Bhavish Aggarwal's Second Coming? Ola Bets Big On Electric Motorcycles

Ola Electric is making an aggressive push into the nascent electric motorcycle market with competitively priced models and in-house battery manufacturing, aiming to overcome past challenges and dominate the segment.

There have been at least five ice ages in Earth’s history going back millions of years.

Bhavish Aggarwal has tried to disrupt the most recent one for the last few years -- that’s a play on the acronym for internal combustion engine -- but the attempts failed.

Now the Ola Electric founder is having one more go at upending the long reign of engines that run on dirty fossil fuel.

Aggarwal is looking to do so by offering consumers electric motorcycles at aggressive pricing to push mass volumes.

The strategy is not new -- three years ago he challenged the big boys TVS and Bajaj by being first off the block to sell electric scooters in large volumes, offering cheap prices and discounts.

Coming from nowhere, the company grabbed over 36 per cent share of the electric two-wheeler market in FY24, zooming to the top of the pecking order.

But then serious issues of product quality and poor servicing infrastructure saw consumer complaints mount, and Ola’s sales slipped just as dramatically as they had risen.

As much as a third of its market share was wiped out -- from 36 per cent in FY24 to a mere 12.5 per cent in FY26 -- as Ola slipped down the pecking order to number four in the last financial year.

This time around, can the Ola Electric founder avoid his earlier mistakes and find his way back into the electric sweepstakes?

Ola's Competitive Edge in Pricing

Competitors Business Standard spoke to acknowledge that Aggarwal’s motorcycles are getting some traction.

The battle is being led by two models of the Roadstar X whose deliveries started in Q1FY26.

One is powered by a 4.5 kWh battery and the other by a 9.1 kWh battery with a range of 500 km -- the highest for any electric two-wheeler in India.

But the latter’s availability is limited -- while Ola says that’s because it did not anticipate such high demand, especially in north India, analysts say it is facing problems ramping up capacity, especially as it is using new batteries, manufactured by the company, for the bigger range.

As a result, bookings for this model are now open for just one day a week and for a limited period.

A senior executive at a leading motorcycle company, an Ola competitor, said: “The 4.5 kWh Roadstar X priced now at ₹98,560 provides huge value for money for which currently there is no competing product. What they have done is to offer an electric equivalent of an entry-level 150 cc ICE bike in terms of specifications and performance but at a price of a 100-110 cc ICE bike.”

The pricing game is the same for the 9.1 kwh bike which was launched last year. Ola has now slashed its price to ₹139,000 from ₹180,000 earlier.

“So you pay only for an electric equivalent of a 110-125 cc ICE bike and get an equivalent electric bike of a 150 cc plus ICE bike with a range of 500 km per charge,” he added.

The Roadstar X 4.5 kWh comes with a top speed of 125 km per hour -- similar to what an entry-level ICE Pulsar from Bajaj Auto with a 150 cc engine offers.

Not only that, it provides a decent range of 250 km in one charge. Even among electric scooters, competitors are selling a 4 kWh battery powered vehicles at ₹1.4-1.5 lakh -- far higher than what they have to fork out for the Roadstar X.

Other electric motorcycle makers will find it difficult to match Ola’s price-to-value equation, at least for the time being.

For instance, Revolt RV 400 manufactured by Revolt Motors, with 3.2 kWh battery and a much lower range, is priced at ₹1.3 lakh.

Ultraviolette’s 7 kWh or 10 kWh electric bike comes with a price tag of ₹2.5-3 lakh but has a far lower range of 211-320 km -- at double the price of Roadstar’s 9.1 kwh bike.

Similarly, Royal Enfield, a big player, is planning to sell its electric bike, the Flying Flea, at ₹2.79 lakh with a 3.9 kWh battery.

While Ola Electric did not disclose sales figures for electric bikes, analysts said it sold a reasonable 3,000-5,000 Roadstars last month.

Ola has around 50 per cent of the market share in this segment, while in the north this is as high as 70-80 per cent.

Sustainability and Future Outlook

Ola faces tough challenges. The CEO of an electric motorcycle maker said: “The price is great but not sustainable in the long run. So you will only lose money like (you did) with electric scooters and, as a public company which has seen its shares falling like nine pins, that’s not a good strategy.”

The bigger question, he said, is whether Ola has been able to fix its problems of quality, service infrastructure and speed of redressing consumer complaints, all of which have been a big concern.

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Ola Electric executives have a different take. Firstly, Aggarwal said, the company has been able to leverage the advantage of having a shared platform for scooters and bikes, which has made it cheaper to manufacture motorcycles and allowed the company to sell the bikes at attractive price points.

Second, the integration of the cell factory -- Ola Electric is the only Indian electric two-wheeler maker that manufactures its own batteries -- with the vehicle factory has also helped pare costs, especially for the Roadstar 9.1 kWh model which is powered by a new 4680 lithium ion battery.

Third, making the battery cells in India has helped Ola Electric take its localisation mark to beyond the 50 per cent threshold needed to qualify for the government’s production linked incentives for the Roadstar 4.5 gWh bike.

That provides a big 12-14 per cent cost benefit for Ola Electric over its potential rivals, with no other competition in sight, giving it further flexibility in pricing.

Challenges and Market Dynamics

To be sure, Ola continues to face questions on bike performance and quality.

Auto Car in its assessment of the bike was critical of the product and its performance, saying it fell “woefully short of expectations”.

The fact remains that electric motorcycle sales in the country have been miniscule, at less than 10,000 vehicles annually, compared with electric scooters, which have a market penetration of 17 per cent of all scooters (ICE and electric). However, motorcycles in general are a bigger market -- of the 20 million two-wheelers sold last year, 13 million were motorcycles.

The data alone would make it hard for manufacturers to ignore this large market for electrification.

The big problem is that major manufacturers like Bajaj, TVS and Hero MotoCorp haven’t jumped on the electric motorcycle bandwagon yet.

Had they done so, it would have instilled a sense of trust among consumers, which is exactly what happened with electric scooters.

In addition, the bulk of the bike market is in rural India, where electricity and charging infrastructure availability are a big question mark.

The big boys are of course preparing quietly for the battle, but they don’t seem to be in a hurry.

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Ather Energy has publicly confirmed that a team is working on an electric motorbike that could hit the road in one or two years. But the company is waiting to see how the Ola foray shapes up first.

Analysts say Hero MotoCorp has entered into a partnership with US manufacturer Zero Motorcycles and is already working on models catering to India. For Bajaj and TVS it is a work in progress.

The big challenge is whether manufacturers will be able to bring down the price of electric motorcycles to ₹70,000-90,000 -- the price point at which six million non-electric bikes sell in India every year.

That would clearly require technological innovation to squeeze existing costs of production sharply, if one has to make money that is.

It’s early days but, this time around, Aggarwal may well have sparked off the battle of electric motorcycles.

Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff