Opinion: Ola Electric and the uncomfortable facts

Ola Electric, the firebrand EV start-up, has undoubtedly pushed the electric two-wheeler game forward and the numbers it has clocked in the last year and a half are impressive by any unit of measure. But at what cost has this been achieved? 

Pointing fingers

Ola has been aggressively dismissive of any criticism against its product or its processes and the latest act of self-defence comes in the form of a blog called “Our engineering facts - busting myths and narratives”. The blog was a response to an expansive, full-page story carried out by the financial daily Mint on how Ola’s front suspension system was failing and putting riders in a dangerous situation. 

This has been a publicly known issue for nearly a year now and we wrote about it on two occasions as well – here and here. So did many other publications, but Ola dismissed the issue saying that these were random and isolated ‘high impact incidents’. However, with nasty images piling up on the internet of Ola scooters with completely broken and dangling front wheels, as well as a recent one of an injured rider, the company could no longer sweep this under the rug. 

You would expect any traditional automobile company to recognise that something was awfully wrong here and jump to action to issue a recall. However, Ola Electric’s initial response was to silently redesign its single-sided front suspension with reinforcement around the thin neck area where the breakages were happening – we wrote about this in our second report in January 2023. 

Eventually, the company put out a statement on March 14, 2023 that this redesigned suspension component was available to any customers who wanted it. However, the company made it clear that this was not a recall and went on to say that there was no problem with this existing front suspension. The article from Mint and the subsequent blog from Ola were all to do with this series of events. 

Unpacking facts

There are some statements in this blog that demand consideration. For example, Ola says that the people who claim that hardly any real-world testing was done and that Ola rushed a European product to our market are simply spreading myths with “deeply malicious intent”.

Let’s take a look at the timeline here. Ola Electric announced that it acquired Etergo, a Dutch start-up that had created the scooter in May 2020. A little more than a year later, Ola launched the scooter in India in August 2021 with deliveries starting by the end of 2021. This was in the midst of a lockdown-riddled pandemic that threw the most experienced automobile manufacturers off their feet. 

Within this acquisition-to-launch timeframe, Ola did make some significant changes to the Etergo scooter. This included increasing the performance and changing the battery pack design from a removable battery pack to a larger fixed unit, an operation that was likely to have involved some modifications to the chassis as well. Ola also added a number of segment-first connected and digital features to the scooter.

Traditions vs disruption

Now, if we were to consider the traditional timeframe to develop a new product, it would take an established manufacturer about two-three years for a new product based on an existing platform, and about three-four years for a brand new product starting from scratch. Of that, at least one year would be dedicated to vehicle testing and validation. And that process is by manufacturers who have decades of experience working with chassis and powertrain technologies that they are intimately knowledgeable about. 

What we have here is one start-up acquiring another - both of which have never made an automobile before. If anything, Ola should have taken more than the usual time frame to fully test and validate its scooter for India, especially considering its unique single-sided front suspension design. 

The reason vehicle testing and validation takes time is because data acquisition is a herculean process. There are variances in materials that have to be considered, even with robotic manufacturing. A senior executive in the RnD department of one of India’s top OEMs tells me on the condition of anonymity that virtual tools have definitely helped the processes, particularly in terms of reducing the number of vehicle iterations that need to be tested. But ultimately, every component, every system and every group of systems that communicate with each other in today’s smart automobiles have to be thoroughly tested. And this needs to be done in a huge range of terrains, weather conditions, altitudes and more. “Variability is a reality of life and we have to test for that”. 

There is no short-cutting this process. Engineers from the biggest and best automobile manufacturers will tell you that there is no better way to learn and improve a product than to test, break things, improve their design and repeat. Meanwhile, Ola will tell you that it has always been proud of how it has disrupted the existing ways of doing things. In this very blog, the company states, “We are one of the most advanced OEMs in using digital tools and that enables us to bring products to market faster without compromising any quality.”

Ola says that it has tested its scooters for more than 4 million kilometres with 736 scooters, but it does not specify how much of this was done before customer deliveries began. And throughout the past two years, there has always been a sense that outright speed takes precedence over quality. That is made clear by the simple fact that if Ola had taken as long as required to thoroughly validate its product, end consumers would not be reporting all these issues.  

The more serious issues

The numerous software glitches as well as the inability to provide its promised performance over extended periods of time can be overlooked, but some reported issues have been downright dangerous. For example, it is unforgivable for a scooter to accelerate backwards without any speed limit when the scooter’s display says that it is in a forward riding mode – you can see this happen in our comparison review with the Ather 450X. 

More recently, a customer shared a video on Instagram of the scooter gradually accelerating from a standstill to 60kph at which point the video ends – this without the rider’s hand on the accelerator. These instances were isolated to a few cases and the company eventually fixed them with software updates, but that does not excuse the fact that a vehicle capable of such grave errors should never have been sold to the public.  

However, the most frightening issue of them all was one that had nothing to do with this being an ICE or electric vehicle – the suspension failure. In its latest blog, Ola claims that even the original suspension unit has a 75 percent safety margin over a conventional telescopic fork and that the updated one now has a 250 percent safety margin. And yet when you look at all those images of the broken suspension, most of the scooters themselves look spotless, which suggests that it was not a violent impact that led to the failure. In comparison, you will almost never see a conventional telescopic fork simply snap like that. They will bend in an accident, but it’s generally only in extremely violent crashes (where we’re looking at a total write-off) where the fork could get torn off the motorcycle.   

Ola’s take 

In its blog, Ola has finally gone into detail about these suspension failures and it lets us know that there have been 218 failures out of over 2 lakh vehicles on the road. Of these, Ola says that 184 of these were accident cases, while 34 suspension failures were “inconclusive or not accident linked”. Ola says that, by law, it is in the clear and does not need to announce a recall because its rate of inconclusive failures is 0.015 percent, which is far below the legally mandated limit of ten percent. 

However, I can’t think of a critical safety-related recall by any manufacturer that has been conducted only after one out of every 10 vehicles faces the issue. If there is a potential flaw that puts its customers' lives in danger, which manufacturer says, “Sorry, we need a ten percent failure rate before we will act.” Is Ola suggesting that it would have issued the recall only if 20,000, 10,000, or 2,000 scooters had this failure? These are real people we are talking about, not numbers on paper. Forget 218 – is it okay to write off even 34 inconclusive cases? I certainly wouldn’t want to touch a vehicle where there was even a small chance that the front wheel might snap clean off for ‘inconclusive’ reasons. 

Ola ends its blog by saying, “In our case, the failure rate is really low. No OEM at these failure levels will immediately call for a full recall. We would normally study the part for a longer lifespan and maybe decide after a few more months to see if the failure rate is rising and beyond an acceptable threshold. But instead, we have decided to allow all our customers to use the upgraded version if they feel more comfortable with that. The original part has not breached any safety limits by any OEM standards.”

I will end this by asking if you think that Ola’s tone and attitude is fair and reasonable to all the customers who have put their faith and money into this company.