Ola Introduces All-electric Parcel Services in Bengaluru The company plans to expand the services across India soon
By S Shanthi
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
You're reading BIZ Experiences India, an international franchise of BIZ Experiences Media.
Ride-hailing startup Ola has announced the launch of 'Ola Parcel', which will operate using Ola electric scooters in Bengaluru.
"Launching Ola Parcel today in Bengaluru! Start of an all-electric 2W logistics ecosystem for India," said Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of Ola on X.
With this, Ola enters the parcel delivery service segment to compete the likes of Porter, Swiggy Genie, Uber and Dunzo, who operate in the intra-city parcel delivery space. Ola's rival Uber also offers parcel delivery service through 'Uber Connect'.
Ola will be charging INR 25 for 5km, INR 50 for 10km, INR 75 for 15 km and INR 100 for 20km. "You can use tonight onwards. Expanding across India very soon," Aggarwal added.
Ola said in a media statement that the full-scale rollout of the service will follow in Bengaluru and will be scaled in cities across the country in the next few months,
The shift to an electric fleet
Many players in the segment are moving towards electric vehicles (EVs). For instance, Uber has partnered with Zypp Electric to roll out around 10,000 electric two-wheelers in Delhi. Last month, Amazon announced that it had over 6,000 EVs in its India delivery fleet. In June, BLive, an EV platform said that it had partnered with online food delivery company Zomato to roll out its EVs in 20 cities across India. Around the same time, Swiggy also announced that it had partnered with Taiwanese firm Gogoro, a technology major in battery-swapping ecosystems.
Earlier, TVS Motor said that it would deploy over 10,000 electric scooters over the next two years for Zomato's delivery fleet, according to a regulatory filing by the auto major to the stock exchanges. Moreover, in May this year, electric scooter manufacturer Ola Electric raised $300 million. News reports said that with that the company's valuation was expected to touch the $6 billion valuation mark.
According to experts watching the space, the EV transition in India will be powered by e2Ws and e3Ws and delivery platforms and enablers will have a huge role to play in faster adoption. The World Economic Forum (WEF) paper, published in collaboration with NITI Aayog, also said that the last-mile and urban delivery fleets are leading the adoption of electric two- and three-wheelers in India and are likely the first segments to transition completely to electric.
