The Ola app is displayed on a smartphone.
Mint | Hindustan Times | Getty Images
Ola, an Indian competitor to Uber that makes its own electric vehicles, announced Tuesday that it has hired Jaguar Land Rover veteran Wayne Burgess to lead vehicle design.
Burgess, who has worked at Jaguar Land Rover for nearly 20 years on models such as the XF, F-Type, F-Pace SUV and XE, has joined Ola Electric’s electric vehicle business, where he will lead design for the company’s entire EV product Area that includes scooters, bicycles, cars, and other vehicles.
Before Jaguar Land Rover, Burgess worked for premium British automakers such as Aston Martin, Bentley and Rolls Royce. He worked on the Bentley Arnage in 1998 and on the Aston Martin DB9 in the mid-2000s.
Bhavish Aggarwal, Chairman and Group CEO of Ola, said in a statement that Burgess “will bring global appeal and design aesthetics to our electric vehicle transforming industry”. Burgess said he looks forward to leading a team “that will work to create state-of-the-art electric vehicles for the world”.
Ola is the largest hail shipping company in India and competes with Californian heavyweight Uber in several countries around the world.
Headquartered in Bangalore, the company was founded by Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati in 2010 and plans to launch its first electric scooters in the coming months. These vehicles are more like mopeds (motorcycles without a gearbox) than the e-scooters from companies like Bird, Lime, Voi and Tier.
The Ola Scooter is made in the Ola Futurefactory in Tamil Nadu, India, which is still under construction. If Ola is fully functional, it says that 10 million Ola scooters will be manufactured in the facility every year.
Ola spun off its electric vehicle business into a separate entity in February 2019 with a funding volume of $ 56 million. In addition to electric vehicles, charging solutions, electric vehicle batteries and the development of an infrastructure that will enable commercial electric vehicles to operate on a large scale are also being developed.
