Ola Electric: When Hype Becomes a Habit and Hardware Becomes a Headache

In August 2024, India watched Ola Electric enter the stock market with the swagger of a startup that believed it was the chosen one. The IPO opened with massive excitement, listed around the seventy-rupee mark, and within days the stock blasted past one-fifty. Investors celebrated like they had found the desi Tesla.

Today that same stock crawls around the forty-rupee range while retail investors stare at charts that look like steep waterfalls. Billions have evaporated. Customers are angry. Showrooms have been vandalised. And the founder—Bhavish Aggarwal—is still busy attacking comedians on social media like a teenager defending his gaming clan.

This is not merely a corporate collapse story.
This is a case study of how ambition without discipline burns money, burns reputation, and sometimes burns scooters too.

The Rise, the Mania, and the Crash No One Wants to Talk About

Ola Electric didn’t enter the market quietly. It entered like a rockstar. The IPO valuation hovered in the massive thirty-thousand-crore range. It raised over six thousand crores from public money. For a moment, everything looked perfect.

Then reality walked in wearing steel boots.

The share price, which once touched around one-fifty-seven, began falling and kept falling until it broke below fifty. Today, it sits near forty. This isn’t a small correction. This is a surgical demolition.

What triggered this?

A mix of poor service, unresolved customer complaints, rising losses, manufacturing troubles, and an aggressive founder who seemed more interested in Twitter wars than customer care or investor confidence.

Bhavish Aggarwal: The Genius, The Gambler, The Growing Problem

Bhavish Aggarwal is undeniably brilliant. He built Ola Cabs from scratch in 2010 and challenged giants like Uber. Later he launched Ola Electric. Then came his AI experiment, Krutrim.

A bold, ambitious resume.

But behind that brilliance is a pattern.

A pattern of unfinished battles, half-baked rollouts, ballooning losses, and constant expansion without fixing the basics.

Ola Cabs: A decade of losses and shrinking global footprint

Ola Cabs has been losing money for years. Even when parts of the business turned profitable on paper, the company as a whole continued to bleed. Eventually, it shut down operations in countries like the UK, Australia and New Zealand. The brand that once wanted to challenge the world quietly retreated home.

Ola Electric: A factory of dreams, a balance sheet of nightmares

Ola Electric’s losses have been climbing every year.
Revenue went up—and then started falling again.
Market share, once around fifty percent, has dropped dramatically as competitors entered with better reliability and better service networks.

And meanwhile, the founder kept pledging more and more of his shares to raise money. Major foreign investors sold their stakes. Confidence in the company’s future dimmed.

Krutrim: The AI unicorn that hasn’t actually done anything

Krutrim became a unicorn overnight. But its financials revealed nearly zero operating revenue and losses running into crores. Employees were hired and fired in short cycles. Multiple layoffs hit the company within months.

Ola’s pattern continued:
Big announcements, small results.

The Scooter Problems No One Can Ignore Anymore

Let’s be brutally honest: Ola scooters became famous, but not always for the right reasons.

Customers reported scooters shutting down mid-ride, batteries acting unpredictably, software glitches, missing features, and service delays that stretched for weeks. Thousands complained. Some service centres were flooded with scooters parked like abandoned aircraft on a tarmac.

And then came the fires.

A few scooters caught fire. Videos went viral. Trust dipped. Fear rose.

The service centre crisis

The biggest flaw was simple:
Ola tried to build a physical product with a software startup mindset.

They sold lakhs of scooters online but built only a fraction of the service infrastructure required to maintain them. Customers ended up driving 30–40 kilometres just to find a centre that could take their complaint. And once the scooter entered the service bay, it often stayed there for weeks.

When mobility itself becomes immobile, customers don’t stay silent.

Some literally burned their scooters in protest.

When the Founder’s Ego Becomes a Liability

A founder’s leadership defines a company’s culture.

Bhavish’s online behaviour—mocking customers, attacking critics, and arguing aggressively on X—became a major corporate risk. Instead of acknowledging issues and showing empathy, he often responded like a man who believed admitting flaws was weakness.

But customers don’t want a superhero.
They want a scooter that works and a company that listens.

Investors noticed the tone.
Customers felt dismissed.
Brand sentiment took a beating.

In a world where one bad tweet can cost millions, his replies sometimes felt like self-inflicted wounds.

The Money Equation: Public Risk, Private Power

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

• Ola Electric raised over six thousand crores from public investors.
• The company remains deeply loss-making.
• The founder’s personal wealth remains enormous while retail investors watch their savings vanish.
• Foreign investors have exited or reduced stakes.
• The stock has crashed more than seventy percent from its high.

This is not illegal.
This is not even unusual in India’s startup ecosystem.

But it raises an ethical question:

When public money enters the picture, shouldn’t responsibility increase, not decrease?

What Does the Future Look Like?

Ola Electric is at a crossroads.
The next few years will decide whether it becomes:

1. A Comeback Story

If Ola focuses hard on:

• quality engineering,
• battery safety,
• real-world testing,
• massive expansion of service centres,
• customer trust rebuilding,
• transparent communication,

…then yes, the company can still become India’s EV hero.

2. An Eternal “Almost-There” Company

Some improvements here and there, but never enough to earn full trust.
Flashes of brilliance overshadowed by recurring issues.
A brand trapped between ambition and execution.

3. A Cautionary Tale

If market share keeps slipping, if losses keep rising, if investors keep leaving, if customer complaints keep exploding—
then Ola Electric might become the next big Indian startup collapse that everyone discusses in business schools as a warning.

What India Really Needs From Its Founders

India is hungry for innovation.
We want world-class EVs, world-class AI, world-class companies.

But we also need world-class discipline, responsibility, and humility from founders.

A true leader:

• listens,
• accepts mistakes,
• fixes what’s broken,
• respects customer pain,
• focuses on fundamentals,
• builds institutions—not ego monuments.

Ola Electric still has the chance to fix its path.
But the window won’t stay open forever.

Final Thought: Vision Is Cheap. Execution Is Everything.

India doesn’t need loud leaders.
India needs reliable products.

India doesn’t need big announcements.
India needs working service centres.

And India definitely doesn’t need founders who fight comedians when customers are fighting to get their scooters back from service bays.

The EV revolution will happen.
The AI revolution will happen.
The tech revolution will happen.

The only question is:

Will Ola be a part of it, or just a warning sign on the highway?

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