Well, going a bit off-topic, but, valuations are bit tricky on their own. In the past, one of the best (over)valued company WeWork (backed by SoftBank, which has backed Ola Electric, too), tumbled upon some issues just before its IPO in USA. The result was a heartbreak for not only a lot of employees at WeWork, but also, for Masayoshi Son himself
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I think they have a wonderful product to kind of justify that valuation. Now with all that money they should literally take over the market and make it extremely difficult for players that are not serious. Its good to see them set such a high benchmark in terms of range and performance. Next, it will be interesting to see how their software experience & fast charging network pans out. 
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A product which they never designed from the scratch. But OLA has been good in services.
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Why didn’t he show any wings to it ?
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He is just joking.
Ola Electric is working on an electric car as they announced officially a few times already. They hired an ex-Jaguar designer for that project.
Car design and manufacturing is way more complex than 2 wheelers and it will take many years with very little chance of succeeding. All the best to them.
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Or they will have to find an already developed platform like what they did with etergo scooter, and stick the Ola label.
Wait till April 1.
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Electric 2W market in India is way more compared to other countries. That’s where Ola acquired Etergo seeing the opportunity, while, it is kind of opposite in the case of 4W. It has a bigger market in the west, where almost every individual owns a 4W. It becomes very tough to find an EV company that is waiting to be acquired by Ola in this case… IMHO, Etergo was very much undervalued, and, Ola is vice-versa.
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Something that is really standing out for me with every passing day, true! This weekly news of additional rounds of funding for a company with hardly a few thousand (or hundreds?) vehicles on the road is giving me massive Nikola Corp vibes! Not saying there is anything shady going on, but seems like Mr. Aggarwal has learnt a lesson or two from Trevor Milton 
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One product that’s hardly sold for a few months in the hundreds resulting in a valuation more than TVS - one that has probably sold in millions over decades - to me that’s very clearly bloated valuation. A trend that’s caught on everywhere in the tech world nowadays.
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“IMHO, Etergo was very much undervalued, and, Ola is vice-versa.”
The most difficult part in the automobile industry is not design but manufacturing at scale. There are hundreds of companies that are dead at the prototype stage in the automobile industry. Each company faces its biggest struggle getting past the prototype stage or low volume stage.
This weekly news of additional rounds of funding for a company with hardly a few thousand (or hundreds?) vehicles on the road is giving me massive Nikola Corp vibes! Not saying there is anything shady going on, but seems like Mr. Aggarwal has learnt a lesson or two from Trevor Milton.
Ola in its second month (January) delivered more vehicles than Ather did in the same month. This is despite Ather started deliveries more than 3 years ago. Ola also delivered more vehicles than legacy companies like Bajaj and TVS electric models combined in January.
I am not sure if you guys are tracking or not but Ather never sold more than 3,000 vehicles per month based on the Vahan database. Their highest ever was in October 2021 and since then their sales have continuously declined.
2021:
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October = 2,648
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November = 2,202
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December = 1,811
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January = 1,307 (till Jan 25th).
The interesting thing is Ather announced expansion of their factory to 4 lakh units per month in November. At that time, Ather claimed they are operating at full capacity (which is 1.2 lakh units per annum or 10,000 per month), and to be ready for the future they are expanding to 4 lakh units.
So, if they are operating at full capacity of 10,000 units per month, why Vahan is only showing 2000 to 2500 unit sales? There is some lag in Vahan due to the temp registration method in a few states for each month sales are lower than the previous month. Even if we assume, ~500 monthly sales in AP, TS, and MP which are not on Vaha, it never crossed 3,500 sales even in the best month.
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Umm, what??? The design scale is the factor I actually bought Ather in the first place, and with actual luck, they went into Business. But Every person does not want to switch to an EV. That is the very question Charging time, and Expensive among other things is the major factor.
It’s always sales vs demand. Even OLA has a million unit production catchphrase but they don’t produce that much right. Judging is very easy. Ola has captured the market for now but I’m sure Ather is not behind.(Just my feel).
No factory on earth runs at its full capacity Exception to Tesla and Mahindra XUV700 their demand is never-ending. Again it’s Demand Vs Supply. Ather should work on some advertisements not that they have ads ready but it’s not getting its message through.
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I am not sure what your point really is. I am not saying design is very easy but compared to taking an automobile company from design phase to mass market manufacturing is much more difficult. This is even told by Elon musk many times.
Coming to Ather sales and capacity, if there is no demand for 10K vehicles per month, then why they are expanding to 33K per month (4 lakh annually)?
People are comparing Ola CEO to Nikola and Trevor Milton based on their tall claims. But Ola actually building a huge factory and started deliveries unlike Nikola. Ola Electric is getting huge amounts of funds based on Ola background. Who will invest in Ola electric otherwise? By the way, Tiger global is an early investor in both ok and Ather.
EVs does not need TV or paper ads. There is a huge demand for EVs everywhere including in India. Ather is probably the only company ever to do traditional ads for EVs which shows the lack of demand. Ather has a good product but with the current pricing it will always be a niche product. Hopefully, the new fund raise will enable Ather to be aggressive with pricing.
Someone making tall promises does not make it a scam. Is Ola not delivering the product to the customers? Is Ola not returning money for those who cancelled?
All the companies are making tall claims. Ather promised a cheaper scooter in future at the launch of 450. It never happened but they actually launch 450x at 50K more and stopped 450. Ather in 2018 announced that they will setup 6,500 charging points by 2022. It’s not even crossed 300 currently.
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Don’t mean to dwell on any of your pointers because end of the day, these are just opinions and everyone is bound to have a different one to offer, but as far as the advert is concerned, not sure if you were on the Forum back then, but the ad came out at a time when there was no real competition for Ather, and the common ask on the Forum was a mass media awareness campaign to bring EVs into public conscience, and surely when the monthly sale numbers were significantly lower than today’s. So I really am not sure if it was because they saw dropping sales 
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I think this may be seasonal because of Diwali when demand increases after which it sort of tapers away (have seen this with the data of atleast one other major automotive company). Maybe take a look at other OEMs and even Ather in 2020 to see if this tapering pattern is consistent.
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I think this may be seasonal because of Diwali when demand increases after which it sort of tapers away (have seen this with the data of atleast one other major automotive company). Maybe take a look at other OEMs and even Ather in 2020 to see if this tapering pattern is consistent.
Ather sales grew from Oct to Dec in 2020 without such seasonal decline. Coming to other brands, TVS had their best EV sales in Dec 2021, and it’s continuing in Jan 2022. Ampere sales continue to grow month over month from Oct to Jan.
With sales expansion to more cities each month and production capacity increasing drastically, Ather sales should have gone higher. There is a reason why that is not happening. I would like to see Ather sales grow to their current production capacity (10K per month) and then 4 lakh units per year quickly. That will really push the laggards like Hero, Bajaj, Honda, Suzuki, etc… to develop EVs and set up production capacities.
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Ampere had a significant portfolio of low speed scooters that sold in volumes at Urban and Rural areas.
Average waiting time in MH is 45-60 days per the recent updates some pre-order customers got from dealers there. The pipeline seems to be good, but assembly capacity seems to be constrained.
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Perfectly agree
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There’s a longer post coming on this (been busy recently) but the Oct-Jan numbers are not seasonality. Demand hit a peak exceeding 6K units in Oct and practically hasn’t come down.
What’s happened is that we had the largest decommit ever by 1 electronics partner in end-Oct. Cell supply has been also pretty erratic so had to accept massive line-downs Nov onwards to balance the constricted supply. We even slowed down on new EC openings because customer lead times had sky-rocketed and it was getting difficult to manage old order wait times.
In the meantime, decided to bite the bullet and pay crazy spot prices for some of these components and resume production at a low level this month. On the bright side, new orders went in the system for all suppliers starting July and with lead times of ~40 weeks for bottleneck components we should start seeing results starting April. Also much better relationships with partners across the board now.
Massive ramp-up ahead, demand stopped being a problem a long time back - it’s mostly about managing supply chain well now if you have a good product. Hence, the plant expansion. The minute we cross 13K units/month the current plant will be 100% utilized and that number (13K) looks barely 30 ECs away. All of them are in the pipeline in the next 5 months.
Charging infra - yeah, donno what I was smoking (wasn’t sitting very close to ops back then) when I said 6500 units years back. Easy to announce #s when you haven’t built much yet or think that it’s totally sensible to burn 100s of millions $ pre-revenue 
It’s gone through it’s own design hell (metrics look stable only now) and will expand. But will take ~2+ years to get to that large a number still.
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That is something horrible. Hope that the hurdle clears soon.
I started reading the post, and, I thought you are going way too serious. 
Two years is still a long time, and, I expect that by the time charging-infra is warping up, Ather launch a product which complements the 450X. 
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