Ola Electric, India’s largest electric scooter maker, on Thursday said it will aggressively expand its network by on-boarding 10,000 partners, across sales and service, by the end of 2025.
Ola Electric currently has around 800 company-owned stores but only about 500 service centres. The company plans to double its service network to 1,000 centres by December 2024.
The automaker is planning nearly 1,800 sales and service touch points ahead of the upcoming festive season.
Ola Electric sold 27,518 scooters in August, down 34% compared with 41,624 units in July, according to data available on the government’s Vahan portal.
The automaker says its new programme is aimed at increasing EV adoption further into tier-2 and tier-3 cities, including urban pockets where EV penetration still remains low. Ola Electric further plans to have 1,000 partners ahead of the festive season this year. The company has on-boarded 625 partners to expand its sales footprint across India.
The service and sales network expansion comes at a time when social media platforms have been flooded with complaints of service delays at Ola service stations.
In another incident, an angry customer allegedly set an Ola Electric showroom on fire in Karnataka’s Kalaburagi district after his scooter was not repaired.
Ola Electric says it will continue to onboard partners to drive EV adoption and provide “seamless sales & after-sales experience across the country.”
The company plans to further leverage this programme for sales and service of its upcoming Roadster portfolio, deepening EV penetration in the motorcycle segment across India.
“Our D2C model has been extremely successful in driving sustainable business growth. The Network Partner Programme will further amplify the benefits of our D2C network as it requires limited capital investment from partners and can be scaled up really fast. While the company-owned stores will be the anchors of our sales and service network, this programme will be instrumental in expanding the EV footprint deeper into the urban and rural markets,” says Bhavish Aggarwal, chairman and MD, Ola Electric.
"We will continue to expand and invest in our front-end network to accelerate EV adoption to #EndICEAge, and by the end of next year, will have 10,000 Network Partners across the country," he adds.
To further expand its business, Ola Electric is eyeing the light-weight commuter motorcycle segment which constitutes 75% of India’s two-wheeler market. On August 15, the Bhavish Aggarwal-led two-wheeler maker showcased a new range of Roadster electric, comprising Roadster X (2.5 kWh, 3.5 kWh, 4.5 kWh), Roadster (3.5 kWh, 4.5 kWh, 6 kWh), and Roadster Pro (8 kWh, 16 kWh), with prices starting from ₹74,999 and going up to ₹2,49,999. Roadster and Roadster X deliveries will commence from the fourth quarter of the ongoing fiscal while the Roadster Pro will be shipped in 2026.
Two-thirds of India’s 2W market consists of motorcycles, and with Ola’s entry into this segment, EV penetration is poised to further accelerate in the Indian 2W segment, Aggarwal, founder of Ola Electric, said at the time.
The Ola Electric CEO recently said trial production at the company’s cell gigafactory is going on currently and commercial production will start early next year. Ola claims its ‘Bharat 4680 cell’ is five times bigger than existing lithium-ion cylindrical cells used in electric vehicles. Ola Electric was awarded 20 GWh (gigawatt hour) capacity by the government under its PLI scheme for Advanced Chemistry Cell (ACC) battery storage.
