My Ola S1 Pro comes home: Delivery & first impressions

So far so good with the overall delivery experience and the service support was timely too.

BHPian soumobakshi recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

As an early adopter who paid in full for the Ola S1 on the 12th of November, it was a long wait.

I had booked an Ola S1 in Black colour and then I received an email somewhere in December, stating that the vehicle shipped to me will be the S1 Pro and the additional features of Pro will be disabled and can be enabled anytime, if I so decide, by paying an upgrade fee of Rs 30k.

Started getting calls from Ola regarding FAME OTP and then Vahaan OTP in order to get the vehicle registration done from the 6th of Jan. The complete On-Line Process was a welcome change and other than meeting a person to provide signatures for the RTO process everything was online and a big for that.

On the 10th of Jan, I received a much welcome SMS from Vahaan, confirming the Registration Number of my first EV and I immediately headed to Digilocker to search and download the RC.

The very next day around 3 pm, I received a call stating that the vehicle will be delivered today and what would be my preferred timings for the same. Communicated the same and the countdown begins

Well, this is the first vehicle that I am buying without a PDI and it was already giving me jitters!

It was around 6 pm on Tuesday the 11th of Jan when I received a call stating that the delivery vehicle has reached my location.

Like a kid getting his first bicycle, I rushed and met the Ola Delivery Team.

They had already started the process of removing the restraints in order to ensure safe delivery and it was in a few minutes that the scooter was rolled down into my apartment parking where the unboxing would take place.

The entire delivery process was flawless and the person in charge explained each and every detail. The vehicle was delivered with more than 100kms range in Normal Mode, which was a sigh of relief since I didn't have the charging point installed.

The next day I did some research and spoke to a few folks who own an eV and got the charging point installed.

Once the installation was done it was time to get the vehicle charged at home using the Charger provided. I must say that the quality of the Charger (Made in Odisha, as per the invoice) is of very good build quality and so is the bag in which it came.

For that matter, the cover which came complimentary with the vehicle was of great quality too.

It took about 2.5 hours to fully charge the battery and it shows the range in various riding modes as it charges too.

Everything was going great and that's when it happened. Suddenly the Touchscreen system won't power up. Called up the OLA customer care and I selected RSA for getting support, but then since my vehicle was parked in my apartment, they decided to route my call to the Service team. The customer care team was not given enough training and it showed up in their Communication. I didn't have faith that anyone would be attending to my reported issue at the end of the conversation. Yes, they were trained that well!

So me being me, I went a poked on Twitter about the recent predicament. Within 30 mins I received a call from Mr Arun Kumar who introduced himself as Service In Charge from Ola electric for Karnataka Region. He was very professional and heard me and checked my availability so that he can send someone to get this fixed within the next 2 hours to my preferred timing as well. Agreed upon a time and he requested if I would pull down the Twitter post, I obliged!

The service technician reached at the stipulated time and he assured me that it was a case of loose contact and he will have it up and running in a short time. And as he had informed, it was indeed a connector that was loose and once it was secured with a zip tie (as additional protection) vehicle was back online.

So far so good with the overall delivery experience and the service support was timely too. And yes the 'Hyper' mode is active in my scooter for now and I must say it's very exhilarating It could turn out to be a very smart move from Ola to convert the S1 customer to S1 Pro by letting them experience the additional features for the first few days. I strongly believe that it will be disabled by the OTA update very shortly.

I just hope that they spend some time training their customer care team who acts as the face of Ola for their customers.

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