Ola Electric Accused of Using Another Brand’s Imagery!
The Indian electric motorcycle brand has just announced its first bikes, although accusations of plagiarism are already being made
Earlier this summer an Indian brand announced a cheap and cheerful new electric bike which boasted some extravagant claims with regards to its range, recharge time and top speed.
It’s taken less than a month, though, for the brand’s reputation to be called into question by some commentators after Ola Electric was accused of plagiarising marketing images used by another famous electric bike brand.
The images in question show the Ola Roadster being ridden along a country road and also it in a more urban setting. The thing is, they bear more than a striking resemblance to images used by rival electric motorcycle maker, Zero. What it looks as though the Ola marketing team has done, which we can’t 100 per cent confirm, is use advanced Ai and photo editing software to remove the Zero DSR/X from the country road image, and the DS from the urban image. It then seems as though the Ola Electric Roadster has been superimposed on the image, portraying it to have been ridden on the road when perhaps it was not.
There is also the chance that Ola managed to recreate the images perfectly, riding on the same road, with the same weather conditions, at the same time of year and time of day. They could have then got the same photographer using the same camera to recreate the shot, while also managing to perfectly recreate the same motion blur on the trees and the road, and somehow summoning up the same clouds in the sky behind.
But that, admittedly, is a big ask.
The accusations that the images are indeed doctored come just a few weeks on from the official launch of the Roadster range, although industry insiders are claiming that very few journalistic outlets were allowed to test the bikes. It’s also reported that at the grand reveal of the Roadster Pro, the apparently production-ready machine had to be pushed onto the stage, not ridden as had been originally planned.
The reports also come a few weeks after Ola Electric’s CEO, Bhavish Aggarwal, reposted an article on his LinkedIn profile titled: ‘Masters of imitation: Copying has been a foundational element of innovation in the most successful tech ecosystems’.
We’ve reached out to Ola Electric for a comment on the matter and are awaiting a response.
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Simon (AKA Toad) has been working within the motorcycle industry for more than twelve years, and a member of the motorcyclist family since birth. Growing up around British-built single and twins, it was inevitable that a life on two wheels was on the cards, from a very early age!
