What battery warranty you actually get on an electric scooter in India

Pay Ather Energy an extra ₹4,999 on top of an Ather 450X or Rizta, and the company puts a number on paper that no other electric scooter maker in India commits to. The battery will hold at least 70 per cent of its original health for eight years or 80,000 km, whichever comes first, under what Ather calls its Eight70 warranty. Buy an Ola S1, a Bajaj Chetak, a TVS iQube, or sign up for Hero's VIDA Advantage plan instead, and the word "per cent" does not appear anywhere in the battery warranty terms.

That gap matters because the battery is the one part of an electric scooter that nobody can see degrade until it is too late to do anything cheap about it. A full replacement pack can cost a large share of what the scooter did new, and the warranty document is the only promise a buyer gets before that bill arrives. For someone in Bengaluru choosing between half a dozen scooters on a showroom floor, the years printed in bold on a brochure mean less than what the company actually commits to doing when the battery weakens.

Start with what each brand calls standard. Ather's base battery cover on the 450 series runs for five years or 60,000 km under its Pro Pack, before the Eight70 add-on, priced at ₹4,999, extends that cover to eight years or 80,000 km with the written 70 per cent health floor. Ola's own battery warranty page states a base cover of three years or 40,000 km, with an additional 10,000 km of cover for the battery alone, and sells top up plans stretching that to five years and 60,000 km, or eight years and 70,000 km. Nowhere on that page does Ola commit to a minimum health percentage the battery must retain to stay under warranty.

Bajaj's own explainer on the Chetak's battery warranty states three years or 50,000 km as standard, with owners able to add one year and 10,000 km, or two years and 20,000 km, if they apply before the scooter turns two years old or crosses 50,000 km, whichever comes first. TVS Motor's product page for the iQube states a 3 year or 50,000 km battery warranty. Hero's VIDA Advantage package, announced for V1 Pro buyers, stretches cover on both batteries to five years or 60,000 km. None of these three states a capacity floor the battery must hold to still count as working.

That silence is not automatically bad news. A battery that degrades gracefully and never falls to a point the maker calls a defect may never need a warranty claim regardless of what the paper says. But it also means a Bajaj, TVS or Hero buyer has no written number to point to if their scooter's range quietly drops by a third while still well inside the warranty period. Only a drop severe enough to count as a defect, by the company's own unstated judgement, triggers a replacement.

The years and kilometres printed in bold are the easy part to compare on a showroom floor. The harder question, worth asking the dealer directly before signing, is simpler: what percentage, if any, does this warranty actually promise, and is it written down anywhere beyond a brochure.

Sources

• Ola Electric battery warranty
• Bajaj Chetak battery warranty, what's covered and what's not
• TVS iQube Smart Electric Scooter
• Ather Energy introduces Eight70 warranty for its electric scooter batteries
• Ather 450, Rizta electric scooters get new 8 year/80,000 km battery warranty
• Hero MotoCorp introduces VIDA Advantage for electric scooter owners