I doubt they would want to touch that. That’s an added income for the company. Where others are providing it for free. I am expecting them to at least match the specs of OLA in regards to performance.
It’s really disappointing to see that Ather team is keeping quite. I was hoping them to organise another Owners meet to give some good news.
A good article summarising the current scenario. Like it rightly points out, this is not the end of the road for Ather like some people are excitedly predicting, but there is an urgent need for a strategy / USP overhaul at Ather. Maybe a new product development roadmap helmed by a new dedicated Strategy guy in the CxO soon?
But having said that, there is one weak link in the overall Ola equation (unlikely to happen and possibly just the worst case scenario that might be brought about because of some surprise from Ather): Bhavish is banking on very high sales volume to compensate for selling his scooters at a loss / razor-thin margin at the present heavily-subsidised price point. So if for some reason they don’t hit the forecasted sales numbers, then they will be forced to increase the price to at least break-even (even the most well funded startups can’t survive on investors forever!) by next year. And with the features S1 and Pro offer, the actual price will be significantly higher than what is promised now, leading to it jumping to within Ather 450x’s range.
I am sure Ola is hoping that won’t happen, but the Indian market is easily spooked - one battery fire or a product recall and today’s projections might suddenly seem dicey!
A second unrelated point to make here around the original conversation on the thread: Ather’s saving grace here is that a LOT (in fact most) features promised in Ola apart from battery are software implementations (that can be introduced via OTA) or part of the current roadmap (additional sensors like TPMS) or a combination of both (potential voice control using the upcoming smart helmets). So if Ather picks up the pieces and comes up with a better software rollout plan, it is only a matter of time - 1 year maybe? - before Ather 450X too will have these features. So it’s about how willing the current and future owners are to play the waiting game.
TL;DR: Yes, the Ather owners are presently at a disadvantage, but if Ather plays its cards right, they can catch up with Ola and then its hopefully a battle between equals…
Hopefully? To whom is the hope addressed?
Since 2 years of launching the 450 variant, the OTA updates we’ve been getting are next to junk, full of bugs. And now, “hopefully” they’ll catch up? Ah, we customers love hope. Just love to keep it and adore it at home.
Wishful thinking, actually; literally the hope is only for this one thing to change, like the rest of your comment points out:
Everything sounds but my concerns are the following:
Take it seriously @tarun and do some changes in subscription and softwares. Nothing can be done in terms of hardware.
Ah yes! This accusation of radio silence from Ather - thanks for pointing this out.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to disagree with what any of the people here are saying, but as someone who works with organisation leadership on strategy development as a part of my day job, I can assure you that announcing a feature or update is NOT as simple as an overnight task of drafting a cute social media post. In the backend, it takes many days, an insane number of internal discussions between all stakeholder teams and innumerable back-and-forth before a new announcement is made. Take for example something like announcing the unlocking of Wi-Fi in the scooter for connecting via phone hotspot: It would take many days to understand the implication of doing this, developing a roadmap or actually committing on a timeline in coordination with the product teams.
I can bet my life Ather has been having non-stop discussions on what they can do differently now to compete against Ola. After all, this launch affects Ather’s survival more than ours. So we can be certain they are more worried about it than we can ever be - and I’m guessing it’s not like we all smartly called out the risks from Ola on the Forum and they just went “DAAAANG!”. It’s just that running a company is hard. VERY HARD. And developing a strategy is one of the hardest parts of it. If people are expecting Ather to announce changes around their future plans just in a couple of days, then I am not sure if those people have any idea how companies at this scale work, unfortunately. And the radio silence from Ather hints that they are likely studying competition and thinking of the next steps and avoiding knee-jerk reactions.
And yeah, as far as the comments on SM is concerned, I find them funny to some extent because they are just sad little things kicking someone when they are down. You really think they are here for answers? Most of them probably have no skin in this game (very likely neither owners nor potential buyers), and they are just making the best use of cheap data rates in India these days 
They will not comment immidiately (understandably) because any comment made will be mocked up so hard. When they have a plan to announce or well prepared then they will make a comment or will not comment at all on this.
Of course they are on back foot which is inevitable after the sequence of things happened.
@harshithbhat rightly said. They are running acompany and just one or two events do not shut the operation, only thing is that they have to take best and also a feasible decission and that cannot happen over night. So no hurry for their response.
Well i don’t expect them to announce it here but i had a private word from someone in ather and it does not look promising. 368 bookings were cancelled today , just in 1 day. You can imagine the effect for long term horizon.
It just occurred to me though that in this entire process of making a case for strategy development, I might have just antagonised the Brand & Marketing Team at Ather. Sorry Ryan, Abhishek and Co. Didn’t mean to trivialise all the effort that goes into creating your smart SM posts 
Damn, that’s disappointing. But not entirely surprising, considering the propensity of fence-sitters and limited brand loyalty in this new space. The ball is now in Ather’s court and it really needs to address some long-pending issues:
Coming to that part , i have also done my MBA in marketing , as a matter of fact ather must have done some competitor analysis before OLA/SE was launched and strategies on how to tackle it under different scenarios. In all the scenarios i can see Ather losing money. I can wait for ather to make announcement later say in a month as i am not going to jump ships. Constructive criticism + Frustration does seem to make my tone a little irritating but in the end all the owners of ather wants it to succeed. Lets wait and watch what they do.
[quote=“vinith_karadi, post:23, topic:24186”] Since [/quote
I see a surge on this topic ‘Ather preowned and sell’ most of them want to sell their Ather. Sad to see ‘Series 1’ users there as well. Waiting to hear from @abhishek.balaji and @tarun. Said this in other topic as well, the recent TPMS survey kinda says that it will be sold for 2198rs but I’m not sure if anyone will even THINK of buying it. This is one of those BASIC things which should come with the vehicle since the beginning. What say?
Yeah, the 1 GB RAM decision! Will surely bite them as they add more features if they don’t think of optimising their processes to run more efficiently… Can we have an OTA to give our Ather extra RAM too? 
I don’t think Ather is planning on a huge comeback or anything. And looking at the development since the launch of 450 which I think is almost two years now is almost negligible. I am pretty sure their sales will drop a lot in the coming months while companies like Ola, PureEV and simple energy will slowly start to take over the EV two wheeler market. The future for Ather energy does appear grim at the moment.
That said, if Ather wants to stay relevant then they should start working on some kind of battery upgrade and fix its crappy dashboard OS and optimising it better to run even on 1gb RAM but I doubt Ather has that kind of funds to reinvest in R&D department. The second thing they have to do is increase the number of grid points - this is something OLA and simple one is yet to establish and it is well within Ather’s budget and a chance for Ather to a get a foothold of something. The only way for Ather to compete with other upcoming EVs is to show something that other companies don’t have or yet to provide and having 100+ fast charging stations in a major city will add some value to it.
Right now, I don’t think new buyers should even consider buying Ather, it’s way too over priced for what it offers. Atleast that’s how I feel after the launch of Ola electric and simple one. And the fact that the founder and community manager is keeping quiet about it shows that they are clearly dumbstruck and don’t have any answers presently to tackle the threat these new EV launches possess.
I feel there are two major aspects…
Software can be managed by the way of OTA updates…
Hardware mostly they have bigger battery… and similar or under powered motor than ather but they claim more torque.
Motor power of ather is highest… Battery I suppose simple ONE has same 2.9kW but they have add-on battery under the seat for more range… Ola also same 2.9kW for basic & additional battery power with S1 pro…
What about BMS ? Ather has 2.9kW battery same as basic (without add-on battery) in simple One. Ather manage good range by the way of BMS on 2.9kW battery.
Ather has limited top speed in software (so called legal requirements)…I heard earlier versions ather used to clock upto 110kmph…
TPMS is on the way (may be at extra cost but it is there in testing I saw one at EC)
And delivery of both ola & ONE is still not clear…it may take another 6 months or so…
So not much difficult for ather to match these if ather has will to do so by the way of software update & little hardware updates like TPMS, Smart helmet & may be dashboard upgrade…
So we should enjoy our premium EV & save on petrol cost, atleast till then…
F.O.M.O is a real thing!. Just look at the number of people signing up 6/7yr olds for “coding” classes!
That said, This is an excellent opportunity for the Team at Ather to look deep within and come up with a plan to stay relevant in the now crowded smart scooter market. They know what the competition offers now - for real.
However, I’d rather they spend time introspecting and strategizing for the new market than take any knee jerk action.
That dashboard upgrade is must so that Ather can push more features. 1gb ram just wont kill it, no matter how much optimization they might achieve through software. I think what they achieved with 10.1.6 is the limit. You add anything more to it and that dashboard will just give up.
Dashboard will get an upgrade - Sure, but in next iteration. Don’t expect for existing customers, sure 
For 4G upgrade - which is relatively a small change & chargeable - That itself took > 6 months to accept that 3G is dead and another 6 months to implement it (I am not considering delay coz of pandemic)
Upgrade from 450 to 450X - Lot of hypes on exciting upgrade for existing 450 Owners - Finally it ended with Health Certificate & a thread dedicated in forum for selling your 450.
Shut-down bug - Enough said about this. It just required will. Though Ather fixed the issue in next versions, existing buyers were left with luck & warranty
OTA updates - Lots of promises. But, Ather 450 has been kept aside for any feature roll-out post 450X.
Now, should we still think that Dashboard upgrade will be done to existing owners?
Prove me wrong and I am happy to accept my defeat. But, Ather wont try to win me. Instead, move on with their future customers.
A Raspberry Pi worth 4k has 4 GB RAM. Fire TV stick has upto 2 GB of RAM.
If you have used Fire TV stick with both 1 GB & 2 GB RAM - you can feel the difference in the experience.
Even if we speak in hindsight, I am not sure how much Ather would have saved by having 1 GB RAM.
When they had 450X with upgraded dashboard, this bottleneck could have been removed.
Yeah, the funny part is people who are selling their 450x have no idea the FAME II subsidy does not apply on them anymore.Its limited . One time per person / vehicle category(2W). They need to buy in name of family members that again is a headache.
