Ola Electric will open 500 experience centres across India by March this year as it seeks to be closer to consumers, company founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal said on Thursday. The company, which currently has 200 experience centres across the country, is also planning to bring an electric bike to the market.
Ola’s experience centres help consumers explore and buy its vehicles and also get servicing.
“Now 80 percent of our customers are within 20km of an Ola experience centre and by March we are going to open 500 centres to be as close to you (customers) as possible,” he said in a virtual address of launching new products.
Ola Electric introduced a lower variant of its electric scooter model S1 priced at Rs. 99,999, while also announcing a full line-up to its S1 Air model with three different battery capacities with prices starting at Rs. 84,999.
Aggarwal said on the basis of customer feedback, the company is introducing a lower-end variant of the S1 with a battery capacity of 2kWh and a range of 91 km along with a top speed of 90kmph. It comes at Rs 99,999.
This will be in addition to the existing S1 which has a battery capacity of 3kWh with range of 141km and top speed of 95kmph, and the S1 Pro which has a battery capacity of 4kWh with range of 181km and top speed of 116kmph.
On the S1 Air line-up, he said the company had originally announced the model to be powered by a 2.5kWh battery pack but it has now decided to offer the same in 2kWh, 3kWh and 4kWh battery pack options as well.
The S1 Air with battery capacity of 2kWh has a range of 85km and a top speed of 85kmph, while the 3kWh and 4 kWh variants will have a range of 125km and 165km respectively. These are priced at Rs. 84,999, Rs. 99,999 and Rs. 1,09,999 respectively.
While the new S1 variant with 2kWh option can be purchased immediately, all the S1 Air variants can be booked from Thursday for Rs. 999 and deliveries will start in July.
Aggarwal said the deliveries of S1 Air had to be pushed by three months in order to accommodate the three new variants.
Customers who had booked the 2.5kWh variant that was unveiled last year will get a free upgrade to the 3kWh option, he added.
Ola Electric also offered a sneak peek into its upcoming electric bike but Aggarwal did not share details of the product.
