Ola Electric brings in former Geely, Jaguar exec as head of vehicle design

Ola Electric today announced the appointment of Wayne Burgess as head of vehicle design for its entire product range including scooters, bikes, cars, and more.

Experience:

• Burgess was previously the chief design officer at Paramex, a UK-based management consultancy firm for the automotive industry. He also had a stint as the head of design and vice president of Geely Design UK, which is part of Chinese automaker Geely – one of the largest automakers in the world that is looking to take on Tesla with its own premium electric car Zeekr.
• He has spent almost three decades designing vehicles for companies such as Rolls Royce, Bentley, Aston Martin, Jaguar Land Rover, and Lotus. Notably, Burgess was the chief designer for the Jaguar F-Type sports car and then studio director for the Jaguar F-Pace SUV.

More details:

• This development comes after Ola Electric recently appointed former Hyundai Motor’s executive Yongsung Kim as head of global sales and distribution.
• Ola is gearing up to launch the first in its range of electric scooters in the coming months.
• The company says the electric two-wheeler will be priced aggressively to make it accessible to all.
• The Ola Scooter will roll out from the Ola Futurefactory in Tamil Nadu, for which the ride-hailing company has invested US$326 million. The factory will start manufacturing the Ola Scooter as soon as its 2 million annual capacity is ready this summer, the company said in a statement
• In March, it was reported that Ola Electric was looking to raise over US$300 million from Singapore’s Temasek, SoftBank, and Tiger Global.