Ishan's experience with the Ather 450

I have had quite a painful experience with Ather. I had received a faulty vehicle and had to send a new vehicle for servicing in the first week itself.

The vehicle had to be taken thrice and the service team was just not helpful in providing good service or a replacement vehicle. Ather never accepted that the vehicle was a faulty one!!!

The issues in the vehicle were:

  1. Navigation was not working
  2. Glitches in the screen
  3. Abnormal motor noise in Eco and Ride mode
  4. SIM got disabled after 3 days of use
  5. Power up issues

Please be a little careful before making such a huge investment in a new company.

FYI, I’m using the same faulty vehicle and had to just accept that I have wasted money on the Ather 450, a decision that I will regret for the rest of my life.

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Can you kindly share more photos explaining your issue? I would help in anyway if possible.

That will not be required because I have wasted enough of my time writing mails and reaching out for help and do not wish to go through with it all over again!! That was only my review for anyone who is planning to invest in an Ather!! Photos, mails etc have all been already shared with your service team and customer support team. If you are interested, you’ll have to do your research yourself!!

Maybe you could explain what issues you faced in detail because some may just be bugs that are prevalent across all the 450s and not specific to yours.

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All of issues that I have listed occurred just 3 days after I received my “new” vehicle. If it occurs with all the vehicles then we would have had all these issues described by new owners!! This was what had been said by the customer support as well. Thanks for making my point on this forum!!

Hey @ishankhanna31, I know I am not responding to your query as such, but just wanted to point out that @frozenprakash too is just an Ather owner like you and me, trying to help you out, and not part of the Ather Team :slight_smile:

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My service team ? I am just a customer like you.

I just stepped into ask about the problems you face so that to help you in anyway possible, But seems like you don’t like to get info or help from anyone.

Carry on.

FYI, I have 2 Ather and almost an year and haven’t faced a single problem yet.

Initial months, some learning curve is needed to diagnose simple issues like how to even do soft restart, hard restart, belt noise issue etc

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@ishankhanna31. I wasn’t trying to make a point. Rather I was trying to understand if the issues that you listed were show stoppers or niggles that most of us experience/experienced.

The forum welcomes all opinions and viewpoints as long as posts don’t target individuals or are abusive in nature.

Except for profiles with the badge “Ather Team”, the rest of us are owners just like you. We share our feedback on this forum so everyone can understand and learn from each other’s experience.

Thanks to both of you.

Sorry if I came across annoying, but it’s just the kind of experience I have had. I had done research and also taken feedback from customers(2 of my friends as well), before I purchased the 450.

I could in detail describe all the issues:

  1. Navigation not working- This issue occurred when there was complete network with a fully functioning SIM. I did the all the possible kind of starts but in vain. The vehicle was taken for servicing.
  2. Glitches on the screen- The screen had black patches(triangle shaped across the screen) whenever I started the vehicle. I had to restart to make the screen normal. The bike was again taken for service.
  3. Abnormal motor noise- Well I have read about this issue after people have used the vehicle but mine had been hardly ridden for 25km after which I started to hear the fan noise with both Eco and Ride mode.
  4. SIM disabled- The SIM stopped working and hence the maps, the app sync stopped working on the 3rd day of my purchase.
  5. Power up issues- The vehicle powered on only on the second or third attempt on powering on the vehicle. This was third time the vehicle was taken for service.

Mind you, this was the first 10 days of owning a new bike. I could share you my emails with team, voice records, videos of the errors etc personally.

Let me know if you would like it…

Also I apologise for assuming that you were part of the Ather team.

Thanks, Ishan

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Also if any of you have faced all of these issues on a single vehicle in the first 1 week of your purchase, would be glad to know that these are some of the tiny glitches which we all have faced as soon as we bought the vehicle.

But if not, then I would carry on to assume that it was a faulty vehicle and it wasn’t fair on Ather’s part to deliver such a vehicle.

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This does occur at rare instances if there is a issue with Google Cloud services. All of us have had issues with navigation downtime because the Google Cloud api services went offline for sometime. And then there’s the infamous Vodafone issue (may not apply in your instance) when 3G network would just drop and a couple of hours at times.

This is the first time i am hearing of a “Dead Pixel” type issue, albiet a temporary issue since it seems to fix itself during a reboot.

Until 3k or even 5k odo, you will feel a strange vibration type noise from the footrest area. This has been diagnosed as a resonant feedback and goes away in time.

The Fan however is a different thing altogether. The motor fan will kick in depending on the motor temperature and is not dependant on mileage of the vehicle. The auto- cuts off at speeds of ~12kmph and will kick in at speeds higher than that if the motor temperature exceeds its ambient thresholds.

Did Ather confirm that the SIM was indeed disabled or deactivated?. Thats a first on this forum!

My scooter, off-late, has this habit of randomly doing a full reboot. I see my key turned on and i press the ignition switch - but the screen is still blank. I repeat the cycle a couple of times and still the screen is blank. I sit there wondering what could be the problem and lo behold i see the boot up graphics. Then it stuck me that the the vehicle did a full re-boot and hence the screen takes much longer to display any data on it, unlike a standby start where your dashboard is instantly visible upon turning the key on.

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The communication that I had received after the 3 times of my servicing was that the screen has been replaced and the component holding the SIM has been replace.

Also there was an issue with the left indicator tail lamp which stopped functioning. This was also replaced as communicated.

But thanks for the in detail response, and trying to help out.

Also did you face these issues within the first 1 week of your purchase or over a few months of use?

I’ve had my share of niggles, like the Boot lamp yellowing out, the plastic trims not aligned when returned after servicing and had a major s/w failure that stalled my vehicle on the road.

But everytime, the Service team addressed the issues and i did not have to follow up.

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Glad to hear that the team was supportive in your case, I had a really challenging time trying to reach them and after a point my calls were not answered.

After the 3 services, I still have the screen issues!! Not sure what I take home from this discussion because reiterating, not sure if you faced these issues in the first 7 days!!

Hard to face a failed purchase after paying close to 1.2L up front and getting these issues immediately!!

Wish I hadn’t purchased it at all :slight_smile:

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I understand the frustration of seeing the same issues again and again within such a short duration of taking delivery.

This is a feedback that you should also give during an Owners meet or Open House. My personal experience of meeting and talking to the folks at Ather is that they are very receptive to feedback - Good and Bad.

I am also pretty confident that some of customer service managers and senior folks at Ather are reading this thread and looking to understand what went wrong. Again, from personal experience :slight_smile:

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Once I had an experience with them, it didn’t feel helpful reaching out to them in those meetings. I have written mails to almost 8-10 people personally regarding these issues.

It feels really sad to put in hard earned money from over 4 years and invest it Ather. Also I know you’ve had a good experience but for me it hurts whenever I see the bike.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Ownership Experience

Hey @ishankhanna31,

As I checked with the team, they’ve reached out to you to offer a doorstep service, and have asked for more details regarding the issues. Someone will try to reach out to you to get these resolved again.

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