Bhavish Aggarwal & Ankit Bhati on EV Transition

Ola Electric was spun out in 2017 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of ANI Technologies, Ola Cabs' parent, with the initial mission of decarbonising Ola's own cab fleet. The Nagpur pilot of May 2017 — charging stations and procured e-cabs, e-buses and e-rickshaws — was the first credible Indian experiment in mass electric mobility by a private platform.

Ola Electric acquired Amsterdam-based crowdfunded scooter maker Etergo for 3.75 million euros in May 2020 — a distress sale that gave Ola its first product platform. The purchase compressed the build-vs-buy decision: rather than designing a scooter from scratch, Ola inherited Etergo's engineering and reworked it for Indian roads and pricing.

In April 2022 Bhavish announced he was stepping away from day-to-day operations of Ola Consumer to focus on Ola Electric and quick-commerce bets. The shift effectively partitioned his time toward the EV and AI thesis, leaving the cab business to a leaner operating leadership and signalling where he saw the next decade of value creation.

In December 2020 Ola committed about 2,400 crore rupees (around 324 million dollars) to build what it called the world's largest two-wheeler factory on a 500-acre site in Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu. The Future Factory deployed automated robots in welding, painting and battery lines, and made headlines by staffing its manufacturing floor entirely with women — an unusual gendered labour choice in Indian auto manufacturing.

Customer bookings hit 500,000 in the first month of Ola S1 scooter availability, and the company began deliveries in December 2021 with the first hundred units in Bengaluru and Chennai. Several promised features were not enabled at launch — a software-readiness lag that drew early criticism and prompted iterative over-the-air updates through 2022.

Ola Electric's IPO in August 2024 raised about 5,500 crore rupees, with founder Aggarwal and other existing shareholders selling 84.9 million shares. The listing briefly doubled Bhavish's net worth and put Ola Electric among the few Indian EV pure-plays trading on the public markets — a landmark for India's electric two-wheeler category.

After a March 2022 scooter fire in Pune, Ola recalled 1,441 units as a 'pre-emptive measure,' and later in 2023 offered free front-fork arm replacements on the S1 and S1 Pro after safety-defect criticism. The recall-and-fix cycle illustrated the reputational cost of moving from crowdfunding-stage prototype to mass production at scale.