RattanIndia Enterprises, led by IndiaBulls founder Rajiv Rattan, has announced plans to open Revolt electric bike showrooms in 60 new cities by early next year, which will take the total number of showrooms to 75. These new cities include Kolkata, Chandigarh, Lucknow and the national capital.
The current crop of showrooms are located in Bangalore, Jaipur, Surat, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad.
At present, the company has already started taking orders from 70 cities on its website.
“All the new stores will be set up by retail partners across the key cities,” the company said.
Such showrooms are important not just as display and sales centers, but also to offer follow-on support for customers.
The company, for example, is setting up a network of ‘switch stations’ where customers can swap their drained battery for a fully charged one, in case they don’t have time to get it recharged. This can be quite helpful for intercity rides.
“The new centres will not only act as sales points for the company, but also give the customers a chance to experience the vehicle and go through the design, the charging process and how the installation of the charging points take place. Customers can also get a sense of their riding patterns after the test ride,” it added.
Revolt RV400 is, by far, the most aggressively marketed electric motorcycle in India, at a time when even established players are unsure about the viability of electric technology in the motorcycle space.
Speaking about Hero MotoCorp’s own upcoming electric scooter range, the automaker’s CFO Niranjan Gupta had pointed out that his company will keep off the electric motorcycle market for now due to pricing and affordability concerns.
Industry veterans believe that electric motorcycles will be priced so high that most people will not be able to afford one.
However, Revolt Intellicorp’s RV400 is priced at around Rs 1 lakh, prior to RTO charges, which makes it no more expensive than any mid-range motorcycle.
The RV400 promises a single-charge range of 150 km, and a top speed of 85 km/h. It remains to be seen what the actual mileage/charge is, as it would depend quite a lot of driving conditions, terrain, speed, tyre pressure and riding style.
Nevertheless, the bike has been selling like hot cakes every time a new batch is put up for sale on the company’s website, possibly due to petrol prices that have crossed the Rs 100/liter mark in India.
The RV400 comes with a 3KW motor powered by a 72V, 3.24K watt-hour lithium-Ion battery. The bike’s software is able to carry out and display details about the complete bike diagnostics, battery status, historical data on rides.
Revolt is the dream-child of Rajiv Rattan, son of Haryana-based school teachers, who started his entrepreneurial journey by creating IndiaBuils.
Rattan, along with his IIT Delhi batchmates Sameer Gehlaut and Saurabh Mittal, had started Indiabulls in 1999 as India’s first online stock broker, which soon expanded it into one of the country’s fastest growing business conglomerates.
