Ola Electric Scooter Crumbles While Driving, Breaks Into Two Parts: Massive Mechanical Failures Detected (Full Details)
Ola has contacted us, and issued a statement on this fiasco:
“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 traveled over ~45 million cumulative kms on Indian roads. 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.”
Earlier..
Just days after the purchase window opened, Ola Electric’s S1 Pro scooter may once again put its passengers in danger and it is not fires this time.
Contents
The Incident
A customer took to Twitter to report an incident in which the front suspension of the scooter allegedly broke during low-speed driving.
Front suspension or fork refers to the tube that connects the wheel to the handlebar.
Along with a photo of his wrecked ride, the customer named Sreenadh Menon wrote that the front fork broke despite riding at low speed which could potentially be a very serious situation.
He asked for a replacement or design change on that part.
Not Isolated Incidents
Another user shared a similar story.
Anand Lavakumar, the user, also experienced the front fork falling off after hitting a wall at a speed of 25 kmph in eco mode along an uphill side.
He said that similar issues happened to “some other customers in plain road also.”
These are just two examples of users complaining about the scooters on a public forum.
Angry Customers Form Forum
Some of those problems were related to sudden drop in range, breakdowns, uncontrolled reversing, and registration issues.
There hadn’t been any mechanical failures documented before but that has now changed.
You know that your company is in a bad way with regards to its products and service when angry customers band together to form a union.
A user in Kerala faced the same issue when his fork broke down and said that many from Kerala Ola Scooter Users’ forum have already reported the same.
A Closer Look
Going by the images it appears that the suspension arm has given up in all the cases.
Ola has used a thin forged block metal strip as the suspension arm which is not typical of many single-front-fork scooters worldwide.
Most of them and auto rickshaws use forged hollow metal tubes instead of the block metal that Ola uses.
This is so because such a setup bears more fatigue stress over time and is quite flexible to varying load as well.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.