A day after announcing that he was finalising the launch date for the much-anticipated Ola Electric Scooter, Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal tweeted a poll asking how customers would like to buy their scooters—from the showroom, or from the comfort of their own homes.
Tweeting the poll, Aggarwal asked, “How do you want to buy your scooter” with two options: Online and home-delivered, and “physical dealership/store”.
Over 60 per cent of those polled picked the home delivery option. Interestingly, Aggarwal has demonstrated in the past that these polls count for something: After polling audiences on their preferred choice of colours for the scooter, Ola Electric went on to unveil a similar bouquet of options with ten colour schemes for the Ola Electric Scooter.
Rumours that Ola was considering the door-delivery model for its scooter—which is the ride-aggregating company’s first automotive offering in India—have been circulating for a while. Ola had said it received over one lakh bookings for the scooter (which came via a token booking amount of Rs 500) after initiating pre-bookings on July 15. However, the direct-to-consumer delivery model brings a host of challenges.
Interestingly, luxury carmaker Mercedez-Benz initiated this approach in June, announcing a direct-to-consumer system that will eliminate the dealer middlemen. Tesla Motors had also tried a similar system in the United States, selling cars directly to customers via its website. While Tesla showrooms exist, customers can only receive their cars directly at their homes.
To facilitate the direct delivery process, Ola has reportedly set up a separate logistics department, and has plans to set up experience centres across the country.
Ola has its work cut out in terms of building and scaling up its infrastructure in order to sell scooters pan-India: the company plans a “hypercharger” setup in 400 Indian cities with over 100one lakh locations and touchpoints. Its under-construction “hyperfactory” is claimed to be able to produce ten million scooters a year from next year, with the first phase reportedly nearing construction.
While official specifications have yet to be confirmed, the Scooter is believed to have a single telescopic front suspension, twin LED headlamps, and a claimed range of 150km under normal riding conditions, as well as riding modes. A top speed of over 100kpmh has also been teased by Aggarwal.