Had a brief look at Chetak today.
•The build quality and paint quality seems good.
•The buttons were a little tacky and I’d rather have conventional ones over these.
•Display is just okay, nothing special about that.
•One huge mistake Bajaj did was to give it a 3 pin socket (Ather has CCS socket) which renders it not able to charge at public charging locations without an adaptor,in fact I don’t know if such adapter (3 pin to CCS) even exists at all.
• Under seat storage seems shallower than Ather. Wouldn’t fit a full-size helmet.
• Sorry to say but design resembles a famous Italian brand which is either cool or absolutely terrible,depends on how you look at it.
•Couldn’t take a test ride as it was hot outside.
Overall a good proposition economically,but they’re pricing Premium one for ₹1.2l ex showroom. At that price point I’d go for Ather anyday.
First of all, Ather doesn’t have a CCS socket. It’s a proprietary design.
A 3 pin industrial socket design for the Bajaj Chetak is in fact a very good move. There are many charging stations setup by the Government, local administrative authorities, and others and all these have that industrial scoket (3 pin blue connector). Bajaj can do away with setting up fewer charging stations.
That’s the most common type plug, its just a 3 pin server type/desktop power supply/ appliance connector IEC C15/16 which is very common and It looks similar to the C14 used in desktop computers but C15 is rated for higher temperature used in EU appliances.
While ather uses a Plug similar looking to CCS, their pin have the wrong layout, expect fire works if one connects a ather to a CCS charger or vice versa. Ather chargers atleast the public ones additionaly have a standard 16a AC socket to charge, other EV which have oboard charger.
Below are 2 posts showing a DIY Industrial-Ather adaptor. One by @Rahul and another by @abhishek.balaji. Rahul has shown a charging station set up by a government agency I suppose. BESCOM has setup many of these of it in Bengaluru.
Abhishek has shown his scooter being charged in a common charging point of an apartment complex.
Ah my bad! It does look like a CCS! I hope all manufacturers (including Ather) switch to an universal charging plug (CCS/CCS2 is most popular if I’m not mistaken,even Model 3 will have CCS2 for European cars.)
there isn’t a standard defined for bikes/scooter yet. As hemanth told before, the design of bajaj allows charging at any bescom location. The thing with Ather is that, doing a plug for industrial socket to 15A still means you are charging with portable charger and it is going to be a slow one, meaning you pay lot of money for charging less. Unless of course, you go to an ather charge grid, it’s not going to be fast anywhere.
Yes. Absolutely aware of that and unfortunately until the laws of chemical reactions change, we’ll have to deal with that.
However, I was just pointing out that While Ather can charge the 450 to 80% in ~80 mins at a grid point, the Chetak has no such facility. Even if you are at a BESCOM 25kwh DC fast charger. It would be unable to use the “Fast” charging.
I also called chetak and enquired a lot for Chennai deliveries. It is going to take quite some time.
In bangalore and pune, the deliveries of premium model will start in February, but the urbane will only start in May.
I just hope 450x details are hashed out before chetak starts capturing a bigger market. It seems to be a good vehicle but no where near the 450x in performance.
