneuver activated the scooter’s “reverse mode,” and the scooter gunned backward at 25 miles per hour, sending Raj flying and leaving him bruised.
If it was a busy road, “I’d be dead by now,” Raj told Rest of World. Raj requested a pseudonym out of fear of political retribution. “The reverse scene was a real trauma!”
Prior to the accident, Raj was part of a community of Ola fanboys that emerged around the company’s promise of “riding the revolution.” Ola, which started as a ride-hailing company, incorporated its electric mobility operation Ola Electric as a separate entity in 2017. Ola Electric became one of the fastest Indian companies to achieve “unicorn status” at that time. Its founder, Bhavish Aggarwal, promised to build the world’s largest scooter factory, which would produce 10 million units at full capacity. These scooters, he claimed, would embrace the clean energy future without compromising on chic design, speed, and long-range travel that the erstwhile e-scooter lacked. The company began delivery of its scooters in December 2021.
Rest of World reached out to Ola Electric with questions and hasn’t heard back from the company.
But to some, Ola has yet to meet those promises, and now Raj is part of another quickly growing community — Ola customers who say they feel betrayed and frustrated by their purchases because of malfunctioning scooters, glitchy software, and unresponsive post-sales servicing. These customers are now protesting the company by setting their scooters on fire, staging protests, and complaining online to get the CEO’s attention.
Ola scooter owners told Rest of World that they regret falling hook, line, and sinker for the company’s marketing hype and tall promises, such as the voice-activated scooter unlock feature, hill hold assists, and cruise control — all that the company has not delivered yet to all customers.
“In a rush to make the ‘future factory’ — the biggest ever factory manufactur[ing] lakhs of vehicles — they had really not done the research and development which was needed for the products,” Vinkesh Gulati, president of the Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations (FADA), told Rest of World. After numerous customer complaints and a battery fire, on April 24, Ola announced a recall of 1,441 units.
Faulty scooters and delayed feature rollouts are just one part of the company’s challenges. Over half a dozen senior executives have resigned from the company in the last six months.
Yeshwanth Rao was enamored by the company’s ads and ordered a scooter in December. When he got his scooter in January, Rao, who did not wish to be identified by his real name fearing retribution from Ola, found that the exterior had multiple scratches; a few days later, he noticed an “annoying noise” from the rear wheel. Incensed, Rao messaged Ola Electric’s head of marketing Varun Dubey on WhatsApp. “What is this? You made us wait for nine months and you’re delivering this kind of shitty product,” Rao recalled asking Dubey, who instantly dispatched a team to the customer. Rao said the team examined the issues and delivered a replacement scooter within a week.
But within days, the touch screen panel on the replacement scooter went blank, and software bugs meant Rao couldn’t unlock his scooter. “I warned the Ola management that I am going to burn the vehicle in full public [view], as even after four repairs issues are not resolved,” Rao said. Dubey apologized over WhatsApp texts, offering to fix the issues, and even replace the scooter again, if needed.
Rao turned his scooter in for repair, but Ola never returned the scooter. After 15 days, he launched a protest at the company’s distribution center on the outskirts of Hyderabad. He spent nine hours in the scorching heat. A frustrated Rao shouted and threatened to “hit the person who took my scooter to return it to management.” Eventually, local Ola management threatened to file a police complaint about causing a nuisance. “I was afraid after the incident,” Rao told Rest of World. He deleted the tweet that he had posted about the protest. A day after the incident, Ola refunded the full amount that Rao had paid for his vehicle.
Rao feels stuck as the customer service team still hasn’t transferred ownership of his old e-scooter to the new owner. “That’s a serious offense,” said Rao. In India, ownership transfer is a legal process that transfers the rights of the vehicle to the new buyer. Rao has two active Ola scooters registered under his name and claims that Ola’s escalation team has not completed the legal transfer of his bike. “What if the bike is misused? Who will go to jail? I will.”
Rest of Word has reviewed Rao’s communication with Ola management and ownership documents of the scooter. Chief Marketing Officer Dubey quit Ola Electric in early May, days after Chief Technology Officer Dinesh Radhakrishnan’s exit.
Source: www.Restofworld.com