electric scooter: Ola Electric will miss its target to fully utilise production capacity in 6-8 months: CEO Bhavish Aggarwal

Ola Electric will miss its target to fully utilise installed production capacity in next six to eight months and will achieve only 50 per cent of it by November 2023, founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal said on Friday. At the time of launch of the new S1 Air electric scooter ahead of Diwali last month, he had said the company was already producing more than 1,000 a day at its ‘future factory’ and would be scaling it up significantly beyond that.

“We feel that in the next six to eight months we will exhaust the (current) installed capacity and we are also in parallel expanding our capacity in the future factory,” he had said.

Company officials had insisted that Ola Electric has a current capacity of 20 lakh units per annum at its factory and it would be exhausted in the next six to eight months.

However, in a post on Twitter on Friday sharing the company’s production targets, Aggarwal wrote, “Our cumulative production numbers: Dec 2021: 0; Nov 2022: 1,00,000; Nov 2023: 10,00,000; Nov 2024: 1,00,00,000…This is the journey to #EndICEAge by 2025.”

Ola Electric had said that its factory at Krishnagiri district in Tamil Nadu would have a capacity to produce 1 crore electric two-wheelers annually when fully completed.

On Tuesday Ola Electric had reported sales of 20,000 units in October 2022 on the back of a strong performance during the festive season. It sells electric scooters S1 Pro and S1.

The company had said the purchase window for the new Ola S1 Air would open in February 2023, and deliveries are scheduled to commence from early April next year.