How I got my first bike?

I lived in a small town called Boleng tucked away in Arunachal Pradesh where I learnt cycling on a patch of road of less than 500m which was not going up and down like every other road did. My dad taught me riding a bike when I was in 9th standard. When I came to Bangalore after college I was very keen to get a bike and was planning to buy Bajaj Avenger due to my very average height. But my parents were not confident with my biking skills and hence it took a long winded road to own a bike. As the luck would have it, I started working for a two wheeler company.

I would like to state that Ather Energy is my employer and this review is based on my first 1K+ ride on the 450.

So when I started working at Ather I had decided that this is going to be my first bike and my parents wouldn’t be able to veto it :-). I had already registered for the per-order interest but then there was a internal list being floated to employee order and I did register. 

It took some time but I was able to get the delivery this February which was probably the third lot of internal deliveries and have been using it since then. It has mostly replaced my office commute from a car (recently started using Car again due to rains) and nearby longer walks, hence haven’t clocked a lot of distance as yet.

Features

Electric bikes in India were known for not having registration due to their low speeds and many thought that no driving license is needed. Ather 450 was no compromise bike and it does equally good when compared to most of gasoline powered scooters with bunch of features unheard of in this segment. So when compared to the competition it was good in the basic premise of transportation from A to B with a powerful motor supported by battery pack. The overall clean design philosophy followed made it stand out on the road from other vehicles. There were bunch of features like  dashboard with 7 inch color TFT LCD with touch enabled and cellular connectivity and GNSS capabilities inbuilt. There are other sensors like IMU that has helped to create features like Auto-Indicator off. Just being electric helps one to monitor a lot of stuff on the bike for which additional sensors will be needed on a conventional scooters. There is already written a lot about features so I will stop here.

My Experience

I like the stability of the bike on the road and the acceleration that you get right from the start. I am not a speed junkie so I drive it slow but overtaking other people hasn’t been that big of a trouble. I myself thought on-board navigation may not be used all that much but due to my really bad road sense whenever I go off to a new place I have used on board navigation that has been really good. Haven’t had to stop and take my phone to see google maps. Extra storage space that fits my full face helmet is quite good. Dogs have been noticing the bike little more maybe due to the high frequency hums that irritates them maybe.

Connected vehicles enable a whole lot things for the vehicle in future. Here is an example, I was going over to HSR Layout, ironically to show the bike to a friend of mine, 27th main was really crowded and I was trying to stop after my friend waved at me. Somehow there was a scooter guy who came and hit me from back. I had a fall but both me and the bike escaped with minor scratches. I came in office the next day and asked one of the colleague to just check the data of that time and he just asked me “did you had a fall”. Note that I never told him about the incident. This can enable the product to send alerts back to server to do whole range to things.

Having ridden electric bike for so many days there was only once I had a low battery anxiety. With public infrastructure that Ather is also building this anxiety should decrease and city travel should not be a big challenge.

Future?

Electric Automobiles have existed as long as the gasoline powered automobiles have existed. For quite sometime Gasoline powered automobiles had ruled the market but now things are changing. One can run electric theoretically as long as sun shines (we are far away from being able to harness Sun’s potential in a big way) whereas petroleum is limited resource that will run out much before the Sun stops. In the long run dependency on fossil fuels needs to go down and electric mobility does help in that aspect.