Kitna Deti Hai?

The Right Choice

We can all do with a pat on the back and be told that we’ve made some good choices along the way.

Ather owners often know they've made the right choice - either financially, given the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) when pitted against ICE vehicles, or because of having come over to the side that has ‘greener grass’. Or even better, at having bought a splendid piece of tech. 

But, “how much" of a right choice is an Ather 450X? How much are folks actually saving? 

In this world of quantification and evidence, the Savings Tracker feature tells customers how much they've exactly saved, and therefore, how good a choice this was. And they need to ride more, to know more. From which we can learn more. A win-win! Points systems always work.

An Idea Sown, A Feature Reaped

This is just one of the many features that Ather Labs has helped us launch recently. While labs of this kind are already popular amongst phone companies and e-commerce platforms, for a hardware company to focus on feature updates in this manner is brand new.

The idea of Ather Labs came to be with Priya, Vishwas and Mithilesh mulling over the concept for a tech-driven customer interaction platform. While the end user doesn't care for how it is packaged, as long as things are easy, making sure things are easy for them is the hard part. It was a mini PI planning of sorts, spanning 3-4 sprints, to build a sustainable system that can survive years. 

Anurag then made sure every word and sliver of information was simple, yet aesthetically fitting for a tech interface. Maharudrappa (a.k.a. Praveen) and Bharat pitched in with their attention to detail in implementing the design, often stepping into the customer’s shoes to come up with possible scenarios. 

Abhishek validated concepts and implementation against each other, with his invaluable experience of having seen the app grow. Hithesh and Adarsh had their lenses of close inspection for clean design, focusing on building endurance, to make it failsafe - especially since the development window was short. Sankar, who is usually quick in adapting to change, made countless modifications till we reached a state of finesse.

Meanwhile, Gopi quietly built the secret sauce of the system—accessing real-time on-field data to get the savings tracker computations. And now that Ather Labs is out there, we have Kruthika examining and re-examining what we've built and its acceptance by users. Data, data, and more data, to give us an inkling of how our customers feel.

What's new?

‘Smart Eco’ was a recent beta feature. It’s a ride mode on your scooter that guarantees a True Range of 85 km and 70 km on the 450X and 450 Plus respectively. The intelligence in this comes from the fact it does this independent of your driving style, traffic conditions, etc. The algorithm does a trade-off analysis between Efficiency and Performance, in order to guarantee True Range. However, this comes with a degree of variability in performance i.e. the same throttle input from the user might result in a performance that doesn’t meet their expectations. Customer experience of the feature is what we want to better understand. Not everyone might be comfortable with the new paradigm of driving. Launching this as a feature via Ather Labs helps us learn how people feel about the machine taking over. 

Why is this a big deal?

Ather Labs helps us test features with users who are happy to try them out and let us know what they think. Armed with this knowledge, helps with prioritising features planned. Plus, we get this information early on, to build and deploy OTA updates whose success we can bet on. 

That kind of guarantee helps because OTAs require a lot of focused time and cross-functional effort. The Ather Labs platform helps us experiment while buying us the time required to understand customer response and optimise the features. We get to engage with the community during feature development, and not just receive feedback post-release. What this means is a co-creative system. 

The community likes or wants a feature. We build it. They help us build better. 

And now they can themselves find out, "kitna deti hai".

Fin.