Ola told the customers in the communication that if they had already paid `20,000 and secured the scooter during the first purchase window on September 15 and 16, then there was no change for them.
Ola Electric has deferred the opening of its next purchase window for e-scooters to December 16, in place of the earlier date of November 1, in a bid to fulfil its existing orders. The company on Sunday informed the customers who have reserved the company’s e-scooters that the next purchase window for them would be opened on December 16.
The ride-hailing major had earlier scheduled the opening of the purchase window for November 1, after it had mopped up a whopping `1,100 crore sales in the first two-day session of purchase held on September 15 and 16.
“We’ve received unprecedented demand for our Ola S1 and S1 Pro scooters and are currently busy fulfilling existing orders. We will be opening our purchase window for fresh orders on December 16, 2021. We will reach out to you in the coming weeks to schedule your test ride,” the company said in a communication to the customers.
Interestingly, the development comes close on the heels of Bajaj Auto MD Rajiv Bajaj taking a dig at the upcoming e-scooter startups in the country, saying that they are champions and champions eat OATS (Ola, Ather, Tork Motors and SmartE) for breakfast.
This had prompted Bhavish Aggarwal, chairman and Group CEO, Ola, to make an indirect response to it. He retweeted a tweet by another person that highlighted the fact that Bajaj was not even in the competition. Ola sold almost 90,000 scooters in the first window itself before the first unit was even rolled out of the factory. Ather sold 1,800 EV units in July alone. Bajaj Chetak has sold a mere 3,300 units from January 2020 to July 2021, the tweet had said.
Ola told the customers in the communication that if they had already paid `20,000 and secured the scooter during the first purchase window on September 15 and 16, then there was no change for them.
“Your final payment window will open from November 10 onwards basis our previous communication to you and your scooter is on track to reach you within the delivery window already communicated to you,” the company said.
Aggarwal while tweeting a video showing production of e-scooters, recently, said: “Sneak peek of the scooters in production. The women at our Futurefactory are ramping up production fast.”
Ola Electric on September 30 announced that it has raised over $200 million led by Falcon Edge, Softbank and others, at a valuation of $3 billion. With the fresh fund infusion, Ola plans to accelerate the development of other vehicle platforms including electric motorbikes, mass-market scooters and its electric car, it had said.
Earlier in September, Ola had announced said the `2400 crore e-scooter manufacturing facility or Ola Futurefactory, in Tamil Nadu, will be run entirely by women. The company had said that the vehicles would be delivered directly to the customers at home. “No visiting showrooms, no running around, nothing. Purchasing early gets you priority delivery,” it had said.
Ola launched its maiden e-scooter on August 15 in two variants while keeping the entry-level (S1) model attractively below `1 lakh (`99,999) and the more powerful one (S1 Pro) at `1,29,000.
