OLA Electric Highlights: Ola is expect to announce a new car today, according to the company's CEO Bhavish Aggarwal. This photo is of a car that Agarwal had tweeted in January this year. (Image credit: Bhavish Aggarwal Twitter) Ola Electric’s event’s Independence Day announcement is over and the company has confirmed the upcoming launch of its EV car. The company says the car will arrive in 2024 and it will have a range of 500 kms. It also announced a S1 scooter as well as a new battery. Ola CEO and cofounder Bhavish Aggarwal has talked about bringing an EV revolution in India during the event. He claims the company’s Ola Future factory will be able to produce one million EV cars in the future.
Agarwal has been posting teasers about the car announcement for a while now. But it looks like the new EV car will take sometime before it arrives. The only details that Ola revealed at that the car will go from 0 to 100 in four seconds. But the car will only arrive in 2024, which means this is still a product in development.
Ola already has EV scooters in the market, though safety concerns have been raised about these products in the last few months. The Ola Electric car, according to Aggarwal, will sport a futuristic looking design.
During the livestream, Ola 'relaunched' its base-model S1 scooter, giving it an introductory price of Rs 99,999. The S1 is built on the same platform as the S1 Pro and will largely look the same as the flagship. The S1 will come with a 3 KWh battery that should give the scooter an ARAI-certified range of 131 kilometres. Its top speed will cap out at 95 kilometres per hour. Since it comes with the same Move OS as the S1 Pro, the Ola S1 will also come with many of the software features like music, navigation and reverse mode etc.
While not much was revealed about the vehicle, two key specs have been announced: a range of 100 kilometres and that the car will accelerate from zero to a hundred kilometres per hour in 4 seconds. To put that into context, Tata’s Nexon EV claims a range of 437 kilometres. The electric vehicle from Tata goes from zero to a hundred kilometres per hour in about 9.4 seconds.
While that may make the new car from Ola Electric sound impressive, do note that the Tata Nexon is a compact SUV and that Ola is yet to confirm the form factor of its new car. A teaser image shared by Aggarwal in July this year depicted a hatchback. But the silhouette of the car depicted in the Ola Electric video shows what looks like a sedan with a fastback roof. Also, these figures could be par for the course with other Indian electric vehicles by the year 2024.
Here is everything we know so far about the new car announced by Ola Electric.
Ola’s future factory will be expanded across an area of 1,00 acres in order to accommodate the manufacturing capabilities required to make 10 million scooters, 1 million electric cars and cells with a combined capacity of 100 GWh.
“We deserve a car that defines this new India. An India that is fearless and believes in writing its own destiny. Our car is going to be one of the fastest cars in India. 0 to 100 within 4 seconds, it will have a range of more than 500 kilometres per charge. It will be the sportiest car ever built in India, with an all-glass roof, it will have Move OS and assisted driving capabilities as good as any other car in the world. It will be keyless and handleless,” said Ola Electric founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal, during the livestream.
Our details about the car's design and performance figures remain sparse as the company has not revealed much about the vehicle. Ola did announce that the car will be launching in 2024
Ola said it plans to develop two vehicle platforms and six different cars, all of which will be manufactured from its giga factory in Tamil Nadu after it has been extended.
Aggarwal showed a battery module on screen and said that it is made from cells developed indigenously by Ola Electric; a first for any Indian vehicle OEM.
“We missed the semiconductor, solar, electronic and other manufacturing revolutions. But everyone around the world is still getting started with electric cells and batteries. If we invest now and at scale, we can lead the market,” said Aggarwal during the livestream.
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Ola Electric CEO announced that Move OS 3, the third iteration for the software underpinning Ola's scooters, will be released on Diwali this year.
During the event, Aggarwal said that the average sale price of a car in the west is $70,000 and that the average price of a new car in India is $25,000. Ola Electric's CEO emphasised how an Indian vehicle will need to be priced for the Indian market.
Ola’s live-streamed event begins with a few minutes of pre-recorded footage from its future factory in Tamil Nadu, where the company’s scooters are currently manufactured.
Ola’s Independence Day 2022 event has begun and the livestream link is now live.
If Ola Electrica announces a car during the 2PM event, we could expect it to follow some of the design cues of the company’s scooter. While not much has been revealed about the vehicle itself, CEO Bhavish Agarwal has tweeted a teaser video that gives hints about the vehicle’s design
So yes, electric cars were developed around the same time as fossil fuel-powered vehicles. In fact, electric vehicles accounted for one in three of all the vehicles on the road in the United States in 1900. They were more popular because they were less noisy and easier to maintain than their internal combustion engine (ICE) counterparts. But ICE cars brought about the downfall of electric vehicles.
At the turn of the 20th century, horses were still the most popular method of transportation, but cars were becoming more popular. The Ford Model T was introduced in 1908 and changed the automotive world forever. According to the US Department of Energy, the Model T cost $650 in 1912, while an electric roadster sold for $1,750. Later, in 1915, Charles Kettering was awarded a patent for the electric scooter, meaning that ICE vehicles no longer needed to be started using a hand-crank.
Eventually, the lower cost of the ICE vehicle and fuel, convenience and other technological developments led to the eventual demise of the electric vehicle. So perhaps it is poetic that in the twenty-first century, it looks like electric vehicles are going to have their revenge on ICE vehicles.
It is a bit difficult to pinpoint exactly when the first electric car was invented because it took a series of inventions, from the battery to the electric motor, to make such a vehicle reality. And these inventions and breakthroughs happened over many years in many different countries till the technology reached where it is today. In fact, according to the US Department of Energy, American chemist William Morrison had developed an electric car in 1890. He designed a six-passenger car capable of going up to a top speed of 14 miles per hour (approximately 22 kilometres per hour). In the next few years, various different manufacturers developed electric cars. In fact, New York City had a fleet of more than 60 electric cars at one point.
The number of electric vehicles plying the roads of our country has been on a steady rise since 2020. A total of 4.19 lakh electric vehicles have been sold so are in 2022, compared to 3.11 lakhs in 2021 and 1.19 lakhs in 2022, according to the data shared by the Minister of State for Heavy Industries Krishan Pal Gurjar with Parliament. However, the minister did also point out that only 10 lakh electric vehicles were sold in the country in the last four years, compared to over 6.3 crore non-electric vehicles.
In July this year, Ola Electric signed a Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme agreement with the government of India to manufacture advanced cells in India. The company had recently unveiled the NMC 2170, its first indigenously developed battery cell. The company said that it has already roped in global suppliers to start mass production of the cell from its planned 50 GWh Gigafactory.
Batteries are one of the biggest and most important components of electric cars. Usually, batteries are also the costliest component of a new electric car. Ola Electric makes its own batteries using imported cells so that expertise could help the company in designing its own electric car.
There is a reason why building and developing batteries is important. Batteries that are manufactured abroad may not be able to tackle the abuse meted out to them on Indian roads. This is why many manufacturers call for EV batteries to be developed and tested locally, designed for the Indian conditions. While we can't yet be sure whether Ola Electric's car will use locally developed batteries, that seems like the prudent decision to make.
In July this year, Ola Electric CEO Bhavish Aggarwal tweeted saying, “We’re going to build the sportiest car ever built in India.” While the definition of sporty is subjective, this could mean that whatever car Ola plans to unveil could have a bit more zip in it than the rest of what you find in the country. Either way, electric cars are usually able to produce peak torque almost instantly once you floor the throttle. So if you are a customer going from an internal combustion engine vehicle to an electric vehicle, you would probably feel the former is sportier anyway, despite the added weight of the batteries.