Opinion | Ola Electric’s faulty front fork design highlights a history of problems with its scooters

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Ola Electric and its founder Bhavish Aggarwal’s social media channels are abuzz with press statements and videos that attest how extensive the brand’s testing procedures are when it comes to the structural integrity of its flagship product – the Ola S1 Pro – and its budget version, the S1. These statements come shortly after Ola Electric chose to issue a recall under the guise of offering a free upgrade to a new front fork design to customers who wished to do so. The company has been widely accused of trying to surreptitiously fix a glaring safety hazard without acknowledging it as such, and more importantly, informing its customers of the issue. This has prompted a series of rebuttals from the founder in defence of the company’s “continuous engineering” approach which purports to continuously optimise the scooter – a product whose value, conventionally, depreciates over time through wear and tear, a product that is, in stock form, its best version when it leaves the factory.

The recent spate of incidents involving the collapse of the Ola S1 Pro’s front fork, seem to suggest that the scooters themselves aren’t always ready for the rigours of the real world right out of the factory gate. In January 2023, a customer of the Ola S1 claimed to have met with an accident after the front suspension broke at a speed of 35kph. The claim was made via a tweet that has since been deleted.

After news of more such front fork failures emerged, Ola Electric was quick to release a statement stating explicitly that the concerns over this issue were unfounded, before mentioning in the next line that it was offering a free upgrade.

By choosing to not only downplay the severity of an issue, but denying it altogether, Ola Electric continues to put its customers in harm's way. Simply put, if the customer concern is unfounded then the free upgrade to a new front fork design should not be necessary. And if the upgrade is, if not necessary, then advisable, Ola should volunteer to make a mandatory upgrade – the very definition of a recall – instead of leaving it to the at least 200,000 customers, several of whom will continue to ride scooters with a faulty design by believing Ola’s claims of sound structural engineering.

Long-standing issue

It should also be mentioned that the front fork collapse reported in January 2023 wasn’t an isolated incident. Issues pertaining to the S1 Pro’s front fork began to surface in May 2022, when a Twitter user posted an image of a broken front fork that had dislodged the front wheel of the scooter. This was immediately followed by other Twitter users responding with similar images, where three different scooters appear to have suffered the same structural damage at the same point. While Aggarwal claimed that a lot of the images that surfaced online were planted by competitors and were clearly from scooters involved in accidents involving frontal impact, by Ola Electric’s own admission, over 218 incidents of front fork failure have been recorded.

Bhavish Aggarwal, Ola’s founder, has responded to these incidents by blaming the media and competition, and denying allegations of shoddy workmanship and technical glitches in the scooter. Still, every Tweet by the founder is countered with a multitude of consumer comments pointing to unaddressed mechanical issues.

The front fork integrity issue isn’t the first time Ola Electric’s maiden offering has faced a serious technical error. Earlier there were reports of the scooter suddenly switching to reverse mode causing multiple accidents. Ola offered no acknowledgement from its side that such an issue had been noted, nor did the company announce a recall to address the grave software problem.

Neither of these were incidents pertaining to a sudden drop in range (although those existed too) or a flawed Satnav. Brands can make mechanical or engineering errors, which are fixed via recalls. This shows that among other things, the brand is willing to put its reputation on the line to ensure passenger safety. In Ola Electric’s case, the brand seems to be more interested in preserving its own image as a disrupter and maker of avant-garde scooters, than ensuring passenger safety.

The potential solution

Although Ola claims to have revolutionised India’s EV space with a home-grown offering, the scooter and its proprietary tech was acquired from Dutch e-scooter maker Etergo. When brought to India, Ola essentially stuck to the original design and components, while switching from a removable battery pack found in the Etergo to a fixed one offering more power and range. This was done to enable easier and cheaper chassis re-design to accommodate the new fixed battery pack. The S1 was also given a bigger electric motor to put out more power.

On paper, the S1 Pro is a much better scooter than the one offered by Etergo. Indeed, when things work flawlessly, the Ola S1 Pro is easily among the country’s fastest, best-performing e-scooters. However, it can’t be denied that many of the fitments were originally made for smooth European roads, which led to several issues, including ones involving the low-cost S1 whose launch was delayed by a year due to battery overheating issues during the scooter’s testing stages. Similarly, the unconventional front fork design used by Ola and Etergo uses a single-sided front fork as opposed to the trail link front fork design used by the Activa 110. Honda, for its part, did initiate a recall back in 2018, for a malfunctioning flange in the telescopic front fork design found on the more expensive Honda Activa 125 and Honda Aviator. This reaffirms the fact that calling a recall and putting individual rider safety first doesn’t weaken a product. It instils public faith, something that’s in dire need of reinstatement when it comes to Ola Electric.

Ola’s unconventional suspension design, while giving the scooter a cleaner front design, and exceptional ride quality, doesn’t seem to be suited to Indian roads, and thus, could benefit from a more robust telescopic fork suspension. Ola Electric, hasn’t announced whether it will be introducing a new suspension design, only that it will be reinforcing the current design with an added brace, thereby improving structural integrity with a potentially low-cost solution. Ola’s budget S1 Air offers telescopic suspension which, while not as novel, is more robust and commonplace.

The road ahead

In what appears to be an effort to preserve the brand image, Bhavish Aggarwal, and, by extension, Ola Electric, seem to take a three-pronged approach to every crisis: obfuscate the truth, accuse the media of being agenda-driven and then offer a distraction in the form of future targets (such as an EV or in this instance, beta-testing novel ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) technology, designed for cars, on its scooters) while incorporating nationalistic rhetoric to sell more vehicles. It’s an approach that has, undoubtedly worked for the brand, having occupied a greater market share with each passing year.

However, behind the twitter trolls and bots, lie multiple cases of beleaguered customers who aren’t quite sure what their newly purchased premium e-scooter – a beacon of India’s potential global supremacy when it comes to manufacturing e2Ws – might throw at them. If Ola Electric is to truly emerge as a world-class maker of e-scooters on the back of conquering the world’s largest two-wheeler market, it must engineer its products to suit the harsh conditions of that market.

Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication