Vida V1 electric scooter review: Late bloomer

Vida V1 review: design

The Vida V1 wears a brand new and rather unusual design. The most striking angle is its aggressive looking face with a low mounted LED headlamp, wide bodywork and flyscreen on top. The side profile is all about that large swooping body panel and the unusual split seat design. From the rider’s point of view, the Vida gets some premium looking switchgear and a 7-inch touchscreen TFT display.

Vida V1 review: ride and handling

The Vida V1 looks like a fairly large scooter in person and that translates to how you sit on it. The floorboard feels at a natural height, the seat is nice and spacious and the handlebar placement is pretty decent as well.

While we only got to ride the V1 on the super smooth test tracks at Hero’s sprawling Centre for Innovation and Technology in Jaipur, from what I could tell, there seems to be a decent level of compliance in the suspension. I suspect that this scooter should have a nicely absorptive suspension set-up on the road. 

The Vida V1 Pro weighs 125kg, which puts it on par with the Ola at the heavier end of the scooter market, but it doesn’t feel cumbersome, and like with most EV scooters, there’s a reverse function if you need it. The braking capability is also good enough for this level of performance. 

Vida V1 review: performance

The base V1 comes with three riding modes while the V1 Pro gets an additional custom mode that can be set up as per the rider’s liking. 

The Vida scooter can be charged in three ways. You can either remove the batteries and charge them outside, or you can charge the scooter directly using the provided home charger. Finally, the scooter also supports fast charging, and while Hero says it will set up its own network, the V1 can also use Ather’s fast charging network as it shares the same connector design. 

Vida V1 review: features

Hero is positioning the Vida as a premium product and they’re throwing in a bunch of features to try and justify that. On the scooter itself, you get all-LED lighting, fully keyless functionality, cruise control and follow-me-home lights. There’s also a shielded SOS button on the handlebar that can send out an alert message via the mobile app in case of an emergency. In addition, there are a whole bunch of features that will be enabled by the app, but it wasn’t ready for us to try out at the launch ride.

While the scooter has been launched right now, as we’ve seen with most other EVs, deliveries will only begin in a while and in a few cities to start with. Hero says that bookings are now open and that deliveries will begin by December. Sales will start off in Delhi, Bengaluru and Jaipur with more cities being added later.

Vida V1 review: price 

Clearly, the Vida V1 is a well equipped scooter, but that doesn’t shake the fact that this machine is priced a little uncomfortably high. The Vida V1 starts at Rs 1.45 lakh, ex-showroom, and the Vida V1 Pro goes all the way up to Rs 1.59 lakh, ex-showroom, and these prices are after the FAME 2 subsidy. Those prices put this scooter at the very top of the EV scooter market as of this moment. With such ambitiously high pricing Hero seems to have taken inspiration from the Ather 450X and the Bajaj Chetak, both of which are doing quite well at the moment despite being priced at around a similar point.

Nevertheless, we’ll reserve our full verdict for when we get to properly test the Vida on public roads and against its rivals. 

Also see:

Vida V1 video review