Ola S1 Pro Electric Scooter: Don't Buy

I test-drove the Ola S1 Pro, and I wouldn’t recommend you buy it.

+ I was first in line at a traffic light, specifically the one you get after descending Domlur Flyover towards Indiranagar. When it turned green, I gave it a lot of throttle, and everyone else was behind me in the distance. I was happy, and it was good to drive on an empty road. I looked at the speedo and it showed 82 kph. I was shocked. The road, 100 feet road, is not at all suitable for this speed, so I immediately braked. The Ola, like the Ather Apex, accelerates effortlessly.

- The UI is unresponsive.

- Some screens failed to load, both in the scooter and on the app. They gave errors or loaded blank. The salesman tried to brush this away as not a big deal.

- A customer had come to the showroom to seek help with his Ola scooter, but the people in the showroom weren’t interested in helping him. They dismissed him by telling him to file a complaint in the app. The customer explained that he did and nobody responded or resolved the issue. The Ola employees didn’t care and just wanted him gone. The Ola showroom is swanky, but that doesn’t fool anyone into trusting Ola.

Olas have caught fire, both in Bangalore:

and in Pune:

Another customer was so fed up that he set his scooter on fire:

And another hammered it to bits:

Another hired a donkey to pull his Ola:

Another in Karnataka set an Ola showroom on fire:

I don’t encourage this, but imagine how frustrated the customer might have felt with Ola’s cheating that he felt he had no other recourse.

Some Ola service centers are piling up scooters instead of repairing them:

The government has finally woken up. The Central Consumer Protection Authority, which doesn’t protect consumers, has sent Ola a show-cause notice.

Run, don’t walk, from Ola.