This Company’s Electric Motorcycle Claims 360 Miles Of Range And 120 MPH For $3,000 And It’s Breaking My Brain

One of the biggest problems with electric motorcycles right now is the fact that ones that have decent range cost a fortune and you end up right back to buying another gas bike. India’s Ola Electric thinks it has a solution, but the specs of its new motorcycle are so insane that I just don’t believe it. The new Ola Roadster Pro claims it’ll do 360 miles on a charge, top out at 120 mph, and do that for a touch under $3,000. What in the world?

If you don’t follow the electric motorcycle world, these specs sound just too good to be true. I’ve been testing a 2023 Zero DSR/X for more than a year. That bike is a $22,995 flagship with a 17.3 kWh (15.1 kWh nominal) battery and a city range of 179 miles or an off-road range of 200 miles. It tops out at 113 mph and gets 100 HP from its motor.

Somehow, Ola is saying its new Roadster Pro electric motorcycle will go 360 miles on a charge despite a 16 kWh battery and it’s going to have a higher top speed all for just 250,000 rupees or the equivalent of $2,977. That isn’t a typo, this bike is supposed to cost less than a crappy car on Facebook, yet have as much range as a Tesla. What is going on here?

Who, Again?

Ola Electric was founded in 2017 as a subsidiary of ANI Technologies, the parent company of transportation company Ola.

The founder of Ola is Bhavish Aggarwal and his ventures are basically the Indian equivalents of popular brands here in America. Ola is a ride-hailing service like Uber and Ola Electric is close enough to being something like India’s Tesla. Ola Electric was envisioned as a way to reduce Ola’s dependency on fossil fuels while also getting the masses in India on electric transportation.

To show how serious it is, Ola Electric threw metric tonnes of cash around to construct a massive production facility in just eight months in 2021. This facility is called the Future Factory and Ola says it’s building around 1,000 electric scooters a day inside of it. Ola Electric then owns a total of 500 acres of land on the property so that future expansion is easy. The Future Factory is also seen as a bit of a trailblazer since the vast majority of its workforce is staffed by women.

How did Ola Electric do this? Well, Aggarwal bought the firm from ANI Technologies and then managed to raise $56 million from Tiger Global, $250 million from SoftBank, and some unknown amount of money from Ratan Tata.

Vehicle production kicked off not long after Ola Electric acquired cash-strapped Amsterdam electric scooter maker Etergo. At the time, Etergo was six years deep into developing an electric scooter with swappable batteries and a 150-mile range. Ola Electric promised to finish what Etergo couldn’t and get an electric scooter on India’s roads in 2021.

Ola Electric pulled it off, too, getting what it called the S1 scooter on the road by December 2021. Since then, Ola Electric has taken off like wildfire and now controls more than 30 percent of India’s electric scooter market. Today, Ola sells three different high-tech and surprisingly affordable electric scooters. For example, for the equivalent of $1,597, you could buy the Ola S1 Pro, an electric scooter that goes 75 mph and 121 miles on a charge under India’s extremely generous IDC testing scheme. But still, that’s a deal even with half of the range.

Unfortunately, some think comparisons to Tesla are a bit closer to reality than they sound. But we’ll get back to that in a moment.

The Roadster

This month, Ola has launched pre-orders for its first electric motorcycle, the Roadster series.

The Roadster series consists of three similar motorcycles based on the same modular and scalable architecture. Ola Electric has developed a double cradle frame where the batteries sit where the tank and engine would normally be on a gasser. Under the batteries is a small electric motor and behind that is a swingarm that Ola says can be scaled up or down depending on Ola’s needs.

This new frame supports battery packs ranging from 2.5 kWh each to 7.5 kWh each. It can also handle an 18kW or better motor and Ola uses smart architecture and flat cabling to reduce weight and cost. The motorcycle’s integrated brain allows it to have a hill hold mode, traction control, and cornering ABS. The so-called smart functions of the motorcycle are said to deliver a collision warning system, 5G connectivity, and connected vehicle functions, including a voice assistant. The Roadster even comes with an automatic heated and cooled seat and bars.

Perhaps the wildest of all is the fact that Ola says you’ll be able to play video games from the motorcycle’s LCD display, which sounds pretty unsafe to me.

Alright, so there are three Roadsters. The Roadster is the base model while the Roadster X is the discount model and the Roadster Pro is the flagship.

The standard Roadster has a single disc brake up front and a single disc in the rear plus projector LED headlights, a 6.8-inch display, a 78 mph top speed, and all of the features I noted before. As the chart shows, the biggest battery you can get is 6 kWh, which means 154 overly optimistic miles. Oh, and don’t expect to get back on the road anytime soon because the 6 kWh Roadster takes an excruciating 8 hours to charge.

Here’s a chart to help you figure out what I’m talking about (which you can click to enlarge):

But hey, the Roadster starts at $1,251 for the version with a 3.5 kWh battery, a 72 mph top speed, and 93 miles of range. That’s still a deal. All versions of the normal Roadster get a 17 HP motor. You also get a brake-by-wire system, though Ola doesn’t talk about redundancies.

Step down to the Roadster X and you lose a ton of features. The touchscreen becomes a basic 4.3-inch non-touch display and you lose a security system, hill hold, and you don’t even get a bright headlight. The cost-cutting gets even more aggressive when you realize that Ola also takes away the ABS, active safety systems, and you even get a drum brake in the rear. All versions of the Ola Roadster also come with a rear monoshock except for the Roadster X, which gets twin shocks.

Range figures and battery sizes are just a few ticks off of the regular Roadster, but the motor is detuned to 14 HP. You also cannot get the 6 kWh battery with the Roadster X. The smallest battery is also a 2.5 kWh unit, which gets you 72 miles of range. Again, that’s not bad when you consider that the base price of the Roadster X is a shocking $894. Of course, keep in mind that playing around with exchange rates isn’t always fair, and a U.S. equivalent of this bike would definitely be more expensive. Still, it’s cheap!

Then we get to the Roadster Pro flagship and things start coming off of the rails.

The $3,000 Electric Sport Bike

Things start getting nutty with the Roadster Pro. For starters, its battery is a chunky 16 kWh, or roughly the size of the one powering my Zero long-termer. As I said before, Ola says this battery is good for 360 miles. Of course, I’ll remind you that’s under the very generous Indian test cycle.

But things don’t stop being crazy with the battery. The motor is now cranked up to 70 HP. Now, I wish I could tell you how fast this bike accelerates, but Ola offers only a totally useless acceleration time of 0 mph to 25 mph in 1.2 seconds, which that’s cool, I guess? At least we’re told the top speed is 120 mph, which is properly sporty for an electric motorcycle.

The Roadster Pro also appears to stretch out that scalable platform. It’s larger than its siblings and features dual disc brakes up front. The swingarm of the regular Roadster is also tossed out for a snazzy single-arm unit with a single rotor. The Pro also gets all of the cool features I noted above plus a Race mode for track riding, wheelie control, stoppie control, low-traction modes, and the aforementioned automatic heated and cooled elements. The Pro is topped off with a 10-inch touchscreen with a voice assistant, the ability to play video games, a navigation system, and more.

Pump The Brakes

So here’s where I will be the meanie and cast some doubt.

Let’s start with that range. I get that 360 miles is under the super optimistic Indian Drive Cycle, but even then I’m not really buying it. Consider that my Zero DSR/X tester has a slightly larger battery, yet the best it can do under perfect circumstances (riding extremely slow off-road) is 200 miles. Ola is saying its motorcycle will go 160 more miles despite technically having a slightly smaller battery.

In fairness to Ola, the company says the standard Roadsters will come out early next year while this flagship will be coming out in the fourth quarter of 2026. So hey, the company has more than two years to reach the range it claimed this week. Maybe battery tech will advance that far.

But then we come to that price. Ola Electric says the top-spec Roadster Pro will cost the equivalent of $2,977. As I said before, just converting the currencies of other countries to USD isn’t really fair. But what you can do is compare the prices of other vehicles in the country. Remember that awesome Royal Enfield Classic 350 I bought last year? Right, so that bike costs the equivalent of $2,680 in India.

So Ola says that for just a little bit more than a slow and basic 20 HP Royal Enfield you can buy an electric motorcycle that goes 120 mph and has a huge 16 kWh battery. I think even when you take locality into account the price is suspiciously cheap for what you’re getting. I mean, the Royal Enfield doesn’t have a 10-inch screen with a voice assistant. I believe the projected price even less than I believe the range claim.

Unfortunately, this is where the Tesla comparison comes in. Aggarwal said that the S1 scooter would have Bluetooth, voice commands, cruise control, hill hold, and a mobile app. However, Ola missed its production deadline on the S1 and then put the scooters into production without those features, saying they would come at a later date. Those features did eventually come, but that left a bad taste in the mouths of buyers.

That wasn’t the end of Ola’s problems as forks on its scooters reportedly started breaking off after rough bumps or hard braking events. I don’t have to tell you that it’s dangerous when the whole front end falls off. Indian publication Money Control was especially harsh to Ola as it reported that the company tried to fix the defective forks by offering free “upgrades” rather than an actual recall. Reportedly, Aggarwal blamed the media and the competition for the failure of his company’s products.

But that wasn’t all. Early S1s reportedly suffered from a weird issue of spontaneously switching to reverse mode while the scooters were in forward motion. There’s also a report that real world range doesn’t come close to claims.

This has led to some in India comparing Bhavish Aggarwal to Elon Musk and not in a complimentary way. The two men run successful and influential EV brands but have a knack for making big promises that sometimes don’t make it to production models.

So, it’s hard to tell what’s going to happen here. I mean, all we have are really bad renders and whiffs of vaporware. I have no doubt the Ola Roadster Pro will be an awesome motorcycle if it eventually hits the road. If its specs are anywhere near advertised it would even have the chance of changing the whole electric motorcycle market. But I’m not going to hold my breath for it, and there isn’t even word if it’s coming to the States.

(All bad renders: Ola Electric)