'Tech difficulties' push sale of Ola Electric scooters to September 15

"We had committed to start purchases today (September 8) for our Ola S1 scooter. But unfortunately, we have had many technical difficulties in making our website for purchases live today... I want to apologise to all of you, who had to wait for several hours. The website was just not up to our expectations on quality. I know we have disappointed you and I sincerely apologise to each of you for what was clearly a very frustrating experience," said Aggarwal.

"Getting you the right experience will take us another week. I want to let you know that we will now be starting our purchase on 15th September, 8 AM... Your reservation and your position in the purchase queue remain unchanged, so if you reserved first, you will still be able to buy it first. Our delivery dates also remain unchanged," he added.

 

The electric scooters were first unveiled on August 15 this year. But customers could make bookings from July for Rs 499. The company had claimed that it received 1 lakh orders in just 24 hours. However, Ola has not disclosed how many orders it has received till date.

The Ola Electric S1 and S1 Pro are priced at Rs 99,999 and Rs 1,29,999 respectively. The customer may have to pay a little less as the final price will factor in FAME II subsidy (the subsidy provided by the Centre for faster adoption and manufacturing of electric vehicles in India) and state subsidies.

The claimed range for Ola S1 is 121 kilometres and for Ola S1 Pro is 181 kilometres. While the S1 will take about four hours and 48 minutes to fully charge, S1 Pro can be fully charged in six hours and 30 minutes. The top speed for Ola S1 is pegged at 90 kmph and for S1 Pro, it is 115 kmph.

The S1 is available in five colour options — jet black, porcelain white, marshmallow, coral red, and neo blue, and S1 Pro comes in 10 colour options — red, sky blue, yellow, silver, gold, pink, black, navy blue, grey and white.

As there are no dealerships, Ola electric scooters can only be bought online.