E-scooters, drones, flying cars: Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal's mobility vision

Ola's Futurefactory, world's largest 2-wheeler unit is building the first in the firm's range of scooters--the Ola S1; firm will soon expand EV range with more scooters, bikes and cars

From electric scooters, cars to drones and flying cars, Ola Chairman and Group CEO Bhavish Aggarwal on Thursday shared his vision of the future of mobility - New Mobility. In India, just 2 per cent (30 million) people own a four-wheeler and only 12 per cent (160 million) own a two-wheeler. “That means more than a billion people in India have been shut out of mobility by this system!," Bhavish said in a company blog post.

New mobility is fixing this archaic system by making mobility universally accessible, sustainable, personalised and convenient. To do this both shared and personal mobility will grow significantly in India through a combination of purpose-built EVs lowering costs, digital retail driving convenience and the cloud enabling personalisation.

Aggarwal said SoftBank-backed Ola is building this New Mobility ecosystem with the consumer at the core. The 3 pillars of this new ecosystem include new mobility services, energy vehicles and auto retail. These three pillars amplify and enhance the impact of each other as part of an integrated Ola New Mobility Platform.

Today Ola provides multi-modal mobility access to 100 million people through taxis, auto-rickshaws, 2 wheelers, day hires and outstation rides. But this is just 7 per cent of India’s population.

“We will bring this multi-modal mobility to all 1.3 billion people by Ola designed EVs customised for the diverse shared mobility needs,” said Aggarwal.

He said EVs (electric vehicles) are 80 per cent cheaper to run so the service will be more affordable and accessible to all. Further, with miniaturisation and high energy density (neither possible in traditional vehicles) Ola said its EVs also create the opportunity for custom vehicle form factors serving many more use cases, better.

The company is seeing strong adoption of its multi-modal platform across Ola’s 150 cities. As the firm expands to 500 towns and bring shared mobility to 500mn people, the multi-modal offerings will grow substantially and will be central to driving affordability and access for these 500 million people.

Aggarwal said 40 per cent of air pollution in India is due to vehicles. This is when just 15 per cent of India owns a vehicle today. This number will grow exponentially as the firm provides more affordable options for shared and personal mobility. “So we will do this through EVs,” he said.

The firm has already moved forward here with its Futurefactory, the largest 2 wheeler factory in the world. It is building the first in the company’s range of scooters – the Ola S1. “In the coming quarters, we will expand our EV range with more scooters, bikes and cars,” said Aggarwal. “Our EVs are smart, connected AI machines and will leapfrog current personal vehicles that are dumb mechanical devices.”

He said they will serve diverse needs through a variety of form factors including kick scooters, e-bikes and even drones and flying cars while costing 80 per cent less to run compared to IC engines. This will cause vehicle ownership to explode to 40 per cent of the population with 50 million 2Ws and 10 million 4Ws sold per year in India in the coming years.

Not just the vehicles but the 100-year-old model of dealership based sales and service, standard financing and insurance and unorganised used vehicle sale and purchase is also out of date and needs to change, according to Aggarwal.

He said the firm has already built a powerful digital retail platform that bypasses physical infrastructure and hosted the largest automotive launch in history with the Ola S1. In future, the firm will open up this platform to other OEMs too giving them unparalleled digital distribution. It will bring consumers wide multi-brand choice online, at home test rides, personalised financing and insurance. The existing ecosystem of dealers will play an important role in this future but in a new paradigm.

This will also create a more trustworthy e-commerce marketplace for used vehicles with real-time pricing and digital access. This is what the company is doing with Ola Cars – reimagining not just buying and selling but the end to end ownership experience of used and new vehicles. Ola Cars is in 30 cities today and will scale up to 100 next year.