Cab-aggregator Ola is set to launch their electric scooter on August 15. While few details have been released yet, many have been teased. One aspect of Ola’s sales model which was hinted at was taken straight from Tesla’s playbook: Direct-to-consumer delivery of the vehicles by eschewing the showroom model.
If Ola plans to home-deliver its scooter, it would be a disruptive move for the Indian auto segment, with only luxury carmakers having experimented with this so far.
Hinted at in the past, Ola have once again suggested this will be the way forward, with CEO Bhavish Aggarwal tweeting that the company would “deliver and service all across India” from “Day 1 of deliveries”.
“India’s EV revolution is here and how! Reservations pouring in from 1,000+ cities, towns. Right from day 1 of deliveries, we’ll deliver & service all across India. Details on 15th Aug. Let’s create this revolution together!,” Aggarwal tweeted,
Earlier, Aggarwal had tweeted a poll asking Twitter users how they wanted to buy their scooters, with two options: Physical dealership/store and online and home delivered. Over 60 per cent voted for the home delivery option.
Following the launch of pre-bookings for the scooter, with a token payment of Rs 500, the company claimed to have received over one lakh bookings in 24 hours.
With an estimated price point of around Rs 85,000 for the base model, and the top end variants likely to cross the lakh mark, the final sales numbers could be much less as the booking amount was refundable. For perspective, sales volumes in June for the Bajaj Chetak and TVS iQube electric scooters were just 452 and 639 units respectively.
