Will there be a Ather 560 or Ather 670 with larger battery?
Not in the near future.
Will there be a super-bike version with larger battery and bigger wheels?
Not in the near future
Will there be a larger scale production of Ather 450 in Bangalore?
We are looking at ramping up production. Not sure if it will happen in Bengaluru or some other city. The current plant can ramp up to 30k vehicles per year. Once the production goes above it, we will need a plant with a larger capacity.
Is there a plan for solar based chargers like Tesla in Bangalore/outside Bangalore?
While solar charging is a great way to reduce carbon impact, currently though, all the public charging points utilize existing grid infrastructure, and tapping the electricity from the Ather Grid host’s. Also, generating distributed solar energy isn’t the most efficient way currently.
Can you provide an option of renting out portable chargers? It will be really helpful for people who may want to go out on weekend trips especially when the portable chargers are low on stocks.
This suggestion came back a couple of months ago. We had discussed this in detail internally, and figured it will be too much of a logistical challenge.
We will figure something out at a later instance, but for now it will not happen.
Any plans for adding offline navigation? Vodafone’s service is very poor in many areas, so it would be good if the whole route is downloaded when there is service ( a bit like how Google navigation works ).
Also, are there any plans (and is it technically feasible) to offer different service providers for data? Vodafone’s service in my area is almost non-existent, so the scooter gets synced only when I go out somewhere.
100% Offline navigation is something that cannot happen on the current version of the navigation. However, the current capability is such that once turn by turn navigation gets turned on, even if the map tile does not load, it will still provide the directions and keep on route.
Different service providers can be provided from a ‘technical’ standpoint. As long as they provide a M2M sim-card(which is scarce) and support the same bands. However, the physical sim will have to be swapped out, and a company wide agreement with the service provider will have to be made. It cannot be done for individual users. Currently we do not have plans to switch service providers.
Can you guys provide some insight into the battery roadmap in general? Some aspects are battery technologies that Ather is looking into (like Graphene based etc.), and the prediction of cost and density of batteries that we might get when we replace the batteries in the next 5 years?
Currently we are not exploring batteries beyond Li-ion. As for the density, we are exploring ways to increase density at a pack level, however, that’s a continuous improvement that will keep happening as we move forward.
As for cell level density improvement, it depends on other manufacturers as we do not produce our own cells.
Cost wise, we expect the battery pack cost to be around 35-40k over the next 2-3 years.
This has been discussed in Owners meets as well as open houses before. The current version will not get a usb port as the vehicle’s wiring harness will have to be significantly modified.
Tax reduction impact affects the price for new owners. However, that’s not in our control and hence the benefit cannot be passed retrospectively to old owners.
Battery discharge % seems to be high when the vehicle is parked… To improve battery efficiency I had to shutdown the vehicle… do you have any plans for an improvement?