Amid fire investigation, Ola buckles to pressure, recalls 1,441 scooters
- ByStartupStory | April 25, 2022
As scrutiny grows over vehicles catching fire across the country, Ola Electric is recalling 1,441 electric scooters. The company maintained, even as the extent of the recall appears far from isolated, that their internal investigation into the March 26th vehicle fire incident in Pune is ongoing and the preliminary assessment reveals that the thermal incident was likely an isolated one. Similar recall of 3,215 units is followed by the recall initiated by Okinawa Autotech for its PraisePro model. Unlike its original ride-sharing business, where it could ride out customer complaints by calling them isolated incidents or blaming it on its driver partners, the announcement appears to confirm a realisation at the firm that the electric scooter products business will demand a different approach to such issues.
Ola Electric added in a statement sent to the press that they will be conducting a detailed diagnostics and health check of the scooters in the specific batch and therefore are issuing a voluntary recall of 1,441 vehicles, as a pre-emptive measure.
By their service engineers these scooters will be inspected and across all battery systems as well as the safety systems it will go through a thorough diagnostics, the company said.
Officials from the Indian Institute of Science and the Centre for Fire, Explosive and Environment Safety has been deputed by the government in order to investigate these incidents, which have occurred for bikes manufactured by Ola Electric, Jitendra EV, Okinawa Autotech, and Pure EV.
The government is yet to respond to an Entrackr RTI request for a copy of their report if submitted, it’s not clear if the two officials have submitted their report to the government yet. On Thursday, Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari publicly called on EV manufacturers so as to recall ‘defective’ batches and said that an expert committee would be constituted in order to look into these incidents. ‘Heavy fines’ for manufacturers slipping up on safety norms has also been threatened by him.
On EV scooters, Dozens of fires have been reported across the country. As was the case in Ola’s March 26 fire, the problem in most of these seem to be lithium ion batteries combusting. With Tesla vehicles having dealth with a fair amount of them (although they’re mostly not spontaneous fires, like the ones being reported for scooters in India), Lithium ion Lithium ion batteries are notorious for such incidents.
Tarun Mehta, Ather’s founder-CEO, said in a statement last month that a lot of manufacturers have been building and using battery packs that were actually architected for the Chinese market.
The accelerated cycle from drawing board to market might be backfiring here as Ola Electric, which by sales in the two-wheeler electric market in March this year behind Hero Electric, raced to the number 2 position. Ever since its scooters first hit the markets, quality issues have been cropping up, and the firm risks slowing adoption for all by the negative publicity, this early in the evolution of the category.
Incredibly, by trying to shift the blame for the accident on March 26 to the driver for driving at high speeds, the firm has already made a false step in its handling of the mini-crisis, as it claims. Foolishly, from its own records, without any third-party validation or the owner’s permission the firm did so by sharing detailed telemetry data of the scooter’s performance. In order to haunt the firm the move might yet come back.
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