Do you guys think it’s going to be better then ather atlest in terms of performance
I would wait till ola and simple energy launches their products. Take test ride of all three and then choose for yourself.
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A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. So it’s better we wait. It’s too early to compare. We have Ather S1 on the road. Simple energy S1 and Ola S1 are yet to come out. Even the final specs are not known yet. August 15th will be interesting this time (although it’s on a Sunday and we lost one leave). but from the pictures, both look promising. Even after the launch, my gut feeling says that Ola and Ather will appeal to different set of customers.
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Unless Ola is super-aggressive in their timelines, I feel Ola’s waiting time is going to help Ather.
People who pre-booked Ather had no choice other than to wait. Here, if waiting time is more at Ola, they will have options to choose from, Ather being the first alternate.
Ola will also catch attention of new set of buyers who never thought of booking an electric scooter so far. That market capture will help other EV including Ather.
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Yes, excited for the launches of both Simple energy and Ola scooters.
Simple energy has a much bigger battery (4.8 kWh) than any other electric scooter currently available in the market (India or elsewhere). It can have ~150 km of real-world range. They also indicated that the price will be around Rs 1.1 to 1.2 lakhs. Less than one month to go. Range and pricing will be key.
Based on leaked pics of Ola scooter showing 122 km range remaining at 87% of SoC. So, ~140 km of range at 100%. In the real world, I am expecting ~120 km of range. I wonder if they will be using the same battery capacity as shown in Etergo (3.46 kWh). Pricing, range, and wider availability will be key for Ola’s success I think.
There will be growing pains for both these companies similar to Ather. Ola will be fine in terms of funds and volumes but how soon they can do it will be the question. It will be much tougher for Simple energy. Hoping for all the companies to be very successful along with Ather 
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Unless they go with the Lithium phosphate batteries the prices cannot be competitive with Simple energy’s Mark 2 and Ola’s S1 and S1 pro. In retrospect, Lithium phosphate is cheap to manufacture and can be BULKY if they go for the removable type.
Indeed, and yes we’ve lost one 
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Heard about sahara? 
Once upon a time, our Force india Formula 1 - car sponsors 🥲
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Rs.85,000/- seems like an excellent price point if true! But the question is, what features have been compromised to achieve it…
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Looks good 
ather has finally a very strong opposition
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I won’t believe this BS article (I mean Business-Standard article). The headline seems as though the pricing is announced. But the first line says the following…
Ola Electric, which opened for bookings on Saturday and has netted as many as 100,000 bookings on the very first day, is expected to price its electric scooter in the range of Rs 85,000-Rs 1.1 lakh.
The key phrase “is expected to” is the new language for “wild guess”.
But if the all-inclusive OTR pricing does come to that, I’ll be pleasantly shocked!
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Very true! I noticed that too, but looking at their level of confidence with the precise price point, I am thinking they have some inside scoop on this.
I know! I have a bad feeling about the price war these new entrants are getting into. There is a reason EVs cost more, and if there was a way to drop it to sub-1L so quickly, other existing players would have obviously done it already! So there is a good chance they have compromised on some things, risking a bad EV first-impression for the majority of Indians, if they were to fall for it and buy one…
Touché, Sir!
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Imo. They won’t compromise much as they will most likely sell the few hundreds or thousands at a loss & in the process gain a nice market share. I am keeping my fingers crossed. Hoping they succeed. With Ather, many of us sitting on the edge, will might be out of there If :
- the software experience is much better than the Ather’s
- the fast charging grids are set up in more “logical” spots. Currently, in Bombay there is too much detours while on longer journeys. Not sure about the other cities but in Bombay setting the chargers close to the highway makes sense.
- the range is close to 100 kms
- performance is at par with Ather’s
So possibly the route Ather took with its 450 initially?
But then, considering Ola claims they already have more than 1L pre-bookings, they can’t possibly take this approach (selling a part of that 1L orders at a lower price and the rest at regular price will be a PR nightmare!). Maybe that is why Ola hasn’t announced the exact prices, I guess? If they only had got a few thousand pre-orders, they could have announced low prices and sold them at this discounted point just to gain market share like you said, and then raise the price for later bookings, à la Ather and its 450 → 450 Plus adventure. But now, considering they have (again, supposedly) more than 1L orders, they can’t afford to sell so many at a loss and therefore will be forced to reduce their discount percentage to avoid any anchoring bias among future buyers.
Interesting to see what Bhavish chooses to do: Go for a higher cash burn to retain this momentum, or preempt future profitability issues and price it higher right from Day 1.
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I don’t understand why people are shying away from accepting this prices. They are producing in mass and their motto is to sell more with low margins and earn more, unlike bather’s strategy of sell less but earn more margin on a single scooter. Yes the price seems very tempting and I myself expected 10-15k higher prices than this, but the 85k model will be of a low battery capacity of maybe 1.15kwh. But the 1.1-1.2 lac models will attract the masses. Will Ather’s sales be affected by this? yes, but by not a huge margin.
As a buyer, I myself don’t want to take these Chinese rebrands and look at some good durable scooters from Indian brands. I don’t need all these fancy touch screen (which in practical life isn’t performing as expected it to, thanks to the software developer team at Ather). Nor do I need 0-40 in 3.3 seconds. I would want a scooter with 120kms range on mix mode that has a good pickup and especially a good 80kmph top speed and at a price point of 1.1lakh. Now Ola fits in my needs, but has its own disadvantages that we will talk later on. So buyers like me will be interested.
But there are buyers who would buy the Ather for the way it’s built, the strong aluminum chassis that will stay intact for years, the R&D that has gone into it that performance, the handling (thanks to good ergonomics, low centre of gravity and 12 inch tyres), all the tech that will be useful if Ather gets a better team and works on it.
So the point I am making here is Ather is now catering to two different users like me and the power, handling, R&D, tech enthusiast Ather guy. They will loose one share of them but like people are expecting that Ather will be affected a lot, it won’t be as Ather does many things better than Ola, especially in the performance, suspension, handling, seating, looks, build compartment, but the pricing and range could have been more attractive which are the exact points Ola is targeting on.
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What do y’all think about this analysis? Guy says Ola will struggle to hit 10k shipped units in 2 years because production is hard and OLA’S factory isn’t even set up. I find it overly pessimistic - given that OLA is initially targeting 2 million units production/year capacity and by sometime next year planning to increase to 10 million.
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This is an interesting take! I would suggest you go through the recent The Ken article on this exact topic, if possible. They talk of such issues that all EV startups have faced (and thus subsequently pivoted).
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I think people are overestimating the costs involved in EVs. Let’s compare the prices of 450x with Activa.
- Activa: Rs 70,716 (ex-showroom).
- Ather 450x: Rs 1,88,000.
Assuming Ather 450x without battery costs the same as Activa, then Ather has Rs 1.17 lakhs for the battery. Battery packs cost $137 per kWh on average as per Bloomberg in 2020. Even if we assume Ather pays double that ($274), then 3 x 274 = $822 (Rs 61,500).
The reason for such high price of Ather 450x has more to do with lower volumes and higher fixed costs (employees, showrooms, etc…) rather than battery costs. Volumes are very important for covering the fixed costs. 1 or 2 thousand sales per month won’t be enough.
The automobile industry is very capital intensive. Till the volumes increased, they will continue to incur the losses. If you are short of funds, then that will be difficult. Ola has that covered with huge investments from investors and they are going for the huge volumes from the beginning itself. They can get into agreements with battery cell makers to get much lower pricing as the volumes will be much higher.
Honestly, the subsidy provided for battery by govt (Rs 15,000 per kWh) and 5% GST (vs 28% GST for petrol scooters) should be enough for price parity with petrol scooters.
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Ather is clearly overpriced no doubt about that, even if we consider the pricing with the earlier 450, they are milking 40-45k extra profits than they used to get in the 450, since there isn’t any competition in this segment it is easy for them to charge this extra premium.
I think a decent price would be 1.6 lac ex-showroom for the 450x. Surely the sales would have doubled and this would mean Ather would have earnt much more and would have a good market share by now. As far as I know, this is possible because the 450 was priced at 1.3lac (correct me if I am wrong) without any subsidy and 20k is far more than sufficient for the additional minute tweaks in battery, OS and motor and 10k for the extra profits and for them to cover all the past years’ profits when they were doing R&D.
With 1.6 lac, the price that I had suggested earlier not many would be excited for OLA. Then the only thing it would offer better is range and there would be surely other things where Ather would do better (read the whole junk in this thread that I have posted earlier). So if they had priced it like that the market share of Ather would be far more intact even with strong competition coming in.
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Great point! Yes, the pricing is largely a factor of sales volume. But the devil is in the details.
In the volumes the current players are operating in, the pie itself is growing and that’s good for new operators to enter and leverage economies of scale. But at the large volumes Ola is aspiring for, the fight will be for a larger share of the existing pie eventually (there is a limit on how many people are willing to shell out around 1L for a 2W, but boy do I hope I am wrong on this!) at some point in the near future and they can’t just bank on continued high sales numbers compensating for their low margins on unit sale, is what I feel.
Only if Ola manages to capture a good part of the 2W market (best case scenario, close to 50% like it plans to) will it be able to make sufficient profits to cover for materials and overheads on the long run. Else, it will just become a cash burning venture for them, like Bajaj is now seeing with Chetak. Thoughts?
There are people on this Forum who are much more knowledgeable about the manufacturing practicalities than me and might be able to confirm or deny this better, but these numbers don’t seem right to me…
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