The darling of India’s electric scooter industry, Ola Electric, just held a major product unveiling as part of its Customer Day event. In addition to launching its impressively updated electric scooter line with new models, the company also showed off four electric motorcycle concepts.
The electric motorcycles are certainly eye-catching, especially the flagship-looking supersport Diamondhead model. The futuristic bike even incorporates rarely seen hub steering, though the complicated and pricey technology only further stretches the imagination regarding how long it could take such flashy concepts to one day become reality.
In addition to the Diamondhead, Ola also shared images of an upcoming cruiser electric motorcycle, as well as an adventure model, and even a naked roadster.
Ola’s CEO Bhavish Aggarwal described the motorcycles not as concepts, but rather prototypes. There were physical models of each of the bikes on display at the event, and at least one appeared to be working when it was ridden out onto the stage, but “prototype” is still a fairly vague term.
The company has floated 2024 as a potential release year for its electric motorcycles, starting in a “phased manner,” but then again Ola has also made lofty promises regarding product launches that are still years behind.
Unfortunately Ola hasn’t provided any technical or performance specifications on the new electric motorcycles, further underscoring the extremely early-stage nature of the project.
Electrek’s Take
I’m excited to see that Ola is interested in expanding into electric motorcycles. They’ve floated the idea before, but they also claimed to be developing an electric car and we’ve barely even heard crickets on that subject in over a year.
The lack of any concrete numbers at all is also disappointing. Even Kawasaki shared basic tech specs when it unveiled its first electric motorcycle prototype. The figures were laughably terrible, but the company shared them anyway. And to Kawasaki’s credit, the specs on the company’s upcoming production electric motorcycles appear to be just as pitiful. There’s something to be said for consistency, I guess.
But just because I don’t think we need to get too excited just yet for these bikes on account of Ola’s penchant for announcing big plans and not following up on them, there may be hope. There’s still room for excitement about the possibilities.
There’s a reason Ola is so gleefully celebrating its scooter success right now. Barely two years ago the company’s scooters came out of nowhere, rushing from renders to the road in short order. Despite some initial hiccups, they’ve largely been a success. The company has shown impressive numbers and is making a huge push to replace combustion engine scooters and motorbikes in India. Sure, they got some help from buying the original scooter design from a failed European e-scooter company, but then again it also looks their Diamondhead electric motorcycle design is also lifted from a European e-moto company on questionable financial footing after a previous bankruptcy. And so if Ola has made it happen before, who’s to say they won’t succeed to do it again? A couple years from now, we may just be riding around on Ola electric motorcycles.
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