Bajaj Chetak Electric nationwide launch delayed: Here’s why

Bajaj Auto recently launched their first all electric scooter – Chetak Electric in India. The Chetak Electric competes with rival scooters such as the TVS iQube and Ather 450. Even though the Chetak Electric was launched in the market months ago, sales were limited to Bengaluru and Pune. The ongoing Corona virus pandemic and the nationwide lockdown has affected company’s plan to launch the electric scooters in other cities of India. According to reports, the pan-India launch of Bajaj Chetak Electric has been delayed by four to five months because of the ongoing crisis.

Bajaj had stopped taking bookings for Chetak Electric. One of the reason behind this step was supply chain interruption. Some of the components used to manufacture this electric scooter is sourced from China and that has been interrupted due to COVID-19 pandemic. Another reason is that Bajaj is looking forward for customer feedback from their experience so that they can make any necessary changes if needed.

Speaking to Moneycontrol, executive director, Bajaj Auto Rakesh Sharma said,

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We had some components coming from China, from Wuhan actually which got interrupted. We had a very good order book and eventually we had to freeze the order book because when the supplies started getting interrupted we felt that we cannot keep going to our customers and keep apologising. So we declined to take more orders.

Bajaj has received many orders for the electric-powered Chetak, and their first priority at the moment will be to complete pending orders before expanding the sales to other cities. Bajaj has started production for other models while operations for Chetak still remain suspended. The Chetak is available in two variants – The first one is the Urbane version and the second is Premium. The Premium version of the scooter gets additional features like a disc brake, metallic colour options, tan coloured seats and so on. Urban version is priced at Rs 1,00,000 whereas the Premium version costs around Rs 1.15 lakh.

Both variants are powered by an electric motor which is capable of generating a maximum of 4.2 Kw power. The Lithium-ion battery is IP67 rated and has 3 year or 50,000 km warranty. Bajaj claims that it takes 5 hours to charge the battery fully and 25 percent in just an hour. The Chetak Electric is nothing like the older version, which used to run on petrol. The new version looks modern and has features such as a fully digital instrument cluster, LED headlamps, and high quality materials that justifies the price.

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