Back in 2001, I started my career as a motorcycle tester for a trade publication. Since then, for 25 years, I have keenly observed the global two-wheeler industry and markets. I consider myself a keen student of the game, as there is always something new to learn with constant changes in technology, customers, and machines.
But at times the mask of “being a student” slips, and 25 years of experience brings in fleeting arrogance, where I end up being a critic, not an appreciator, of others’ work.
Designers are the easiest targets. When someone says, “design is subjective,” it’s an excuse to comment on work you’ll never be able to do yourself.
In the midst of one such bout of arrogance, I first saw the Ather Rizta.
My first reaction was a four-letter, two-syllable word that starts with a vowel and ends with a semi-vowel.
The enthusiast in me, seeking purity of design, found nothing charitable to say about how the new Ather looked. It was bloated. The engineer in me could see the packaging challenges that the Ather team would have started with, considering that they were never given a clean sheet of paper to begin with.
I was not at InsightEV then. I was at another place. “It’s a lot of scooter on a small wheelbase,” is what I commented.
I went through the Rizta pictures again and again and then visited the Ather showroom at the first opportunity to get a good look at how it was in the flesh. The fit and finish was mind-blowing, but the Rizta did look disproportionate, unbalanced, and compromised in design. Clearly, the brief was to create something on an existing (450X) platform, maintaining as much commonality as possible, but still solve the core issues of family commuting that need a generous saddle and unending underseat storage. The management wanted to add a disproportionate amount of practicality while driving down the BoM cost.
As a result, the Rizta grew sideways. It also grew a ‘Duck Tail’ just like popular ICE scooters like the Honda Activa/TVS Jupiter/Suzuki Access, where the scooter extends way beyond the wheelbase.
The Rizta succeeded at everything, but from the rear, it was the equivalent of Krishna’s Butterball on two wheels.
The reason was the rather short (1285 mm) wheelbase that the engineers had to work with. Ather didn’t want to move too far away from the 450X Gen 2 platform with a wheelbase of 1280 mm, creating a packaging challenge. It ended up as the equivalent of taking a Nürburgring-conquering sports coupe and then rebodying the platform for a 4.5m sedan.
But then the Rizta became a superhit, and I learned to keep my mouth shut.
The Konarc: The Advantages of Starting from Scratch
Today is not about the Rizta. We are a few years late for that. Today is about the Konarc, Ather’s new scooter. Unlike the Rizta, the Konarc had the luxury of a clean sheet of paper. It starts with nothing, and that’s always a good thing in design. That allows engineers to work freely and innovate without the constraints of history.
What we end up getting is an all-metal body scooter with a please-all disposition and great attention to detail. Also, one with a generous wheelbase that will package larger battery packs, an onboard charger, and a massive underseat space.
Dig deeper, and the Konarc also comes out as one of the most clever scooters on the market and definitely the best in the Ather showroom.
Wheelbase Holds the Key
The first generation of Indian electric scooters were benchmarked against ICE commuter machines in the market, resulting in wheelbases that were pretty close to where the ICE market was.
Compact ICE scooters created compact electric scooters. Battery packaging is always an issue in a compact form factor, but the Gen 1 electric scooters (apart from the Chetak Gen-1) solved it by putting the battery under the floorboard.
The Ola S1 Pro, at 1359 mm, set the precedent for electric scooters to have a longer wheelbase. Designed in Europe by Etergo, the original AppScooter was packaged to take three removable battery packs of 1.25 kW each. All three ‘banana batteries’ were supposed to slide under the floorboard, necessitating the long wheelbase.
Similarly, Bajaj solved the Chetak’s size issues when it moved the battery to the floorboard in the 35 Series by stretching the wheelbase to 1350 mm.
Ather has now done the same with the Konarc, which has a 1352 mm wheelbase. Thanks to starting from scratch, the Konarc looks balanced and does not suffer from the vision-distorting side bulges that the Rizta had. However, it continues with the Duck-Tail. There is still a lot of scooter beyond the wheelbase to maximise packaging space, though it does not come out as unbalanced in any way.
What also helps the case is that the Konarc has a 14″ wheel at the front. This adds more overall muscle across the scooter.
Charging
Unlike the 450X and the Rizta, which have off-board chargers, Ather has packaged the Konarc’s primary charger on board. The new Ather has a 450W charger, good for the usual overnight charging cycle that most customers follow. The onboard charger means that customers don’t have to carry a large brick inside the boot of the scooter. That is replaced by a handier Mode 3 cable only slightly bulkier than a laptop charger. Ather also does well by packing the PRCD on the wall-plug side, optimising packaging.
Surprisingly, this is not the first Ather to have an onboard charger. The first 450X/340X scooters had onboard chargers as well. The Gen-1 Bajaj Chetak also had an onboard charger, and the 3501 variant still has one.
Ather moved away from onboard chargers later in their journey. The Konarc is a return to the onboard theme. Personally, I find onboard chargers an elegant solution. However, distractors, and they do have a logical point, note that an onboard charger adds a few kg of deadweight to the scooter. However, Ather’s reasons to add the charger onboard go beyond that discussion.
But let’s first talk about the packaging of the charger. Chargers generate heat, so their positioning within the vehicle is tricky, especially when other components produce heat – the motor, MCU, and the battery. The good thing is that chargers and motor+controllers produce heat at different times, so management is easier.
There are two schools of thought here. The first says keep the charger separate, as isolation will deliver the required cooling. In parallel, the motor and controller can be integrated. The second school of thought is to integrate the charger with the controller while keeping the motor separate. The Ather engineers went the second way as they found the thermal management better. This isolates the charger and controller from the motor’s heat while allowing cost optimisation since both the boards end up in the same box. At the higher level, the cost of electronics (controller and charger) is optimised if the thermal numbers stay within manageable limits.
The Accessory Charger Option
Ather’s real jack-in-the-box is the accessory charger. The media hasn’t mentioned this in detail, and that’s a pity considering this is a real big deal and a moat that Ather (also Hero-Vida) has built.
Thanks to the LECCS charging standard (Type 7 connector) developed by Ather Energy, a Konarc customer can buy an add-on charger and (paired with the onboard charger) add to the charging capacity. It means that if you splurge on a 900W accessory charger, you are effectively charging the Konarc at 1350 W (450W + 900W). The Light Electric Combined Charging System (LECCS) is the world’s first combined AC and DC charging connector standard for light electric vehicles (LEVs). At any time, it can take both AC and DC charging together. The connector is capable of taking 7.7kW AC and up to 12 kW DC.
It can charge from an AC charger, and it can also charge from a DC charger. Importantly, it is capable of charging from both together. The trick is how to get both AC and DC together. Ather solves this by putting the AC charger onboard and offering the DC charger as an accessory. This diagram explains that.
I can go much deeper, but that’s a waste of my energy when Ather’s Senior Design Engineer for Charging Infra, Narendran Bhaskar, has already published a very detailed LinkedIn post on the system. A must-read.
BTW, this may be a moat, but Ather is not protecting it. The LECCSS standard is open-sourced and managed by the LEAF Consortium.
The Motor & Drive
When we talk about the Konarc, the obvious comparison is with the stablemate, Rizta. On paper, the Konarc motor appears way weaker than the Rizta’s. It produces 0.3 kW less power, but most importantly, it has 6 Nm less torque. In daily riding, torque matters.
But then these are paper specs. You don’t ride paper specs. The Rizta’s 22 Nm of peak torque gets multiplied by 7.2 from the two-stage reduction, delivering a wheel torque of 158.4 Nm. Here is where the Konarc shines. Whatever it loses in peak torque, it makes up for more than that through the transmission. The swingarm-mounted motor-integrated gear drive has a 10:1 reduction, effectively delivering 160 Nm on the wheel. Not to mention, all of this torque is delivered ‘slack-free’ because of the gear drive, while the Rizta’s motor has to encounter first a chain and then a belt to reach the rear wheel.
Again, this is an area where the Ather engineers have optimised both for performance and cost. High-torque motors need more magnets and copper, both expensive commodities. At the other end, if you take the ratio beyond 10:1, you need bigger gears, which are pricier. Not to mention, packaging becomes a challenge with bigger gears. The Ather engineers found 10:1 to be the best ratio to optimise both the cost of the motor and the cost of gears.
The motor and geared drive are an integrated unit. It’s not an off-the-shelf unit from a supplier but an in-house-developed unit. The motor supplier is also not the same as that on the 450X/Rizta.
It’s not that Ather is setting a benchmark here. Far from that, they are a bit late to the geared drive party. The Vida scooters and the Chetak 35 series all use a geared drive. Ola and River are on chain drives, and the TVS iQube still uses a hub motor, reiterating again that in the Indian market, you don’t have to be the best to sell the most.
The other Athers are still on a two-stage (chain + final belt drive). The belt drive, even though well engineered, is no match to a geared drive in longevity and serviceability.
The change to a geared drive shines through in the serviceability and the service interval. Ather stresses that replacing important components like the entire drive system takes a matter of seconds. The service interval has also changed to 10,000 km, up from the 5,000 km it was for the other scooters.
Does the Konarc Cannibalise the Rizta?
There is no way that the Rizta sales won’t be affected by the Konarc. The new scooter is better-looking, has more space, delivers more, and even ticks the psychological box of having an all-steel body. Ather did well to tout the Konarc as their cheapest scooter ever. But they haven’t moved an inch. kWh for kWh, the Konarc is priced absolutely the same as the Rizta. What it does better is to have a smaller battery variant that goes below the Rizta and creates the illusory five-digit price point. At INR 99,999, it is more of a talking point. At the same time, the Konarc will also have variants, not yet released, that go above the Rizta. So the best scooter in the Ather stable will also have the widest model portfolio to offer.
Like the Rizta, the Konarc portfolio will also have a mix of LFP and NMC packs. Some packs have been announced already, while some more are in the pipeline.
When the Konarc is in full flow, it will have variants covering the entire Rizta portfolio, and above and below that as well, offering customers unprecedented choice. We should also remember that this is an all-metal body scooter, unlike the ABS that Ather and many others prefer. I find nothing wrong with ABS, and it’s difficult to find a rundown Ather. However, the Konarc has to go into markets where the Honda Activa rules and customers have an affinity for metal.
Ather would hope that the Konarc takes a chunk of the Activa market. But, answering the question in this heading, the Konarc would first take a chunk of the Rizta market.
How does it affect Ather?
That’s not a bad deal. The Konarc, because of the optimisation throughout the scooter, would have better margins than the Rizta. Geared drives are cheaper than belts. Batteries, especially the LFP packs, would be cost-optimised. There is less aluminum. The motor is optimised for magnets and copper. Onboard chargers would also save some money over offboard ones. So, Ather is cutting optimising costs everywhere while delivering a scooter better than the Rizta.