Ather CEO "Tarun Mehta" Slams competitors with savage replies

Introduction:

The raising competition in the EV industry is now attracting a lot of attention from both investors and various competitors. Right now there are very few competitors in the EV-2W market that are countable at the fingertips. Brands like Okinawa, Hero Electric, Ather energy, Pure EV, Ola electric, etc. are fighting hard to capture more and more EV markets in India.

Best EV brands in India

Hero electric

Ather energy

Ola electric

Pure EV

In this EV revolution, brands always find a chance to poke their competitors. When an Ola scooter caught fire in Pune and a wave of negativity that came with various brands of EVs catching fire incidents. Ather found a creative way to poke others and published a short video on their YouTube channel showing how cool their batteries are.

Here are a few key points from his talk at the Mobility conclave:

1. “You want to be super patient, saying yes to everything will fail you as a product company”

Tarun Mehta said this in the context of building a super-efficient, user-friendly product. The way Ather took 8 long years to launch their first pair of products Ather 450X and Ather 450 plus and received an overwhelming response from customers, justifies and explains the context of his statements.

“If you let the market or competition dictate your product roadmap, you are not a product company”

Here the Ather CEO kind of responded to all the people asking “Why Ather isn’t making any product competitive with Ola in terms of specifications”. Tarun Mehta wants people to know Ather isn’t following any benchmark set by any EV maker but instead, he’ll make his own.

“Once you have a bad product and even thousands of people bought it, that doesn’t make you a successful company”

Here Tarun Mehta straightforwardly pokes Ather’s greatest competitor Ola electric for delivering a product that’s causing lots of trouble to the customers. According to him, this isn’t really good practice for building a successful product company.

“Driving traffic now with no hope of sustaining in the next 1-2 years is a terrible strategy”

While taunting their competitors like Pure EV, and Ola electric he directly comes to the point and questions the strategy of good marketing, bad products can survive in the future.

“We do get a lot of questions on why are we not building bikes, trucks, or cars. I would love to build all that, but the company needs to focus… We need to sell like 3-4 million scooters to really happy customers”

This shows the super patients of Ather Energy, he clarifies that unlike other EV makers Ather isn’t gonna rush to enter other industries and will gonna be in the EV-2W market till they win it all.

“Internet companies that started up in Bengaluru – be it Flipkart or Swiggy – these guys have pushed the envelope on product development in general”

Without naming the specific he points to Ather’s competitor Ola who was a service company just like Swiggy, Zomato, etc. and now switching to product companies.

“It’s difficult to build a large business on fast chargers for 2-wheelers in India. Companies’ best space to make it work are OEMs itself”

Tarun Mehta advises the emerging startups and companies working on fast EV charging space that would see a hard time at it’s really difficult to build one. Only OEMs have the best opportunity to build a robust business in the fast EV-2W charging space.

Social Media responses?

Social media has mixed responses to these blunt statements of Trun Mehta. Some just praised him but few people raised a point that “one must act not react”. Here is the complete thread of all the key points of Ather CEO Tarun Mehta.

"If you let the market or competition dictate your product roadmap, you are not a product company."

– @tarunsmehta, Co-founder & CEO, Ather Energy

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— Mint (@livemint) July 28, 2022