Ola electric launches pre-booking for electric scooter; site glitches

In its electric vehicle (EV) push, Ola Electric Mobility has announced the pre-booking for its electric scooter.  

The EV arm of ride-hailing and mobility company Ola has priced initial reservation at a refundable deposit of Rs 499 for priority delivery.  

The company, however, did not specify the actual pricing of the vehicle. 

The reservation portal, olaelectric.com, was not live at the time of publishing the article on Thursday.  

Users took to Twitter to complain about the failure of payments as well. 

Not accepting any type of payments @OlaElectric https://t.co/NxzlDfrSH5

— Srinivas Poodari (@itspoodari) July 15, 2021

@OlaElectric @bhash booking confirmed and later received SMS payment unable to process. Please confirm my booking confirmed? pic.twitter.com/aJaZNZOh3T

— Ravi Kumar (@ravi_kumar1982) July 15, 2021

Ola CEO and group chairman Bhavish Aggarwal apologised for the glitch.

For those who faced issues in the beginning, apologies! We didn’t anticipate the crazy demand and didn’t plan enough scalability of the website All fixed now

— Bhavish Aggarwal (@bhash) July 15, 2021

In March, Ola announced setting up a manufacturing facility for its electric scooter, Ola Futurefactory, in Tamil Nadu’s Krishnagiri.

In phase 1, the facility will be ready to roll out 2 million vehicles annually by June 2021, said the company as part of the announcement. 

It added that at full capacity, the facility will be able to produce 10 million vehicles by 2022. 

“India’s EV revolution begins today as we open reservations for our electric scooter, the first in our range of upcoming EVs. With its incredible performance, technology and  design  along  with  aggressive  pricing,  it  will  help  accelerate  the  transition  to sustainable  mobility,” Bhavish Aggarwal, chairman and group CEO of Ola in the statement, said. 

Earlier this month, Ola raised $500 million in a pre-IPO round from Temasek Holdings and Warburg Pincus, apart from $100 million in long-term debt financing from bank of Baroda to fund the phase 1 of Ola Futurefactory.

Ola had previously indicated that it will be investing Rs 2,400 crore ($322 million according to current exchange rates) for setting up the first phase of the manufacturing facility. 

Founded in 2010 by Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, Ola’s ride hailing business has been affected strongly by the pandemic.  

The SoftBank backed company will be directly taking on incumbents like Hero MotoCorp backed Ather with the launch of their EV.