The electric two wheeler companies seem to be competing not only their products and pricing, but also on the quality of put-downs they can deliver to their competitors.
Bajaj Auto MD Rajiv Bajaj has trolled Ola saying “Ola To Ola Hai, Chetak To Shola Hai.” Chetak is Bajaj’s electric two wheeler, and Bajaj said it had become the top-selling electric two-wheeler in India. “My son Rishabh who has been part of the Electric Chetak team for the past 2.5 years told me this morning that based of December VAHAN registration data, our electric scooter Chetak is now the largest selling electric scooter, not third largest, in the country,” he said at a CNBC event. Rajiv Bajaj followed this update by taking a dig at Ola Electric, saying “Ola toh Ola hai, Chetak shola hai (Ola is just Ola, Chetak is a fire).”
Rajiv Bajaj’s remark comes after November data revealed that Ola’s marketshare had fallen to its lowest in several quarters, and Bajaj and TVS were hot on its heels. As per Vahan data for November, Ola had 24.5 percent of the EV two-wheeler in the month. It was closely followed by TVS at 23 percent and Bajaj at 22 percent.
Ola’s market share has declined steadily in recent months. In June, it had a market share of 49 percent, which fell to 39 percent in July, 32 percent in August, and 27 percent in September. In October, Ola Electric’s market share rose marginally to 30 percent, but has now fallen to 24 percent in November.
And it’s at this moment that Bajaj — which is right behind Ola with 22 percent market share — has chosen to say “Ola to Ola hai, Chetak to Shola hai”. This isn’t the first time that Rajiv Bajaj has trolled Ola. In 2021, Rajiv Bajaj had said that Bajaj would eat companies like Ola for breakfast. “We are champions and champions eat OATS for breakfast ( an acronym for startups like Ola, Ather, Tork Motors and SmartE),” he had said. Ola too has been directly attacking Bajaj, claiming that it’ll “end the ICE age” — ICE is the Internal Combustion Engine, which powers petrol and diesel vehicles, and Ola has been saying that it’ll make most of Bajaj’s portfolio extinct with its own electric offerings. It remains to be seen how the electric scooter wars pan out, but at the moment there seem to be enough sparks among the top players in the space to make a combustion engine proud.