Three days back, Ola’s CEO and founder, Bhavish Aggarwal, posted on X that Ola’s LFP cell is now ready. The cell is in the 46100 cylindrical format.
Bhavish’s announcement on X was followed by the mandatory stock market disclosures, which stated the same.
The 4680 NMC: Ola’s Original Cell
Till now, Ola has been manufacturing the 4680 NMC cells at its partially operational Gigafactory. We will come to the partially operational bit later. The 4680 is used in one scooter and one motorcycle variant offered by the company. Sales numbers for both variants are not available, but they are the highest-priced variants in their model ranges, also carrying the biggest battery packs.
Apart from the two-wheelers, the 4680 NMC is also used in Ola Shakti, the home power backup solution offered by Ola Electric. As the BESS industry will tell you, a large, cylindrical NMC cell is perhaps the least favorable choice for a power backup system. Non-cylindrical LFP options are cheaper, more stable, and have higher cycle life.
In comparison, the 4680 NMC is the perfect fit for a high-performance car, like what Tesla makes. That’s why Tesla uses 4680 NMCs on certain models, except in China. 1
Ola did have a car program, but gave up on it about two years ago.
This is not to diss Ola in any way. The Ola 4680 NMC Bharat Cell is an important milestone for the company and, as an extension, even for the country. At the launch event, Ola announced a 5x energy (over 21700), 1.5x faster charging, and 10% more range achievements.
Ola has also been touting the mass industrialisation of their in-house developed Dry Cathode Technology, something that took Tesla a few years of hard work and one acquisition.
That’s not bad for a cell that was developed entirely in-house.
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More Power to the Shakti
The other place where the 4680 NMC cells would get consumed is the Ola Shakti home power backup systems. Ola launched the Shakti power backup systems in October 2025 and claimed to have started manufacturing on 12th January this year, but has not shared any actual sales numbers. We don’t want to make any guesses, but the Shakti is priced outrageously when compared to other home power backup systems in the market. The price is a few times that of Li-ion energised backup systems and many times that of lead acid energy systems.
At nearly INR 30,000 per kWh, the Shakti suffers from a poor product-price-market fit. It doesn’t matter that the Shakti comes with advanced features and even an app to control it. The home inverter market is brutal and very price sensitive. The customer doesn’t care – lead-acid-based inverters work well, sit inconspicuously under the staircase, and don’t blow up.
The Significance of the 46100 LFP
What also doesn’t work for the 4680 NMC, or for that matter, any NMC cell, is the cycle life when compared to LFP. While most commercial NMCs go to 1500 cycles, LFPs can easily meet 4000-6000, or even more, in a slow charging, stationary environment. That and the price differential mean that LFP is many times more effective than NMC when it comes to any power backup systems. Fast charging and high discharge rates come to naught when the application is standing still in a corner of the building.
Considering the drawbacks of cylindrical NMC, the 46100 LFP cell is an important one for Ola. It may still be cylindrical, but LFP means better cycle life and lower cost.
On paper.
Is There Anything Beyond the Announcement?
Like many of the other things that Ola does, the announcement is pretty much the entire story. Over the last three years, the company has made numerous product announcements, even rolling out dummies on the stage, but only a trickle ever reached production.
As an illustration:
Or before that…the Ola Roadster Pro, another motorcycle with eye-watering specs.
or the Roadtser…
…the Sportster and the Arrowhead…
The DiamondHead, Roadster Pro, Roadster, Sportster & Arrowhead continue to stay alive on the Ola website. Some of the other announced products are no longer featured.
Like the Ola S2 and Gig scooters.
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Or the portable battery packs.
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There was also the Ferrite motor innovation, which made sense when India had a shortage of rare earth magnets. Then the shortage did not exist, and rival Ather Energy even published a series of Substacks on why a non-rare-earth is not the right direction for them.
Pause here: The Ather series was pretty readable, and here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
All the above products created a temporary positive buzz about the company, even as the main business drew criticism for its lack of customer support and lingering service issues.
In the worst-case scenario, we’ll look at Ola Electric as a company that likes to make announcements, reap the positive PR, score some gains in stock price, and then move on without delivering anything. In the best-case scenario, some or all of these products are still in development and would see the light of day.
To give the company the benefit of the doubt, let us lean towards the best-case scenario that all of the above-mentioned products are under development and could see the light of day somewhere in the future. It just seems like Ola treats launch announcements as part of the early stage of the product development journey rather than the culmination, as other manufacturers do.
That forces us to look at their latest announcement, the one on the LFP cell, through a different lens. Sure, there is an LFP cell, at least one sitting on a pedestal on the CEO’s desk. But how long will it take to reach the market commercially?
That is something to be debated.
Ola’s Gigafactory Scale: Lack of Transparency
Till Q4 2025 reporting, Ola was pretty open about the yield rates at its cell Gigafactory. The graph below is from the quarterly shareholder newsletter published on May 29, 2025, reporting the Q4 2025 results. For whatever reason, they forgot to label the X-axis, but at least we know that at the end of the reporting quarter, the Gigafactory had a 63% overall actual yield.
Link to the above Q4 2025 shareholders’ letter here
Since then, Ola has stopped talking about yield rates completely, so we do not know what yield the Giga factory is running at present.
In the end, it doesn’t even matter…
As the late Chester Bennington famously sang…
The yield rate stops mattering when the scale is low. Ola has now started disclosing the exact number of cells they manufactured in the quarter. This is from the last reported quarter (Oct-Dec 2025), reported in Feb 2026.
Link to the original document here
This reporting gives us a good estimate of the scale at which the Ola Gigafactory is running. In the last quarter, Ola Electric manufactured 72,418 cells. That amounts to 805 cells in a day. It’s not a gigafactory; it’s more of a cottage industry pilot line scale. At that scale, you may actually be picking up individual cells from the line and testing each of them…manually.
To put it in perspective, at an optimistic 100Wh per cell, the above translates into less than 30 MWh/year.
The Scale is not Ola’s Fault
It’s a classic donkey-before-the-cart situation. You can’t manufacture cells if there is no demand. In the case of Ola, the only demand is from the aforementioned scooter and motorcycle variants. The last few months have been brutal for the company’s sales, so there was no need for manufacturing.
On the other hand, the slow scaling up of the Gigafactory is characteristic of a typical cell manufacturing setup. You can start operating a line, but scaling it up to its intended capacity is an altogether different beast.
That squeezes Ola at both ends. The Gigafactory will take time to scale up, but there is no one waiting to consume the cells when the factory eventually scales up.
Ola’s Demand vs Supply vs Capacity Equation
Ola has a capacity of 6.0 GWh in various stages of installation. That’s why we use the word “partially operational” at the start of this analysis. The company has a current run rate of about 10,000 vehicles a month, 120,000 for the year. Optimistically, 30% of them are the 4680 energised variants. Let us also assume a scooter-to-motorcycle split of 2:1; the scooter has a 5.2 kWh pack, the motorcycle carrying a 9.1 kWh one.
That puts the current energy need at 234 MWh for the year, 3.9% of the installed capacity. That 96.1% over capacity is the big question that Ola has to face. Compounding the problem is the fact that every car manufacturer, the only substantial consumers of cells, has its supply chain tied up. Maruti and Mahindra have gone with BYD. Tata has Gotion and is setting up a cell plant of its own. The Koreans still believe in NMC and bring their own cells, which hardly leaves anyone in the market to sell to.
Of Potatoes and McDonald’s
It’s one thing to grow potatoes in your kitchen garden, and put the first output on Instagram to get some claps. It’s another matter altogether to grow it in 10,000 acres of land to meet the entire demand of McDonald’s in the country.
That, in a nutshell, explains the lithium-ion cell industry’s problem. It’s easy to build a cell and do a PR exercise around it. Easier if you decide to import all the input components. Then it’s a matter of assembling. On a pilot line, that’s not too difficult.
It is the scaling up that is painful, and after the scaling up, you meet the Chinese in the market. There is no rule, no regulation that restricts them from selling cells to your potential customers in the country. Those customers are making their buying decisions based on the maturity of the cell, the quality, and most importantly, the price.
The Chinese score high.
Don’t believe me? Ask the now-dead Moser Baer, which, despite having a freaking big compact disc plant, could not meet the prices of Chinese discs being imported into the country. That did not end well for the Indian company.
One of the primary reasons why LFP prices hit rock bottom in 2025 was due to the capacity in China. Christopher Chico, in his latest Substack, points out that only 22% of the Chinese cell capacity is consumed internally. Everything else gets loaded on a ship.
Is Ola the First one to make an LFP cell in India?
Not even close.
The Peak-XV-backed, and now-defunct, Log9 materials unveiled their LFP and LTO cylindrical cells way back in April 2022, and even started setting up a 50MWh pilot line. The cells were in the 66160 cylindrical format.
Then they were gone by 2025, taking USD 227 million in investment with them.
There is also Bengaluru-based Nash Energy, which claims to have developed a 32140-format LFP cell. The announcement is there, but the ramp-up is far away. Even their earlier NMC line has not been fully ramped up. We are not aware of any major OEM that has shown any interest.
There may be some more, but the fact is that almost everyone sources from China, where the lines are more stable, quality is better, and prices are lower.
Scaling is Painful
Here is an image from mid-2022 of Ola’s first cell.
It was a 21700 NMC from the pilot line. Like everything else, the CEO took a picture of the cell on his desk and tweeted to the world that they are ready to sell the cell, promising scale from 2023 onwards.
From there, here we are in mid-2026, and the cell plant is running at 30 MWh.
So, if he tweeted a picture four days back, you should be looking at your desk calendar…and mark dates in 2029. Remember, inside the aluminum can, everything is different in an LFP cell, and 80% of the learning will have to be done again.
The Significance of the 46100 LFP…Again!
That does not take away the importance of going for LFP. If the scooters will not take enough cells and the car industry may not be interested, then BESS is the only saviour. And BESS needs LFP.
Except that Ola probably doesn’t have the cash to take this cell to the scale where it becomes a cost-efficient BESS cell supplier. Just manufacturing LFP cells is not sufficient. People will simply not buy if you cannot undercut the Chinese with your domestic production. Like we pointed out a few days back, cell prices have gone down, and it is not possible to save so much money from in-house production that it becomes a game-changer.
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But that does make it a target for an acquisition if some big industrial house were looking at BESS in a significant way. Remember, the Ola cell plant can be expanded to 20GWh and then maybe to 50-100 GWh if there is a need.
Enough cash can do everything.
Appendix: Ola Management Quote
“The readiness of our LFP 46100 cell is a pivotal moment in our journey to build India’s most advanced EV and energy ecosystem. Along with the strong progress at our Gigafactory and proven performance of our 4680 cells on the road, this milestone reflects our deep commitment to innovation, scale, and self-reliance. LFP technology will play a critical role in driving affordability, enabling energy storage solutions, and accelerating the transition to electric mobility as we move closer to realizing the vision of End ICE Age.”
