re: Electric scooters catching fire in India Quote:
Originally Posted by skyocean All I meant is its unfair to target Ola for a one off fire incident. |
It is fair to targer ola, since the issue are of their own making. There were reports of mismanagement, top executives leaving (because of announcement of launching of unfinished product) even before the launch of the vehicle.
This article gives some insights on the issues (it came in November 2021) https://the-ken.com/story/the-hazard...need-for-speed
One should support the company, but they can't be given a free pass just because they are launcing something fast. If you compromise on quality, the trust in EVs in consumers will go down. Since the cost of EVs are on higher side, no-one will be willing to put over lakhs Rupees for a vechile which will heat up and stop going uphill, or for a charged battery whose range goes down to zero in few seconds.
Here are few excerpts from the article: Quote:
Shortcuts to success
After revealing that it’s building the world’s biggest two-wheeler factory in January, Ola Electric announced that it wanted to begin deliveries by July itself.
Such timelines are unheard of in the auto industry, where there’s a definite time period required to build a prototype, test, and launch the vehicle in the market, said an Ola Electric executive. “If you are reducing that [time period], you are bypassing something.” The executive requested anonymity as they weren’t authorised to speak with the media.
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The Ken has learnt that, in the past few months, many top executives have left the company. These include Hareesh KT, Ola Electrics’ head of battery engineering and BMS; Sourabh Grover, director of product planning; Sourabh Gupta, chief of vehicle engineering and technology; and Joseph Thomas, head of quality assurance. Most of the engineers who worked on the scooter in its early days have also left the company, said the former executive. Their responsibilities have since fallen on the shoulders of younger engineers.
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The biggest concern is the reliability of the vehicle because of the unavailability of all the promised features. “We’re still not sure if the scooter is a 10/10 or 8/10,” said a current executive.
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“I was literally shocked when I heard about the vehicle launch because most of the software modules weren’t completely developed and tested. Lots of bugs were reported at initial testing itself,” said a current executive.
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We’ve already written about how the mercurial Bhavish Aggarwal, who founded Ola Cabs in 2010 when he was 25, is no ordinary CEO. But for all his methods and madness, he isn’t an automotive guy. “He believes that you can throw manpower and resources to solve problems,” said one of the former executives quoted above.
And that’s the primary issue here.
The company did try to tackle the problem by increasing the salary of employees significantly. However, this made matters worse. People started lying to the top management about meeting deadlines in order to escape the sack, according to three executives quoted above. The goal was simple: stick around the company for a few months, increase your salary, and leave
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Companies usually make around 200 vehicles and send them across the country for testing for at least a year or two. By that time, the supplier is informed well in advance before production about all the necessary changes that need to be made; the assembly line is set after that. Once the vehicle gets into production, everything is ready. The process is well planned.
At Ola, though, everything happens simultaneously—engineering, assembly line, testing, supply chain—and it’s in constant flux
Some current and former executives are also concerned about the lack of testing. The scooter has only been tested on the road in Bengaluru and for homologation in Pune—two cities with forgiving weather conditions. They are not sure how the scooter would fare in hotter cities like Chennai and Jaipur. While some executives suggested that enough temperature tests have been done in a lab Ola has built at Electronic City in Bengaluru, others believe that isn’t enough—a lab can’t replicate real-life weather conditions.
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Inside the Futurefactory, many processes are yet to be automated. The battery assembly line—which is one of the most intricate and sensitive processes in manufacturing, involving 300 battery cells connected by 600 electrical connections for a single scooter—is done mostly manually at the moment
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Vehicles are not software product where its fine if things crash, and you just restart it and it will get working, or where you fix things in future updates.
Even for mission critical softwares (e.g avionics, etc) there is through testing and there is no leeway for bugs there before deployment |