Tesla on two wheels? India's Ola Electric faces service challenges as demand for electric scooters surges
Elon Musk, is racing to roll out millions of electric scooters and speed his nation to a cleaner future. Some of his mechanics can't keep up, though. Aggarwal's Ola Electric, which he likens to Tesla in the West, is zipping towards a stock-market listing after going from zero to 338,000 e-scooter sales in about two years.
The tech entrepreneur vows to banish the internal combustion engine (ICE) from India, where two-wheel vehicles rule the roads. We will "end the ICE age", the 38-year-old told Reuters ahead of the launch of new Ola e-scooters starting at about $1,000 on Aug. 15, Indian Independence Day.
He said the company, already valued at $5.4 billion, would quadruple its annual production capacity to 2 million e-scooters by early new year. Yet Ola's rapid ride faces a few potholes. Parts of the company's nationwide network of over 400 service hubs which maintain and repair its EVs are showing signs of strain after the surge in sales, according to Reuters visits to 35 centres in 10 states between July and October, plus interviews with 36 Ola service staff and 40 customers.
Staff at more than half of those centres, mainly sites in the big metropolitan areas of Mumbai, Chennai and Bengaluru, said they had significant backlogs, with demand outstripping their workforce or their supply of spare parts, and repair waiting times ranging from three days to two weeks. At an Ola workshop in Thane, among the biggest of the 14 centres in the Mumbai region, more than 100 e-scooters awaiting repairs were visible outside in a clearing, many parked in a muddy clearing gathering dust and littered with bird droppings. Devendra Ghuge, a Thane service manager, told Reuters in late October that the number of cases the centre dealt with had
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