Ola founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal engaged in a verbal spat with comedian Kunal Kamra on X (Formerly Twitter) regarding the service situation of Ola Electric’s S1 series of EV scooters.
It all started with Kamra posting on X, an image of an Ola dealership with a large number of Ola scooters standing on its front gathering dust, presumably waiting to be serviced.
“Do indian consumers have a voice? Do they deserve this?” Kamra wrote. “Two wheelers are many daily wage workers lifeline,” he wrote, potentially referring to the fact that many gig workers use scooters for their jobs.
Kamra went on to tag Minister of Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari, asking him, “is this how Indians will get to using EV’s?”
He also tagged the Department of Consumer Affairs in his post, asking “any word?”
Furthermore, he invited anyone who has had issues with OLA electric to comment and their story below the post.
Bhavish Aggarwal responded to Kamra’s post by accusing his tweet as having been a paid one. “Since you care so much @kunalkamra88, come and help us out! I’ll even pay more than you earned for this paid tweet or from your failed comedy career,” he wrote.
“Or else sit quiet and let us focus on fixing the issues for the real customers,” Aggarwal wrote.
“We’re expanding service network fast and backlogs will be cleared soon,” he added.
Aggarwal’s reaction gained well over 170k views, drawing controversy in the comments, with multiple netizens calling his reaction “arrogant.”
“Focus on customer service, take feedbacks in the right spirit and work on improving your product if you want to stay in the game long term,” wrote a user.
“It’s great that you’re expanding the service, but your tone comes across like you’re doing some favor,” wrote another. “Imagine a middle-class person saving 3-4 months of salary to buy an OLA, only for it to have problems in the first week and then park at your service center for days.”