Ola Electric’s service challenges impacted brand trust: Bhavish Aggarwal

Ola Electric chairman and managing director Bhavish Aggarwal on Friday said the electric vehicle maker’s service-related challenges have impacted brand trust.

“We do have a service challenge. That has impacted brand trust,” Aggarwal told investors after the EV maker announced its third-quarter earnings.

Ola Electric has witnessed a consistent decline in market share over the past three months with retail sales falling below the 10,000 units mark for the third straight month in January. Ola recorded 7,516 EV registrations in January, ranking fifth in terms of sales behind TVS Motor, Bajaj Auto, Ather Energy, and Hero MotoCorp, according to VAHAN data. Its pure-play EV rival Ather sold around three times more electric two-wheelers last month.

Aggarwal, once the poster boy of India’s electrification journey, said his company now plans to rebuild the brand trust.

“Brand trust will take some time to recover,” Aggarwal acknowledged, stating that it will take another quarter to fix service challenges. “Volumes have increased in areas where we have solved service challenges,” said Aggarwal.
In a shareholders’ letter, Ola Electric claimed that it has reduced service backlogs by nearly half, from 14 days in November to 7–8 days currently, and with further reductions underway. “We are now completing 80% of service tickets on the same day,” it said.

Ola Electric’s revenue shrank 55% to Rs 470 crore for the third quarter while its net loss narrowed to Rs 487 crore in Q3 2025-26 from Rs 564 crore in the year-ago period.

“As sales recover, we will see a faster roadmap to profitability,” said Aggarwal, adding that he is not worried about the decline in market share in the short-term.

Recent sales softness was driven by service perception rather than product competitiveness, the company said in its shareholders’ letter. “As service metrics normalise and volumes recover, the combination of improved margins and a structurally lower cost base materially accelerates our path to profitability,” it said.

On battery cell gigafactory, Aggarwal said Ola Electric is going to tap into the energy storage requirements in India and globally. “We are the only Indian company to have operationalized the gigafactory. It highlights the company’s strong capability, talent and manufacturing strength,” he said.

Ola Electric is currently operating at 2.5 GWh of installed capacity. It plans to scale it up to 6 GWh by March 2026. Over the next 12 months, the company plans to increase in-house cell penetration across our automotive portfolio, deepen vertical integration and improve unit economics.