Despite fire accidents, range issues, and service problems still plaguing Ola’s electric division, its top guns have now begun resigning one after another, the CTO being the latest.
Dinesh Radhakrishnan, the company’s former CTO, has left the company. He was responsible for all engineering-related tasks at Ola Electric. Like many other top executives who left the company in 12 months or less, he was with the brand for a little over a year.
Before becoming the CTO of Ola Electric, Radhakrishnan was the company’s engineering head leading technology developments in Ola Cars and Ola Dash, the preowned car portfolio and the instant delivery vertical of Ola launched last year.
But, the brand later curtailed its delivery business owing to regional hassles. Dinesh, then, had reportedly taken up the task at Ola Electric when the S1 Pro got plagued with software issues in its online booking processes. It was at around the same time when the company’s software head, Gaurav Aggarwal, too made an abrupt exit.
Even today, Ola Electric is in the process of refining its software as its scooters face range issues and poor calibration of the battery control units. The company did launch the Move OS update recently but, still, there are complaints from users online.
It is to be noted that, just 3 days back, the news of Ola Cars CEO Arun Sirdeshmukh quitting the company floated on the internet.
Since 2020, many top guns have left the company. They include CTO Swayam Saurabh, COO Gaurav Porwal, HR head Rohit Munjal, and General Counsel Sandeep Chowdhury. Ola Electric co-founders Ankit Jain and Anand Shah have also left the company.
Among of the sea of controvorsies, Ola, however, did manage to register its first milestone by becoming the number 1 EV brand in India in April 2022. It sold 12,683 units of its S1 scooter pushing the usual market leader Hero Electric to the third place with Okinawa taking the second spot.
Ola Electric has faced four major controversies so far. The first one involved an Ola S1 Pro that spontaneously caught fire in Pune. Second, during the start of April, an Ola S1 Pro user in Guwahati was involved in a major accident that resulted in his limbs being broken.
The family of the victim claimed that the accident was caused by the scooter’s regenerative braking system failing, however Ola dispute this, stating that the accident was only caused by over-speeding and panic-braking as indicated by the collected vehicle sensor data.
A third controversy involved an S1 Pro user in Ambur, Tamilnadu, who set his scooter on fire after not receiving any response to complaints regarding range and registration. The final controversy was caused by a scooter user in Pune who hauled his S1 Pro on a donkey due to unresolved complaints.