Bringing a billion people, more choices, convenience and an affordable mission: Bhavish Aggarwal, CEO, Ola
Bhavish Aggarwal, Co-founder and CEO of Ola shares his vision for the future of mobility with Ola as the company puts consumers at the core of its new mobility ecosystem. As Ola and our various businesses grow, I sometimes get asked how they connect with each other. So I want to share our vision of the future of mobility, which we call New Mobility, and how we’re building it. Through the ages, human progress has been closely tied to advancements in mobility. The wheel, the steam engine, internal combustion and jet engines, cars, planes are all mobility inventions that transformed our lives and made movement safer, faster, efficient, convenient and accessible to more and more people. The IC engine, automobiles and the related ecosystem is a remnant of the past and assumes unsustainably high ownership of vehicles manufactured by OEMs and sold through dealers. Consumers have been downgraded to being just a cog in this giant wheel. This is best indicated by Henry Ford’s – ‘You can have whatever colour you want, as long as it’s black’. Try saying that to an ecommerce customer today! In India just 2% (30mn) people own a 4W and only 12% (160mn) own a 2W. That means more than a billion people in India have been shut out of mobility by this system! New mobility is fixing this archaic system by making mobility universally accessible, sustainable, personalised and convenient. To do this both shared and personal mobility will grow significantly in India through a combination of purpose built EVs lowering costs, digital retail driving convenience and the cloud enabling personalisation.
Ola is building this New Mobility ecosystem with the consumer at the core. The 3 pillars of this new ecosystem are: New Mobility Services, New Energy Vehicles and New Auto Retail. These three pillars amplify and enhance the impact of each other as part of an integrated Ola New Mobility Platform. New Mobility Services Today Ola provides multi-modal mobility access to 100M people through Taxis, auto rickshaws, 2Ws, day hires, outstation rides etc. But this is just 7% of India’s population. We will bring this multi-modal mobility to all 1.3B people by Ola designed EVs customised for the diverse shared mobility needs. EVs are 80% cheaper to run so the service will be more affordable and accessible to all. Further, with miniaturisation and high energy density (neither possible in traditional vehicles) our EVs also create the opportunity for custom vehicle form factors serving many more use cases, better. As you use our service more frequently, we will create your unique mobility persona in our cloud and will personalise your experience across shared and personal vehicles. This will also enable new usage models like vehicle subscriptions. We already see strong adoption of our multi-modal platform across Ola’s 150 cities. As we expand to 500 towns and bring shared mobility to 500mn people, the multi-modal offerings will grow substantially and will be central to driving affordability and access for these 500mn people.
inzbc 10 | KiaOra India | October 2021 INZBC.ORG india new zealand business council