Days after Ola Electric issued a voluntary recall to their Ola S1 and Ola S1 Pro electric scooters over the front suspension quality issue, the CEO of the company, Bhavish Aggarwal, in a detailed blog, has revealed the reasons behind the recall and also talked about the engineering behind the electric scooters. He also lashed out on various media reports and social media posts insinuating Ola Electric to deliberately ignore the front suspension breakage issue. In a Twitter post, Bhavish wrote, “Too much myth building and mud slinging happening on us last few days. Today we’re publishing a technical blog to share our engineering facts, and break the fake and agenda driven narrative.”

What’s the issue?

Ever since the first Ola electric scooter was launched in the Indian market, reports of problems with the EV have become a constant on social media handles. Multiple issues have been reported with the Ola scooters in the past, including faulty operating system, scooter going in reverse among others. But the one problem that has raised the maximum eyebrows and forced the CEO to write a detailed blog has to do with a fault in the front suspension of the EV.

As per various Ola users, the front shocker of the EV broke, resulting in serious injuries in many cases. Many users took on to social media to report the incident. Later, some media reports blamed Ola Electric for deliberately ignoring this serious issue. In fact, as per Bhavish’s blog, 218 failures have been reported till date in 1.5 years, of which, 184 are accident cases and 34 are inconclusive or not accident linked.

Bhavish Agarwal’s clarification

When we launched our products about 1.5 years ago, India’s 2W industry changed. We brought to market a world class product engineered and manufactured in India. And it has within a year become the best selling EV in India. And also one of the best selling scooters ever in India.

For almost 100 years, there has been a template in automotive for product planning, manufacturing, how to sell to the customers etc. The OEM plans incremental products, gets technology from suppliers, assembles in house, and sells to dealers who sell to consumers. This is the reality that EVs and specifically Ola has disrupted. We make more than 50% of the value of our products in house, bring world class features to customers ahead of the curve, and have a direct relationship with our customers.

This reality has been hard for our detractors to live with and there’s been a non stop effort for the last 1.5 years to throw mud at us in one form or another. Over the last 2 days we’ve seen another such attempt. And I’m sure this won’t be the last. So for those who want to know the facts, we are publishing this technical blog about the engineering behind the Ola scooter, which will dispel many myths and bust many fake narratives.

In this blog, we will address the following points:

The Engineering behind the Ola S1, including safety and testing we have undergone

Deep dive into the specific front fork issue – the data, engineering, the misleading campaign and our continuous engineering improvement activities

What process Ola followed for an upgrade. Also, what is a recall, when do automakers do it, and what process is followed