Hero Vida VX2 Plus 2025 First impressions | #MotorIncFirst S03E29

Hero Vida VX2 Plus 2025 First impressions | #MotorIncFirst S03E29

[Music] Hello and welcome to Motoring First. Shumi went out to ride a hero scooter electric. So I assumed he was in Japur but as it turns out that’s not the case and I hope there are more surprises in this conversation. So what are we talking about today? Nundi Hills. But you know what is the amazing thing about Nandi Hills? We’ve tested a lot of electric scooters there. First, the terrain is spectacularly undersuited to the thing because it’s either going up or coming down and it really cost the electric a lot. Saves a lot of time because you can get through a battery charge very rapidly. But so I come out on the scooter, I look right, I see a HP pump, I think with an Ola sign in it. So they have a charger. And I go 200 m. I look left and there is a hotel of some sort and there’s that trademark white Aether charger there and somebody’s got one of these scooters parked there and they’re filming some segment or whatever. I go up the road and take a left. There is a cafe there called SOC. Are you serious? I said yeah. I said this place has become like the EV launch hub because even the restaurants are called state of charge. Dude, this is awesome. So makes sense why they did it there. Yeah. So the new scooter is called the I have to get this right because I just this name is really not settling into my system. This is called the Vita VX2. Okay. There are two versions, the Plus and the Go. The Go is the lower model and we tested only the Plus. Okay. Uh it’s getting confusing because to me I think cuz Hero says it’s not the Hero Vida, it’s the Vita. Okay. And therefore at the launch obviously living la was a theme. I mean it’s a great video. You should watch it. It is it just doesn’t get to the point at all and for almost an hour it’s amazing actually. But so they had the Vida V1, the original non-scooter. Uh what you should know, we rode it only at the Jaipur CIT track. Correct. Only on the highspeed track, only for three laps. And since then, we’ve never seen the V1 at all, ever. Okay. Okay. They’ve updated that scooter to something called the V2. We don’t know what the changes are. And that’s why we don’t recommend Vas because we haven’t tested them. We have no experience with them. And now the family version of the scooter as it were is here. And that’s called the VX2. So it’s not the V_sub_1 or whatever V2. V1 replaced by V2 and V2 is now accompanied by the VX2. And the X is the family scooter. Okay. So it looks different as well. Completely different looking. Okay. Underneath the chassis itself and all of that. They said we haven’t heard any feedback from the customers that suggested that we should be significantly revaluating this. So the chassis is roughly in the same place. So when you say family scooter, I would automatically think it’s a bigger scooter because it’s more spacious and stuff like that. That’s Yeah. So at the in the launch video, the people that they had got from Norway or whatever, which was some band, the first thing that they did, they went lay down on the scooter because oh the seat is so long. So let me break this down. So we’ll talk about the VX2 as a family scooter product. Uh we will talk about the other stuff which to me is more interesting. Some of it is contextual. Some of it might actually be useful to you as a buyer. But Hero is trying to break a lot of the challenges that are usual for an electric scooter to face before it can come home. They some parts are quite clever. Some parts are a little more deception than I like. But I this time finally got to talk to somebody who explained why the deception is required. And now I understand that maybe this is the step that we have to go through before we get to the next place. For that the only context we need is the electric industry is not growing. Okay. they failed to breach the one lakh unit mark again and the adoption of electrics which was supposed to have taken off and rocketed and all of that is nothing of this kind happened. I don’t think Ola as the market leader has helped the case for it at all because there’s enough uh bad feedback for people to say we’ll just get an IC instead. Right? So it’s not like Aether and TVs and Baja are reaping the benefit of Ola’s customer service issues or whatever. Overall this industry is not moving. Hero is putting some amount of weight into this and trying to push it forward. We will talk about all of this in series. Quick summary, the VX2 is going to be a difficult scooter to recommend right off the bat. Okay, the beginning of that problem is a quality issue. Uh, and you should know that the V1 and the V2 are places where Hero learned a little bit about how perceived quality works and what customers think is a good idea and a bad idea. And those learnings are clearly in the VX2. The VX2 also takes the benefit of the fact that it’s supposed to be a family scooter. So, the design has larger plastic panels. It’s a little bit more of a simpler flowing design, which means places where plastics meet each other, gaps that happen there and all of that is less of an issue here. But Hero’s plastics, especially the black matte black plastics, they remain surprisingly poor to the point where my blanket statement is if you consider Hero’s quality to have come forward with the Xulse 210 and with the Xreme 200R, the VX2 fails to match that standard. Got it. Right. It’s everything. You take the key of the VA which is specific to the VA. It does not look up marketmarket at all. Mhm. Okay. If you look at the keyhole into which this key holes, the plastic black part which sticks out is fine. But the gray plastic around it, you can see that the shutline is not clean. The plastic edges are not clean. And there’s an actual hole. Like on the scooter I rode, there was an actual hole. So, it was like a crescent moon- shaped hole that went around the thing. So, it has just not been centered. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Right. Next to that is a USB port. I couldn’t figure out how to get the cover of the USB port open. Because what they’ve done is they’ve taken a USB port that they designed to be mounted horizontally. So, you open it like this, but mounted it vertically on a apron that goes away from you. So, you never get enough logical purchase for you to open the USB port at all. It’s like a series of these things. So product is okay. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it. There are a few weird ideas in there. There are a few good ideas in there. Some of the stuff has not worked out, etc. Yes. But the first thing you look at that style and you look at the quality and you’re like, “Huh, why would they do that?” So there’s an idea about what they would want to go to as a family scooter and the basics in terms of what the let’s say the internals are, whatever the motor, power, battery, etc. is seems okay. But it’s the up start interacting with the scooter that you start feeling disappointed. Yeah. I’ll give you an example. I have just finished showing him the pictures of the scooter. So he’s aware of what it looks like and he’s noticed the fact that the headlight and the tail light have the same signature elements that we are familiar with on the V1 V2. Yeah. He didn’t notice the handlebar fairing and honestly I didn’t either the first time around because it’s part color, part matte black. But when I noticed it, I was like, “Wow.” because it just doesn’t fit any other part of the scooter and it vaguely looks like a bird with a blunt beak. He didn’t notice the indicators. They look like uh three LED indicators which are quite common on a number of bikes but for some reason they are all sitting in this enormous plastic housing. Okay. And it just looks unintegrated because the plastic the the LED indicators are a normal size but the shrouds that they’re in are too large. Okay. that. So, it’s it’s a lot of these small small small small. So, when I got on the scooter, was I unhappy to ride it? No. But was I like, “Oh, I had such a nice experience.” No. Mhm. I did not. Okay. Okay. Now, one second. It was not a nice experience primarily because of these little little Yeah. In my head, I didn’t write a high quality product. I wrote a functioning product. And if you bought one, would you be happy? I say, “Yeah, you’ll be okay.” But could you do better than this without bringing price into it? Yeah, I think you could. Right now there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the scooter without bringing price into Yeah. Because price is a very powerful part of this game which is which which is which we’ll come to. So if you leave price out and you say forget the Rista’s price for a minute and compare the Rista or the IQ to this product. Will this stand out as the best product in the three automatically no it will immediately seem like the worst of the two. Correct. Correct. And to me this is a visual problem not an actual issue and hero should not have allowed this to happen to themselves. they’ve taken a step back and because this is something we’ve spoken about time and again that Hero had an issue with their plastics and the finishes and we’ve seen that on their motorcycles. We also spoke about the engines not being smooth enough and these things have all turned in the last two bikes the Xreme they have and the uh the X pulse the engines on the Destiny and the Zoom 125 scooters are smooth they have good good engines and good finish levels so all of these were step up so in terms of perception then you’re saying that hey this is looking like a nice finished product now and it’s not just the idea that’s strong that this is desirable and that was a big step up for me like I’m seen any of these in the flesh yet. But for me, in my head, the perception of what hero is doing had changed. Yeah. And I don’t know if it correlates, but you should remember that the VA project was created as a startup within the hero system and it’s not fully connected to the hero system. I feel like if they could have connected the accounts and the HR to Vida, they maybe should have connected the quality department also to Vida, it feels like Vida has its own quality process and the maturity and the growth of the hero quality process has just not percolated to the VA process. So I walked away with the idea of saying they had a whole bunch of good ideas. Some of them have really worked out. And some of those things just are so easy to have fixed. I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t fix it because then I think now I’m getting the sense that imagine if all that was right and the prices whatever it is, we’ll get to that. Correct. Then this would have been an I mean it would have been a breakout product. Correct. Now the USB of the VA line, you should see this on the Hero website, is all the scooters have removable batteries in some form or the other. Okay? Right? So do these scooters. So the VX2 Plus, the top scooter has a 3.4 kWh battery, which is the same as the mid IQ in capacity terms. The bottom one has a 2.2 kWh battery, which is again the same as the bottom I cube. So the batteries are well matched. But on the VX2 Plus, you remove one, two batteries and then the scooter is empty. And on the bottom scooter, there is one slightly larger heavy battery instead. Okay, so the base model has a 2.2 kWh 11 kilo removable battery, single unit. Okay, the VX2 Plus has two battery units. You can remove each of them individually. You can operate the scooter on one. Together, they are 10 kilos each roughly and they give you 3.4 kW hours. They’re 10 kilos each. Yeah. So, Hero’s logic is uh kind of convoluted. I’m not sure if it applies to reality. Tell me if it does. But what they’re basically saying is one of the key stumbling blocks for electrics and this key stumbling block thing will keep coming back because this is a running theme for the scooter and they’ve tried to really put in a lot of work into solving it and I don’t want to undermine the effort that they’ve done. What they basically said is biggest issue that seems to happen is people are living in apartments and many are renting their apartments. So to get a charger installed in the stilt parking or whatever a tenant would have to convince an owner correct then the owner would have to speak to the society. Uh the housing societies are not always aminable to this very simply etc etc. So this chain of consequence becomes too long. So hero says if your society allows you to do these things you can take the charger plug it through those put a salt. What hero has missed out on again is they’ve not put a wall charger of any sort in this whole game. Oh really? Yeah. So Aether does that and as soon as Aether does that I can see the unlock and then Aether’s taken the next step after that which is they have a lockable wall charger. So there is a lock that you mount on the wall and you lock the charger to it. So you don’t have to buy two chargers when you want to carry it with you. Unlock it and carry it in the scooter. And this week I don’t need to charge the scooter so much. It can stay locked to the wall sort. Hero has not done that. You do get a portable charger and therefore you can either charge the scooter with the portable charger with the batteries inside or you can take one or both batteries upstairs and charge them upstairs using the same portable charger. Using the same portable charger. Okay. Question. When it’s in the garage and the batteries are plugged in, there’s a separate port that the charger plugs into. Yeah. So, think about it like this. The scooter has two plugs for both the batteries into which the batter is plugging. And there’s a similar port next to them under the seat which locks obviously. So you can plug the charger into that port. So the wire actually goes into the seat. Under the seat. Yeah. Yeah. Under the seat and locks into place. Okay. So the idea is fundamentally okay. Now what is a miss? There is no way to sequentially charge both the batteries simultaneously. So if you bring them home, you have to plug in battery number one. It’ll charge in 2 and 1/2 3 hours. Then you’ll switch to the other one. So you’ll have to do some jiggy pokery. Whereas what they’re saying is it’s very simple. We will eventually have a Ysplitter and then you’ll connect the Y splitter, connect the both batteries and then the software will take care of which battery needs to be charged. I’m just saying this is not day eight of this process. This should have been on day one. Mhm. That this should have been just been available. So this is just like you don’t even have to think about it. If you’re going to have the convenience of taking these inside, you’ve already put in the effort to carry a 10 kilo battery indoors, two of them, so 20 kilo batteries or whatever, then I don’t need to be doing all of this kind of thing. Okay, question. How does it consume charge? Does it as does it focus on one battery, deplete it and then move to the other or is it parallelly? Uh on the scooter they run in parallel but charging in parallel currently is not possible. Correct. So the scooters both will drain simultaneously. It’s not like it finishes one and goes and I was talking to Gage and Gagan was saying on his scooter there was a significant mismatch between the charge states of the two batteries and once the charge state was slightly different. And I think it was 10% or something between those two batteries. Then the scooter started to glitch on acceleration here and there also. Oh, okay. My scooter, it maintained charge within 2 3% of each other through the whole run. And I ran it from 98 or 99% down to 2%. So you have a display showing the two batteries. Yeah. So you have two energy gauges, one for each battery. I don’t really think you can figure out which gauge is which actual battery unless you remove one and ride one for a while. But I can see that at 99% overall charge, it’s two batteries at 99. Okay. and then at 2% overall charge his two batteries at 2% kind of thing. So I can see that both depleting together I didn’t have an issue at all but Gagan did say that when his scooter that delta between the two batteries went beyond a certain point 8 10%ish then suddenly when he opened the throttle the scooter would think about what to do next. Mhm. So in that sense it’s not a fully glitchfree scooter yet. But me these kind of things like saying we are solving this by you can take it home you can take both the batteries home a Ysplitter is missing really m right there’s another quality thing there for example so uh the single battery scooter which is the base version has a larger undersseat storage at 33 L which is pretty respectable for this class the larger battery scooter has the smaller unders seat storage at 27 L so what has is a is a flattish tray at the bottom and in the front is a metal flap which is really poorly finished. And on that is a lock and you can use a key to unlock that. When you unlock it, that lock pops up and releases and then you can see a spring underneath it which helped it. Oh, it’s so crude. Okay. Anyway, so you open that. Look on that is a very classy silver plaque that says powered by hero. Next to which is like this spring. Oh, okay. Anyway, so you open this thing and they have two batteries with colorful handles and all of that. You pull the battery up and out and the guiding system for aligning the battery and all works to take care of the fact that people will be rough with the batteries and I was right. I did it very carefully a couple of times and I did it very roughly a few times and it always slotted into place. But to have that latitude, the connector itself has a latitude to move up and down in its slot to accommodate the force. How? With an exposed spring. And what does it sound like? Sounds like a spring. So it goes taxing and you’re like this kind of refinement again you might be able to use the price to justify it but for a product from hero I know that they can do better than this and I’m wondering why they did not clean this product up further like this. Mhm. To write so just for a second if you were to say like and like they are saying that this is VA this is not hero. If you were to separate this off and say that okay stop the hero references. Oh dude they’re in so much trouble. If the hero name wasn’t backing the VA thing up, this would not go very well for them at all. My conf I’ll tell you why also. See uh when you have a brand new startup like simple energy, there is uh no history or geography to this company. So you have to go by whatever they say and you’re slowly collating their reputation in terms of what did they say and what did they do and what’s the gap in the middle and over time companies like Ather convince you that what they say they deliver and then they become a highly reputed startup and companies like Ola continuously don’t meet that expectation and they slowly start falling out of the cycle until we reach the point we’ve reached where they’re saying yo bang and Ola product please don’t do it right VA on its own without the hero backing would be a very difficult product to work with would question all these things. Yeah. Because we could not imagine whether they would have the capacity to fix it or not. It’s because hero is such a large setup and hero is such an established organization. So many other parts of this organization are showing positive signs that I believe this can be fixed whether it is not fixed because somebody intended and reached a place or because it’s in the process and it’ll happen in the next step or because uh whatever this glitch in the matrix is the capacity to fix it exists. The money to fix it exists. The resources to fix it exist. So I am not concerned that oh correct. I got I got the answer. Thank you for that question. It’s a very very powerful way to think about it. So to ride this is a good scooter. In sport mode this is a quick scooter. Okay. It’s 6 kW which is more powerful than for example the Rrista by about almost 1 and 1/2 W or something 1 and a half kow or something. This is not a slow feeling scooter. But does it have that natural grunt of walk mode on a 450X for example? No. But in sport mode it will feel fast. Hero also lets you use port mode on this scooter from 100% charge all the way down to 20%. And despite Nandi Hills being up and down and all of this duration is very difficult to sus out. So they’ve really nailed that part of the algorithm. Right. So it’s a very granular slowmoving change of performance. Eventually, because I was looking for it, I found it. And I use the Nandihill slopes to basically deplete the charge fast because what I’m beginning to discover is all the magic of what goes on in terms of algorithms is happening at the bottom of the state of charge. And if you don’t ride the scooter long enough, you will never understand what the weird tweaks are. And I’ll come to it because I had to walk this scooter in a few places. Not their fault, but they should have warned me that this would happen to me. That’s all. So, between 80 and 20%, sport mode feels nice. you can pass things. Top speed is 80 km an hour in the Nandi Hills environment where the roads are reasonably open. I never felt like I needed to go faster. But also we never got any traffic at all in the area. So I have no way of saying how it would fit into the city or not. There is negative region. So if you roll the throttle it rolls 8° I think if I remember correctly you get region. It’s the same amount of region all the time. So you get used to it as much as you will ever will. So the 8° rotation extra rotation doesn’t adjust the amount of region. No, it adjusts the amount of region. It doesn’t change by mode. So it does one thing. I mean to me it is a completely pointless exercise. To me I do this. It does that much. Region is the simplest system which is what ultraviolet gets super super right. And ultraviolet says instead of me doing 8° of rotation I’ll give you 10 levels of region. This is a far easierh system to comprehend and utilize. This is a very difficult system to do. We tried it on the athers. Initially I thought yes it would work but the more I wrote the apex or whatever the more I said my god this is such a complicated thing. and I just don’t want to do it. To me, the best way to do regen is I trigger region somehow. Small movement negative throttle works and then it does a predictable thing which I get to select the level of. So on the ultraviolet, you put it in uh the highest region level, it feels like it’s breaking. Mhm. And if I don’t like that, I just go down the levels on the fly until I come to the point where I say, “Okay, now I’m happy with it.” Right? I would also assume that the gradation would be important if you have that amount of region as well. I mean, if the region was that strong. A B if our traffic was a lot less chaotic, this would be actually much simpler because you’re saying I can give you the effect of braking and I can add some charge back to the battery, everybody wins. But our chaos of our traffic means you keep going for the brakes anyway. And when you have to use the brakes and you’re halfway into region and trying to modulate the thing, it is just too complicated. And since you spoke about breaking in traffic, one common question with EVs is that does it cut when you No. No, it doesn’t. They’ve never cut. Hero has been clever enough always to say brakes are brakes. Motor is motor. You do both simultaneously. It’s awesome. So absolutely no issue on that front at all. So sport mode works really well. Below that is their normal mode or ride mode, whatever they call it. I’ll put up the names. I’m sorry. I don’t remember the names now. But that mode is a nice mode. Enough performance? Yes. Calm enough? Yes. Has a lot of range? Yes. That would be a good name for a mode. What? Nice. Nice mode. I actually don’t when Honda makes a viable electric, I think it should be called there should be a nice mode. Honda. Nice. Yeah, it’ll be it’d be the name of the community because you meet the nicest people on a Honda and the name of that mode. Stop giving free ideas. It it was a you said it. It just clicked. I said, “Hey, that’s a nice name.” Actually, no, you’re not giving the idea to anyone. Honda’s not listening. So, uh and the bottom mode, eco mode also, it’s a nice mode. I didn’t feel like it would feel dog slow in traffic, which some EVs can do. And I was happy to note that even at lower and lower and lower states of charge, that sense of this is the performance you will get was more or less delivered on time. And that part of the scooter I really enjoyed. Okay. Speed cap. Uh so I think the eco mode is 45 or 50 but 45 I think. Then the middle mode is 70. And that is the mode at which the lower scooter the go tops out. So that’s it. And then the plus goes another 10 kmp to 80k. And even when we’re running lower states of charge when I was climbing it would get to 73 74 75 quite easily. So you know that the duration is not significant. And what it is saying it will do it does. So this part they’ve got Hero has given boost mode. Oh really? Uh they’ve always done I think the V2 also has it where if you’re in eco mode and you open the throttle a lot then it’ll gives you a lot more performance. Now I was surprised by it because I was expecting it to skip one next mode. Right. To me I’m saying eco you’ll go to I’m in eco. I’ve temporarily go into normal mode, ride mode, and come back into eco when I close the throttle again. But it feels like they’re saying it’s too complicated because in ride then you’ll want to feel like sport. So instead of that, we’ll just go to sport is what it feels like. Mhm. So when you open the throttle with the boost on, it just jumps forward. And I think it would be a useful tool to have. It might be too powerful a scooter in that mode. But what Hero is being clever about is they’re saying people kept getting surprised by boost mode because it was on by default. And then they couldn’t understand why their range was falling so hard because they were constantly using boost to get past things and enjoying that experience. But obviously you’re consuming the battery when you ride like that. So you’re no longer in eco mode or the mentally you’ve selected eco mode. So now boost is off by default which I think is correct. Okay. So you go into modes uh go into the menus and say I don’t want boost. So then when you do this it stays in that mode and gives you the max it can. Okay. When you say no I want boost then you have consciously chosen that when I open the throttle beyond a certain point give me a lot more performance. So it’s just a switch that you turn on and then that is available to you whenever you test the throttle. Yeah. And you will only realize as you ride boost mode is on or not when you’ve used boost and for example you’re in eco mode but you’re doing 65 km an hour and then you need to open uh like overtake the next thing because when you do this then the scooter is like what do you want? We’ve not gotten back to 45. Okay. So in the boost mode so the you had said eco cap is 4550 something like that. But if you go into boost it goes past the it goes past you’ll overtake now the speed is falling but it has not fallen to where eco is cut off right. So when you open the throttle a second time, it like what are you trying to do? Right. So there’s a little weirdness there. It’s not a big deal. You can sort it out. And then I did leave the boost mode off for the rest of the ride because I found that this scooter performs well enough even on the Nandi Hills area where changing a mode is enough. I didn’t have to think about it. On this scooter, you can change modes on the fly, which means I can have the throttle open in a mode and switch modes. Which brings us to the switch gear. Uh again, one sec before you move to the switch gear. I want to point out here that the one thing that we keep asking for from EVs because all these are softwaredefined vehicles which means the creators often feel like as in if you can do it let’s do it just for the sake of it being something cool or something that hasn’t been done before. what we keep asking for from EVs and a lot of what Shumi’s been talking about how the V2X VX2 Pro sorry VX uh plus plus VX2 plus uh has been in the experience of riding it is that it’s trying to build predictability right he’s talking about different states of charge different modes and how the scooters felt to ride in different terrains as well has been same and that is actually such a it gives joy it’s a relief that it will do what you want and again this boost mode thing you can switch it off awesome and if it’s on it’s nice to know that when you buy let’s say it’s reflex and you do this you’re expecting that same kind of response irrespective of which mode you’re in which is nice what happens after you get below 20% I’ll discuss at the end because there is a lot of uh software that starts to wake up at that point of time okay you talking about switch gear uh the switch gear is very cool uh because it’s a completely new design so there’s a joystick on this side to operate the menu with. And uh this scout has 4.3 in screens. It’s an uh segmented LCD on the base model, the Go. And it’s a it’s the same TFT as the Xpulse on the uh plus model. The exact same hardware unit, obviously with new graphics and stuff. So it it sort of reminds me of the ZX uh of the Zoom 125 switch gear, but it is more spread out. It’s on a nicer finished surface and all this. It looks a little bit more upmarket. Similarly, on this side, there’s a completely new set set of switches, too. So there’s the motor on and off. Then there is the mode chain switch which flips down to mode chain and it’s a circular. So you go sport ride eco sport. Okay, you get used to it. It’s not a problem at all. But it’s unidirectional. You when you go up it wants to go into the parking mode which obviously activates only if you’re stationary and that switch gear can be a little bit confusing but only for the first 5 6 minutes. So if you’re going for a test ride and the switch gear is confusing you just don’t stress about it. It’s not confusing. Yeah. Got it. Right. Uh, another mistake I think that they’ve made there is the graphics are black and white base and colors on top. So, eco mode is green and normal mode is blue and whatever and uh, top mode is orange. Most of the screen is black. When you take a 4.3 in uh, TFT screen with in a black bezel and then use lots of black elements at the edges, it looks like a 2.3 in uh, screen. How bad is it? A person was explaining to me how in night mode uh in uh uh day mode it would look even brighter because then the colors swap. We were in day mode. It’s not bright enough. It’s bright enough but the graphics are all black. So they occupy black and black and black. So when you look down you’re seeing a small circle and the rest of the screen is black. So, they’ve basically wasted 4.3 in of screen because it’s black in a black bezel. Now, the bottom model has a front drum brake, 130 mm. The plus has a 220 mm front disc. Nice and powerful disc. Not too aggressive, not too gentle. It’s in the middle. You can modulate it quite easily. Works really well. The few times where I had regen on and I hit the brake, luckily the region’s not super strong. So, it feels more or less normal. So even that’s not an issue. But the chassis will feel weird to a lot of people. It’s not unstable or anything. It’s just weird. So when you take the batteries out of the scooter, the whole into which the battery goes, it feels like it goes on forever. Mhm. Because it’s a tall battery pack and it goes basically to the bash plate at the bottom is roughly where this hole ends. So these batteries instead of being in the floorboard and low are vertical and high. So this is a very tippy scooter, right? And what I mean by TP is that when you do this, it just sort of doesn’t sit under you. Yeah. Okay. Right. So front to back there’s no issue, but it always feels like it does that too much. And on the Nundi Hills area, it’s a windy area. There is a section with lots of trees, and when you exit the trees, there’s suddenly a breeze. It would react to that breeze every single time. Again, not dangerously, but most scooters don’t do this anymore. And I’m saying even the ICs don’t do this anymore. So, this is a weirdly tippy scooter where I jumped a bunch of speed breakers near the railway crossing. Mhm. And there was a breeze and it went like this and landed. Right. And I have jumped so many speed breakers now that this just like does not happen to me. Right. Why does this happen? I have attitude control now as it were. But this scooter didn’t go up and down in the attitude like so it will feel weird but once you get used to it the handling is actually really good. So once I went up the Nundi hills, the flip side of the scooter feeling tippy is that it goes down to lean angles really well, right? So between the fact that there’s predictable performance, it climbs the hill nice and well, it handles well, the tires feel grippy, it’s really an enjoyable scooter and not in the aggressive sense of enjoyment in the sense of it’s returning feedback to you and saying we are happy to do this. And I’m assuming the suspension is also good. The suspension to me is very similar to the Rristas in terms of expectation setting. So as the bumps get larger and larger and larger, it loses control over that process more and more and more. But for most people riding in most situations, you will think this is okay. Okay being I have an expectation. It is meeting my expectation. No new ground has been discovered on that front. If you were to take the better hero suspension setups, they’ve done more than this before. If you take the Suzuki Access 125, which is my current reference for scooter suspension, miles ahead of this thing. If you take the IQ, IQ made a choice. Mhm. Cube said, “I’ll keep you comfortable when you ride gently and it phrase as you go up in speed.” And I think it’s a clever balance to Hero said, “No, we did really want to balance it across the two.” So, the suspension units have been retuned from the V2 Vas a little bit, but no fundamental changes. So, no surprises also. Okay. Super comfortable. No. So, it doesn’t have that plush feeling. Super stiff. Super super hardcore raw. Not jarring. So, no. But if the roads get worse, you will feel it for sure. The seat will also hurt just a little bit because it’s a slightly sloped seat. It’s also not the lowest of scooters. 777 uh 77 777 mm seat height, but it slopes down a little bit. So to me, sloping seats basically say if you find a comfortable position, you may not be able to maintain it. You slack to slow slowly move forward. It’s not super soft, so you won’t fully sink into it. But I rode the scooter from 98% charge down to 2%. Uh initial order was 15ish. I finished at about 87. By that point of time I knew that another 10 kilometers I would be in some amount of aches and pains. So not a terrible seat but it’s not a perfect seat either. And recently we’ve had really good seats come out. So I think the standard has moved on. Okay. So fundamentally what I’m telling you is the scooter doesn’t really make any new benchmark level expectation setting. Nothing. It’s a good scooter. Fundamentals are in the right place. Works. One last thing. The motor is a hub. The motor is sidemounted. So it is mounted right next to the rear wheel and it has its own fins and all that. So you can see quite clearly saying oh there’s the motor. Uh and Chetuk also uses the same kind of configuration but Chetuk’s housing is bigger. So you don’t physically see the motor there. In hero’s case the motor is right there. You can see it. So then it’s a drive. It’s a geared drive. It’s a gear drive. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So that’s the story of the scooter. When you drop below 20% then all the ways to protect the scooter start to wake up. So the first thing that happens is uh you lose the riding modes and it goes into eco. Now what Hero has done is uh tell me if you think this is a good idea or not is I went from 21 to 19% without closing the throttle. So it stayed in sport mode. Ah then something in front happened right? So I had to close the throttle to account for that something. Then when I opened the throttle I was in eco mode. No other warnings. No audio, no sliders, no notification bars, nothing. And to me, okay, but it is a surprise. Yeah, I like the fact that they let you be in that mode until you close the throttle. I do not like the fact that they do this to you without warning you although you do get used to it. Right. Another step happens below 5% which was undocumented like I was not expecting it at all. So up to 20%, I was I they told me that at 20% you will lose sport mode, you will lose normal mode and performance will taper. Yes, it did. Did it taper to a point where economy mode below 20% becomes unusable? No. Usable? Absolutely. Okay. So, I ran it down further. Okay. So, I’m coming closer and closer to the venues because I don’t want to run out and have to push the scooter. Right. At 5%, the scooter is like, “Okay, I’m done with you.” Limp home. Now, limp home crawls forward at like 5 7 8 km an hour. It cannot climb a thing. Okay. Not a thing. Okay. You’ve been to the JW Marriott facil. So the I was just going to ask so the ramp no wait for the ramp. Have you been to the JW Marriott hotel in the Nandi Hills area? So you remember that long driveway? Yeah. If I enter it with pace I can make it a fair way up the driveway before the scooter says okay done. Then the convention center is on the left from so the convention center slope is quite steep up to the hotel is a steepish slope. Not very steep. It’s steepish. Cannot climb. So I basically went over the first speed breaker and stopped. So then I got off the scooter. Then it had enough force for me to be able to walk it through. That’s how you got it down to 2%. I I wanted to know, right? Then I took a U-turn and went down to the circle from where you take the right up to the convention center and I stopped and I knew that this slope though I have to walk. So I walked this scooter. So I wish it was just documented that Lymph home starts at 5%. And I finished at 2 km of range left and 2% of charge left. Okay. Apart from that weirdness because effectively that means your battery’s actual usable state of charge is 95%. and the last 5% is already stored as your backup which didn’t make any sense to me. And that’s not really much of a backup because if it means that you’re having to push it, right, that’s uh that that’s what Hero will say now that at that point, find a nice cafe, ask the owner to let you use a 5 amp plug, take out one or two of the batteries, plug it into the portable charger, and have a nice cup of coffee. And what they’re also saying about the charger is that it’s a 580 watt charger and it works like a 650 watt charger because some of their software or whatever is able to uh do more consistent throughput than the average charger. So the charger sounds like a lower number but the numbers are comparable to the 650 watt charger. You should know TVS now just gives out a 950 watt charger instead and solves all of this. Uh I think this is that’s the way forward. software trickery is fine but therefore you will charge this scooter some five five and a half hours or something to get to 80%. Okay, roughly two and a half hours each battery is your calculation but the good thing is it is fast charge enabled. It has the same charging port as the Aether charging port and it uses both VA’s network and Aether’s fast charge network to charge. So charging wherever you feel like should not be too much of a problem. Okay, now comes the juicy part of this. Okay. So the prices of these scooters are unusually low. Hit may. Uh so they are introductory prices at this time but the Vita Plus is just under a lack of rupees and the Vita Go is 15,000 rupees below that. Okay. Right. But you don’t have to buy the whole scooter as it were because taking a leaf out of MG’s book. There’s battery available as a they will say service I will say loan. They call it bass not Bass. not my fault and therefore I don’t call it bal I call it bal this is not my fault but if there is a joke I will take okay so uh you can get a three or a 5year battery as a loan product on the base model you can get a two three or 5 year loan on the top model you should check those plans super carefully because the 2-year plan for example requires you to consistently bill 2400 km a month as your mileage. What that means is whether you ride 100 km or not up to 2400 km the money that you pay for that month’s usage is the same because this was the thing even with the when MG came out with the pass uh that you had some plans had a minimum billing that you had to do x number of kilometers that was your minimum payment and uh yeah so the minimum payment on the 2-year plan which hero will hop about because that’s the plan according to them which brings it down to 90 pes per kilometer that’s the cheapest one but that cheapest one has a commitment of 2400 km every month which they will bill you whether you use it or not. Okay, so be cautious with this. What hero is basically saying is now we come to the nice part of this. They’re saying people are not buying electrics in the growth quantities that everybody wants to see. Price is a factor. Charging is a factor. Resale is a factor and they have thought of solutions for all three. You tell me if these solutions are clever, A and B going to work or not because I’m going to just present it to you as what they told me because I think fundamentally the approach is right. Some of the stuff that they’ve thought of is a good idea. Whether it’ll work or not new issue because as as far as I can tell as popular as the Windsor pro Windsor is the Windsor Bass system does not bring customers into money as much as into the showroom. Yeah. People are not taking the BAS loan as often as uh the hype about BASS is. Right. So, back to Bal uh uh the prices dropped to as little as 45,000 rupees for the base model. Okay. Now, so how are they doing this? They’re basically saying the chassis motor of the scooter and the battery of the scooter are two separate units because of the government’s law and this is not a swappable battery system like the Honda Activi Electric. These batteries are yours. The scooter is hypothecated to you when you opt for a loan either for the whole scooter or when you do the battery as a loan thing. In both cases, the scooter is hypothecated to you when the loan is off. Hypothecation is taken off just as if you’ve taken a loan for the whole vehicle in the first place. So there is no complication here. But what they’re basically saying is if we can give you the scooter at let’s say 45,000 rupees for the go model and then give you battery as a loan then if you’re also financing this you could pay a down payment as low as 7 8 10,000 and and bring the scooter home and then have two concurrent EMIs one from the loan provider for the scooter and one from the loan provider for the battery. Who are the loan providers? Vidyut you heard them in the context of MG and Herroofen Cor. Yeah. Vidyth eight cities only is their coverage. Rest of the places Heroin Cop will make up for the rest of it. Mhm. So you can take a loan from Hero to buy a product from Hero. Ooh, so good. Now uh jokes aside, what this basically means to you is in terms of the purchase cost of the scooter to bring it home. They’ve brought it down dramatically. Right. First, the VX2 is not an expensive scooter because the prices are lower than competition by let’s call it 10 12,000 rupees on average anyway, which is roughly 10% which was 1 lakh and 85,000. That was the delta between the VX2 plus,000 and the VX2 Go. Go. And the 85,000 drops down to 45,000. Yeah. 44 44 900. It’s all listed as introductory prices. So you absolutely expect that if the VX2 becomes a hit I have doubts but if the VX2 becomes a hit these prices will jump up to normal and become directly competitive to the Rista overall and therefore the Bal will bring the prices down further and and ballpark did you do any calculations as to let’s say if you took any of one of those plans like the five-year plan or the three-year plan uh how much would you end up paying like the monthly you said is the minimum 2 and a half,000? Uh no no the 2-year plan is 2 and a half,000 rupees. If you go into the longer range plans then it’s as low as 900 kilometers a month. So you’ll be paying another let’s say 900. The monthly payment for the 2400 km plan is 2,160 rupees. Let’s call 2200 rupees. And uh for that scooter if you were to take a 5-year plan then your minimum commitment is 800 for which you’ll pay just over 1,100 rupees. Okay 1,100 rupees to that. So 60 months of 1100 rupees. So let’s call it 66,000. But this is the expensive scooter which you would buy at about 58,000 at that point. 1,100 rupees first into 12. So that is your into 60 60 months 5 years. Huh. Okay. And at the end of it, it’s all clear. Then yeah, it’s all clear. So 66,000 is what you’d pay for the battery and you would have already paid 58,000 at the beginning for the scooter itself. Okay. Not bad. So 58 + 66 is uh 1 lakh 24,000 rupees. Okay. Yeah. I’m not saying they’re being unreasonable. I’m just saying just be cautious with these commitments because that 2400 km is part of that plan. It is not negotiable. So when you do 1200 km this month, can you get 1200 km in credit? No, you can’t. You will have to pay that kind of money. But unlike the other systems where like uh if you use additional kilometers, it’s not like you charge for that either. No, you do. Over charges are there. Oh. So, if you go over the 2400 km on the 2-year plan, you will get build per kilometer or whatever it is for sure. But I’m guessing it’s the same thing. It’ll take it out of the loan. They didn’t say any of those things. And you should read the hero website very cautiously because there’s a lot of disclaimers and terms and condition kind of work going on. So, as much as the top line of the plan seems quite attractive, there are sort of gaps in the information itself. Okay. So, for example, uh just to move on to the next thing, it says assured buyback up to 67 12%. Okay. What does what does that mean globally? That means if I come back to you, you will give me 67.5% of this vehicle back as a check. But that’s only in the first year. Then it’s 53% and then it’s 48% or whatever. What Hero says is we will give you three blank checks with dates on them. We will fill in the amounts when you come back and say, “Okay, I want to get rid of the scooter.” Now, why is Hero doing this? They’re saying resale values is a big concern for customers. Here’s how we solve it. We will give you a short buy back. good so far in the terms and condition it says based on dealer discretion now I don’t know what that means because to me that is too much rigor right so there are interesting ideas in here be cautious with them because the entire extent of these ideas are not being made public as easily as I would have hoped for right so the idea of the Bal system is to say you can buy this a lot less expensively see I’ve already learned to say it without smiling and I’m enjoying the fact that he’s not able to figure that part out yet. Right? So if you take your battery as a loan, your initial cost becomes quite low. If you’re buying cash down, as I said, uh 44,000, 58,000, whatever, you can bring the scooter home with the loan uh still pending on you. If you’re taking a loan for the scooter also, then you might pay as little as 10K, but then you’ll have two EMIs instead. So this is the lay of the land, right? Service everything is there’s no surprises in there. Also, it’s all appdriven. You book your appointments and you go. Service is two times a year. 7,500 kilometers apart which is a slightly longer interval than usual. Uh prices Hero has a good cost estimator. Please use that on their website. It really is very good. Uh but it should be 5600 rupees because most of it is inspection and diagnostics unless you’re changing brake pads or whatever. I did hear something about having to change the oil on the Hero Vita V2. I’m not sure about this at all. If you know anything about this because you’re a VA owner, please do tell us. But there was something about uh what nobody tells you is oil be and I I was just like not sure but but on the ultraviolet there was a situation where an F77 came and then this man had to go underneath to figure out where the oil leak was coming from and one of the worm gears is in an oil bath and that oil bath was leaking. If the V2 has a similar system it might because there’s a gear train to the hub then there might be some oil that helps lubricate that gear train and that oil might need changing. So some there’s a little rough edges here and there not just in the finish but in all of this too but the fundamental thing is it works well enough although it doesn’t look so great uh the prices are very good uh with the battery as a loan the prices appear to be better and if Hero succeeds in just bringing you to the showroom and considering the product even if you don’t take the battery as a loan that’s what they’re aiming to get. Cool. Um oh and no map turn by turn only. Yeah, what we didn’t talk about what is the claim range and what is the actual I’ve completely forgot about claim range. So, uh the top scooter claim range is about 144 I think and uh you should be able to get 100ish. Okay, you managed about 70 in to 87 – 15 is about 72. So, I did 72 km and I did hard riding because I was basically trying to get the battery down to the 20% because I wanted to see what happens there. So, I’ve gone uphill, I’ve gone into corners, not break for those corners. I’m doing all of that nonsense. I’m not using region at all. So, I strained the scooter, but it basically in hilly terrain still got to 70 on a full charge. So, to me, 100 110 every day is going to feel easy, I think. Uh, the base model, I think the claimed range is 85 or something like this. I’ll put up the numbers again. And on that scooter, it’s very similar to the I cube in spec in that sense. I think you should be able to see about 60 75 in the real worldish. Okay. And the uh front disc is ABS. No ABS. Come on, dude. Okay, ABS on a scooter, right? I mean, do you know how stupid that is? Since it’s a new generation from next year onwards when all two wheelers will get ABS, then suddenly all of these things will sprout ABS also because you did speak about modulation and ease and all of that. But you also said it was powerful from combined braking is where it’s at. You touch any of the brakes, the scooter will figure out which brake to use. Stay out of it, please. No. No. So uh nobody’s doing ABS. I think uh the ultraviolet ABS is the only ABS in the electric space right now. Uh it’s not available even even as an option on anything else. And as ultraviolet did also explain it’s it’s quite a bit of work because now you have the brake then you have the regen then you have the ABS system and all of that has to interact with each other and uh what I missed on region is they have not done the ather heat dissipation system. So region kicks in below 80% only 100 to 80% there is no region. Okay. Cool. Short summary. Yeah. Okay. So we’re talking about the Hero. No, sorry. Not the Hero. The Vita VX2 Pro. No. Plus plus. This is what I’m saying. This name just doesn’t settle into my system. I don’t know what it is. And I’m going on calling it V2X in my head. Anyways, again, this is the Hero Vita VX2 Plus. And that’s the topsp spec version of the new family scooter that’s come into the Vita family. There is a lower version which is called the V2X VX2 singing VX2 uh go uh basically go and that I can’t go on until we finish and that has a single removable battery and that one retails for 85,000 and that’s without and what is the real talking point about this scooter is its price. If you buy it without the battery integrated as a cost into the scooter, that price drops down to 45,000 rupees, which is incredibly low. And that is the talking point about these scooters primarily. Um, and for the higher spec version, you get two removable batteries and that scooter costs about a lak of rupees if you buy it outright. But if you buy the batteries as a loan, then it is 53,000. 58 58,000 there there or thereabouts. And that is well definitely a breakout statement from Hero because that means an electric scooter becomes super accessible from a brand that is reputed that is wellknown and has that trust factor built into it and that is an important thing from the way I look at it because you could get these prices from let’s say brands that are being imported into the country which are um kind of not as dependable as an idea. I would say one of the most important things that you don’t think about the longevity and the use case being natural and that is the great thing that along with this price point which is a bit of a marketing part an idea to get people into the showrooms as we’ve seen with uh what MG did with uh the Windsor as well. So it’s great I mean the idea is there the scooter itself the good thing that I’ve understood from this is fundamentally it is a solid scooter. It rides well. The logics that they’ve applied to it in the way it performs in the different modes even as the battery state depletes is all predictable and easy. It actually feels like it’s doing the right kind of thinking. So it’s got that boost mode so which you can turn on or off. So even if you’re in eco mode and you need extra performance, it can come on and give you the acceleration that you need. There are some fine tunings required there but by and large it’s all working well. It allows you to stay in sport mode even when you get to 20% and it’ll stay there as you drop under until you close the throttle. A notification there would have been nice because then it prepares you that now you’re in the lower eco mode. You do have a mode in between which is normal which we are calling as the nice mode because it is nice. Uh there are speed caps for each of the modes 45 km an hour, 70 km an hour and 80 km an hour and at no point did Shi feel that the performance in terms of the speed was not enough. He was riding on open roads. The scooter fed fine and uh the interesting thing is that the and he was riding it around Nandi. He was climbing up and down so that he could deplete the range quickly. And by and large it performed consistently from 98% down to 20% where it remained he had to look for the deration. He could not feel it directly right it did not stare him in the face and that is a good sign. uh below 20% he was only in eco mode which is also fine. What he did not expect and did happen was that at 5% it basically went into the turtle mode which was your uh limp home mode and at that point the scooter’s performance was too low. He couldn’t even climb the slope going up to the hotel where he was not the ramp just the gradient up to that hotel. And it’s while it is reasonably steep, it’s not that steep. Fly overs, many flyovers, steep, defeated by every flyover immediately. If you’re in limpo mode, you’re not climbing anything. Yeah. So, uh that’s how the scooter rides. The suspension is also fine. It’s not plush. It’s um it’s it’s a decent space. It’s not plush. It’s not harsh. So, it’s in that in between space where you will not complain about it, but it’s not going to make you go wow either. In the riding characteristics, one of the things that Shu noticed was that it’s a scooter that feels slightly tippy. This is something we used to talk about adventure bikes which would sit tall and had a high center of gravity. It’s happening here not because it’s tall. The seat height is only 771 mm. So, it’s not super low, but it’s all right. But you feel it because those batteries, the two batteries are stacked vertically under the seat. So, they’re sitting kind of a lot of them is sitting high up. So, it’s a heavy component sitting high up. Yeah. So you are going to feel that center of gravity higher. So it feels different in the way it rides but it’s not necessarily a problem. You just have to kind of get used to it. Yeah. To clarify this thought, think about a scooter has a certain resistance when it is exactly vertical and you want to start moving it off vertical. Most scooters have a known resistance to this which you will expect as your normal expectation. This scooter is let’s call it 30% lighter than that in terms of resistance. So it has just like so not unstable, not scary, but it is a surprise. Yeah. Um and on that front it also has the base variant has 130 mm disc uh sorry 130 mm drums. The front and rear front and rear and the topsp spec variant that Shumi rode that has 220 mm disc and 130 mm drum at the rear. Combi brakes only. And um that brings us to the batteries themselves. Both of them are removable on this topsp spec variant. Each battery state is shown to you and by and large what shumi saw was that it was depleting at a similar rate. So, it’s consuming from both batteries as you go along. And that’s where I was a bit surprised because that means at the end of the day when you want to charge the battery, you have to carry both batteries up to your house. And that’s the convenience that the scooter is offering. And and more importantly, because of what Gagan said, if you were to take one of the batteries and charge it, so one is at 100% and one is at 35%. It’s that varied varied state where there was a little bit of a glitching from the scooter. Not like it didn’t die or anything but when you open the throttle the acceleration become slightly unpredictable. Yeah. Did they say anything about uh if you’re running on only one battery will it derate the performance or something like that? They didn’t say anything like that but also maybe I forgot that you could have asked that question. So um as of now so the battery packs both of them can be removed. The thing is that right now even when you go home only one battery can be charged at a time. They need a solution where you can connect both the batteries to that charger and let them charge overnight and both get done. So you don’t have to think about unplugging one and then plugging the other one in. And effectively each battery is going to take about 2 and 1/2 hours to charge from zero to sorry more or less 100% 80% 100% in that range. So it’s not going to take a lot of time. The charger that you have to charge the batteries at home is the same one that you’d use if you were charging directly through the scooter. And that charger kind of snakes under the seat and plugs in there. Um it’s a 580 watt charger, but through software they’re saying that the performance can be up to similar to what a 650 watt charger would be. Um so that’s all right, but there are better faster chargers that are available in scooters in this space right now as well. Um the point where Shumi started with the V2X X2 VX2 Plus was that the disappointment and that I think is something that has taken me also by surprise and I was not expecting it and that some of the older assumptions that we had about hero quality and this is with regards to plastics specifically one of the things so what he mentioned was perceived quality is a factor that will be a bit of a letdown it is with the kind of plastics. It’s the finishes like the edges around the uh ignition switch uh which were not well finished. Uh small little bits everywhere that kind of just feel like this should have been thought through not just done better should have been thought through better. And those are the things that will make it feel like a like when I think about the VA right because of the design and the first one and even the images that you showed me you think of it as a new generation experience and this aspect of it doesn’t feel like a new generation experience. Um the seat on that front ergonomically I think this is something that always annoys me. The seat slopes down to get you that low seat point but that also means when you’re riding you’ll kind of feel like you’re sliding forward. The good thing here is this is a seat that doesn’t let you sink in too much, so you feel kind of in place, but it could have been better on that front. Yeah. Uh I don’t know the wheel sizes. We didn’t talk about that. 12 in both front and 9090 180. Okay. Awesome. Uh aside from that, the low variant, the plus go, the the go has a larger uh underseat storage 33 L. 33.1 33.1. And the more expensive scooter with the two battery packs has a smaller boot and uh the utility of that is what could you really pack into it? No. So it’s a uh it’s like a deep hole boot but the top of the battery component uh compartment is flat so you can put some stuff on it. When I did put the RAR into it, the seat would not close. So it is still about like a 2 in short of closing. Okay. So no, again, no major ground has been broken here. But 33 L is considered very decent space. So if you’re carrying like a grocery bag or something and not specifically a helmet, there’s a lot of space on this. So this they’re doing okay. So that means like groceries and stuff like that is not an issue. Yeah. And remember the charger lives there 99.99% of the time because there’s no wall mounting option, etc., etc. So the charger will consume a lot of the space anyway. It’s not one of the biggest chargers anymore, but it’s not as small as the TVS charger either. So it is still going to consume some of space. So that’s the story of the Hero Vita. Now I remembered a few things about it. One of the ways they’ve incentivized you to take Bal is it brings extended warranty as a complimentary part of the package during the uh during that phase uh fast charging is free on the Aether and Vita networks. Ah that’s interesting. Right. So they’ve incentivized that part of it. Now the standard warranty is 3 years 30,000 km etc standard and then extensions will be rolled out. I’m not aware that the extension plans are already available and that you could buy the extension now, but you can buy the extension I think within 6 months of purchasing the VX2. So that’s okay. Okay. The free charging is an interesting thing because then it almost becomes like you’re not just paying for the the battery cost as it were. You’re paying for your energy as well, right? Which is again as I said the idea was let’s lower the entry barrier and the B system is one way to do that. The price is one way to do that. Then let’s remove the charging hassles by doing two things. One, if you have the B system, charge wherever. It’s free. And if you don’t have the B system, then take the batteries out and charge wherever. Because you carrying a battery into a place and plugging it in is not physically that complicated sounding a thing. Will you carry a 10 kilo battery up and down in the lift every day? I wonder. And on that, I forgot that we didn’t talk about the motor. It’s a um it’s a 6 kW motor. Peak peak. And uh the top speed is uh we mentioned the top speed. We didn’t talk about the range again. So the range uh claimed is about 143 km if I’m not wrong. And you can expect in the real world to manage about 100 110 which we’ll verify when we get it here. But Shumi managed to pull it off for about 72 km in hard usage. And gradients gradients believe me are are the enemies of EVs and range. No, I did worse. I stopped on the gradient and restarted knowing it’ll consume even more and if duration is going to happen, heat warnings are going to come, it’s all going to come from this, right? And the total battery capacity is 4 uh 3.4 3.4 for the 3.4 2.2 3.4 and 2.2. That’s the last bit. Awesome. What’s next? Um I have the NS400Z for testing next week. Uh the upgrade with the more power and centered and uh there’s a quick shifter in there. I have the 250 Adventure from KTM finally. Oh wow. Coming in. Yeah. So we’ll test that also. A lot of you have asked for this. Exactly. And I don’t know that it’ll be this long a motoring first because we have a reference point already. But I think that bike is worth exploring on its own. Uh then there will should be an update to the RTR 310 from TVS also at some point which should also come in. Mhm. So things are moving and and in happy news the Xulse and the uh the X pulse I’m not sure about the Xreme 250 but the X pulse is apparently around the corner. So finally we will get to see our expul test bike also. Awesome. But I think it’s it’s emblematic of the fact that hero is in a significant zone. There’s lots of people moving around and quitting and joining and all of this. So it is a little bit uh chaotic. And I suppose that that manifests in things like this. Awesome. Good. Yeah. Things are moving. All right. Um before we sign actually for them I hope it works out because uh look at the delays. Yeah. The Destiny 6 months for a price. The Expulse four months for the test bike. Extreme 250R test bike still reasonably an unknown. Uh just Expulse 421 disappeared. Vas only available in the premium. Vas are available at Premier and 2.0 showrooms. That’s about 550 600 of them today. And they’re saying they’ll hit their number which is 750 by the Diwali season for sure. Okay. So it’s not like a super slow thing. Also because of that since they’re sharing that space the 2.0 to network the dealership uh the workshops will be kind of crowded so there’ll be a little bit of a hassle so they’re saying use the app book an appointment if you do buy one of these things please do tell us what that experience is like because if half the showroom is super crowded and there are cues and frustration going on I don’t know that an app booking is going to make a dent in this so please tell us what happens there right and um on that note we’d like to remind you that on the motoring app in circles we’re having these kind of conversations all the time owners are coming in talking about their vehicles, the good part of it, the bad part of it, their lives with it. So come and contribute because you’ll be making decisions easier and better for everybody there. And that’s I think the most powerful part of being in circles. And we love hanging out there and talking about all these things. And if you needed another incentive to get on the motoring app, we’d like to remind you that Disconnect season 3 is playing on the app only and it’s for free. So whether you download, register and watch, it’s all for free. Anything else? No, I think uh we are also rolling out a program called POS podcast as a loan. PAL PAL PAL if you prefer and uh it’s it’s it’s like great value because the EMI zero, the down payment is zero, the interest rate is zero. So if you haven’t checked out as a Mari I approve. Yes. If you haven’t checked out Disconnect season 3 and you think free is too expensive, try a PAL plan out. It it reduces the barriers and now you can come and watch it. All right, on that note, I think we should wrap it up. What you should not do is don’t think of it as podcast as a service though because that’s pass. Please don’t pass. Disconnect me. Love doing it. P good pass bad. Yeah. All right, go for it. If there’s any questions about the Vita VX2 Plus or Go that we’ve not answered, please do leave us a comment. We answer all of our comments on all of our platforms. Fastest responses, easiest to track longer conversations. It’s all easier for us on the Motoring Cap. We encourage you to use it. You don’t have to. Instagram works, YouTube comments work. The best place for us to be able to say, “You said something, we said something, there’s a conversation going on,” is there. We also like the fact that on motoring comments and circles on the app, people seem to be extraordinarily helpful and they bring a lot of insight and help where they can to people that they don’t know. If you want to enjoy that experience, again, please leave your questions on the app if you can. Apart from that, we’ll be back soon with another episode of Motoring First before you know it. Okay, enough. Thank you so much for watching. This is Motoring First. I’m sorry. When marketing guys get into it, then I also want to get into it. Bye-bye.

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Chapters
00:00The EV challenge
04:19 Design & quality
09:54 Batteries & charging
16:24 Importance of Hero
18:00 Performance
24:54 Predictability is important
26:06 Screens & details
28:12 Handling & comfort
32:09 Low charge behaviour
35:25 Charging
36:19 Pricing & battery loans
42:52 Assured buyback
44:15 Living with it
45:43 Range
47:43 Quick summary
57:44 More incentives
59:46 What’s next
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