[Exclusive] Ola Electric silently upgrading VCUs on older S1 Pro scooters to avoid further recalls

Ola Electric has faced a lot of heat in recent months as its electric scooter has underperformed due to software issues and fire incidents. The company has also recalled 1,441 units of the S1 Pro for checking battery health. 

Ola S1 Pro VCUs being upgraded

91mobiles has exclusively learnt from tipster Yogesh Brar that Ola Electric might soon adopt a recall schedule or perform home visits for VCU upgrades. Ola Electric has already started silently changing the VCUs on units dispatched before March 2022. The tipster suggests that the older VCUs don’t have adequate RAM and storage to handle further updates. Moreover, there lies a persisting heating issue. 

The new Vehicle Control Units have more RAM and storage and are likely to have adequate headroom to sustain updates in future. The VCU is important for an electric vehicle and controls aspects such as torque coordination, operation and gearshift strategies, high-voltage and 48V coordination, charging control, onboard diagnosis, monitoring and thermal management. 

Ola Electric is also closely monitoring the health of battery cells and battery packs, according to the tipster. The VCU units control thermal management and can be linked directly to the battery’s behaviour. The VCU upgrade might also address some issues of thermal runaways, performance throttling, etc by tweaking the software and avoiding such circumstances.