Ola's Electric Car To Get Autonomous Driving Tech

Ola Electric has started with scooter in the Indian market, but their ambitions include bigger things - motorcycles and cars. At a recent event at the Ola factory Bhavesh Aggarwal said that the electric car has been in development for the last 6-8 months and is expected late 2023 or early 2024. 

Slokarth Dash, Head of Strategy and Planning, hinted that the car would be a sub ten lakh Rupee offering. He referred to Ola as a disruptor that aims to serve the needs of the Indian masses. 

At the event Ola also had a demo vehicle showcasing autonomous driving technology. The modified golf cart had a top speed of 20kmph as it took visiting journalists on a taxi rides around a large driveway.  Using two LiDAR cameras, a video camera and GPS it stopped for people and navigated around bends autonomously. Although basic, it is said to be a proof of concept with much work yet to be done. 

Also read:

• Affordable Ola Electric Scooter Incoming For Rs 80,000 

• Ola CEO Hints Upcoming Electric Car With New Render Image

Ola acquired pune based geospatial services provider GeoSpoc earlier this year. The acquisition would help build hi-res maps which could be used to enable autonomous driving systems. It is said that the Ola car would offer some autonomous driving tech too. 

Ola setup a sprawling factory at Krishnagiri in Tamil Nadu where they have setup the first line for manufacturing scooters. The line currently produces up to 1000 scooters a day with plans to go up to 3000-4000 scooters by the end of 2022.

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Ola also manufactures their NMC battery packs at the facility with a current capacity of 500,000 battery packs per annum. Ola set up this facility in a record time and Bhavesh Aggarwal reiterated that they plan to produce cars and two-wheelers in parallel. To meet the 2023-24 timelines much work needs to be done Ola Electric has shown they can compress timelines although the Ola S1 hassuffered from many bugs and issues in the initial batches.  More alarmingly a scooter caught fire recently, the root cause investigation results haven’t been shared yet.