New Vida Electric Scooters To Be Launched In The New Few Months

And one of the upcoming electric scooters could be a more affordable Vida V1 scooter

Hero MotoCorp will be expanding the Vida lineup in the first half of this financial year (till the end of September 2024) with new launches in the pipeline, as revealed in a recent earnings call. 

The EV maker revealed that it will be launching electric scooters in “each of the three segments of premium, mid and mass”...meaning the brand intends to have something for buyers with all sorts of budgets. Additionally, Swadesh Srivastava, Chief Business Officer- Emerging Mobility BU, said, “...people are launching products with the smaller battery, and obviously in our portfolio that also exists and will come out in the due course of time”. 

The Vida V1 Plus and the Vida V1 Pro are priced at Rs 1,19,900 and Rs 1,49,000, so it is high time that the Vida lineup gets a more affordable electric scooter with a price tag of around Rs 1 lakh because manufacturers like Ola Electric already have the Ola S1 X’s prices starting at Rs 69,999. Even the TVS iQube recently got a 2.2kWh variant with a price tag of Rs 94,999 (all prices ex-showroom Bengaluru including EMPS 2024, which stands for Electric Mobility Promotion Scheme 2024). And Bajaj Auto is also about to launch a more affordable variant of the Bajaj Chetak in the next few weeks. 

As for the mid and premium segments, we think there could be a more premium offering, slotted above the Vida V1 Pro to compete with the TVS iQube ST (5.1kWh) variant, which costs Rs 1,85,373 (ex-showroom Bengaluru). 

We also think Hero MotoCorp could probably reduce the prices of the V1 Pro and V1 Plus as Swadesh Srivastava (Chief Business Officer) said, “...we are prepared on reduced subsidy as well and obviously as Niranjan Gupta (Chief Executive Officer, Hero MotoCorp) mentioned aggressively working on our cost reduction roadmap”

This means the brand is working on cost reduction strategies, one of which could obviously be a smaller battery pack as the brand talked about that too, in this very call. It’s also evident that Hero is prepared to be in a market with reduced subsidy. The need to do that has certainly been at the forefront of every EV maker’s strategy for the last couple of months with the replacement of FAME 2 subsidy that ended on March 31, 2024 with new EMPS 2024 which offers lesser savings. As a result, prices of electric vehicles have gone up since. That said, Niranjan Gupta also specified cutting off the subsidies entirely isn’t something that should happen, saying, “...we believe that subsidies will be required for a bit longer period of time to support the industry”.

One final bit that Swadesh Srivastava talked about was the PLI (Production Linked Incentive) scheme certificate. He said, “...as an entity we already have the certificate for PLI. Now the upcoming products, which we have mentioned last time, we will be launching very soon in the H1 of this year, you will see those getting the PLI benefits very soon”. For the uninitiated, PLI is a scheme that offers subsidies to boost local manufacturing of components of an electric vehicle, so the savings should be passed on to new products that will be more competitively priced.

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Also, it was revealed that Hero will be launching the Hero Xoom 125 and the Hero Xoom 160 very soon, about which we talked about in a previous story. In fact, Hero might even be gearing up a rival for the Triumph Scrambler 400 X! More about it here.