If you are waiting for a Bajaj electric motorcycle here is an update. Rajiv Bajaj – the MD shares his view if he is interested in this domain or not…
If we look closely, it is abundantly clear that our market has truckloads of electric scooter offerings already but, there are very less of electric motorcycles. But with Ola Electric announcing its entry in this segment, there is a lot of buzz here.
Rajiv Bajaj, the MD of Bajaj Auto, is the person who has been credited for transforming the scooter-predominant Bajaj Auto to a motorcycle company. In fact, till its launch of the Chetak electric scooter, Bajaj was very consciously completely away from making scooters.
The manufacturer chose the scooter domain when it thought of entering the electric 2-wheeler space and as of today, it is doing well as the third-largest seller in electric – with the various variants of the Chetak. Now, after having settled down and getting a fairly good idea of this new business, is an electric motorcycle on the cards under Bajaj’s moniker? This, precisely was asked by a host of CNBC TV18 to Rajiv Bajaj at a recent interview.
To this Rajiv Bajaj compared commuter motorcycles to commuter scooters of yesteryears when the transition from a scooter market to motorcycles happened. He said that Indians went to motorcycles primarily because of them being almost 50 percent more fuel efficient than scooters owing to their transmission (automatic vs manual – manual is more fuel efficient). But now in this electric scenario you will have similar drivetrains (motor and the battery) in scooters and motorcycles and they are bound to offer similar speeds, performance, charging and efficiency.
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So, the big advantage that an ICE motorcycle had over an ICE scooter is no more which brings to fore the positive attributes of a scooter like comfort, convenience and utility over a motorcycle. Rajiv summed up by saying that the company believes that scooters will have far more potential than motorcycles and even gave examples of Ultraviolette, Revolt, etc that aren’t doing any great sales in this space. He concluded by saying that…
We are staying very focused on EV scooters…
If we look at the current scenario also, various makers like Oben, Ultraviolette, Kabira, Komaki, Pure EV, Odyssey, Revolt, Tork, Hop, Orxa had tried their hands in electric motorcycles and most of them had shut shops or have no real update at this point and the remaining ones aren’t doing any great either. With Ola’s entry in this space, we may see some action but how long will it sustain is something that time will tell.
