Copyright © HT Media Limited
All rights reserved.
Ola Electric on Friday issued an official statement regarding an incident reported by an S1 Pro owner in which he claimed that the front fork of his electric scooter completely broke. The company, in its response, underlined the claim of a thorough testing of each product that comes out of its factory lines and said the front fork breaking ‘are due to isolated high impact accidents.’
An Ola S1 Pro user named Sreenadh Menon recently took to Twitter to share an image of his electric scooter in which its front fork had completely undone. The post gathered a whole lot of attention on the micro-blogging platform and once again raised quality concerns over this particular electric scooter model. The owner also claimed he wasn't speeding when the incident happened.
There were many on social media who once again chose to target Ola Electric for what they said was shoddy quality control checks. There were, however, also many who countered by saying that their respective units had no issues. It is a statement that Ola Electric would subsequently echo. “Vehicle safety & quality standards are of paramount importance at Ola. Ola today has more than 50,000 scooters on the road. So far, our scooters have travelled over ~45 million cumulative km on Indian roads," the official statement from the company read. “The recently reported incidents of front fork breakage are due to isolated high impact accidents. All our scooters undergo rigorous quality and performance assessment across different terrains and riding conditions in India."
High impact accidents, more often than not, are a result of speeding even if the owner of the impacted S1 Pro claims he wasn't guilty of it. It is also not clear if Ola Electric came to the said conclusion after an investigation on its part.
This is not the first time that Ola Electric has suggested - directly or indirectly - that a particular incident with its product is a fault on the rider's part. In April, the company had denied an owner's claim of a faulty regenerative braking system having caused an accident, and had even publicly released a data chart as proof that the said unit was being subjected to sudden bursts of speeds.
At present, mechanical or software-related faults are plaguing Ola Electric's image regardless of where the fault may be at. And while it is also true that scores of owners have taken to Twitter to applaud the product, complaints, from glitches to panel gaps, delivery and service timelines have been galore too. An incident of an S1 Pro unit catching fire has not helped either and Ola Electric also had to issue recall orders for 1,441 units for inspection.