It may sound counter-intuitive, but Indian low-speed EVs have more in common with Formula 1 than you’d expect.
A Formula 1 pit crew has about two seconds to get a car back on track. Yulu’s mechanics often have only a few minutes or hours to get an EV back into service.
Yulu operates low-speed EVs primarily for quick commerce delivery executives. Every minute a Yulu EV spends in maintenance is a minute a rider cannot earn. Thus, Yulu’s entire business model is geared to help them maximise earnings. This means making bikes available at the right place and time, which requires maintaining an extremely high-utilisation fleet that’s easy to use, low-maintenance, and affordable.
Just as F1 teams compete on operational precision rather than hardware or technology alone, Yulu’s competitive advantage lies in operational excellence that our competitors struggle to replicate.
The Bottleneck: Quick R&M
You can think of Yulu’s repair and maintenance (R&M) cycle like an F1 race lap. It’s simple: customers Reserve bikes, Yulu Recovers them, Repairs them, and Redeploys them.
Recovery and redeployment are scalable logistics problems. But repair creates the bottleneck.
It requires hundreds of mechanics working round the clock. Yulu’s mechanics do not simply perform repair and maintenance; they perform Quick R&M, much like delivery executives operating in the world of quick commerce.
The F1 Connection
In Formula 1, pit crews achieve 2.3-second stops through precision engineering: hydraulic jacks, pneumatic wheel guns, and choreographed workflows. Speed without precision is chaos; precision without speed is irrelevant.
Yulu faces, and overcomes, the same challenge on a daily basis. Traditional bike shops optimise for cost while Yulu’s mechanics operate under delivery rider-level time pressure, while maintaining strict safety standards.
To achieve this goal, Yulu studied operational best practices from large-scale manufacturing and service networks, including learnings from investor Bajaj Auto’s production and maintenance systems. The focus was simple: reduce turnaround time without compromising quality or safety.
One example is pre-staged inventory. Instead of mechanics assembling repairs component by component, commonly required parts are organised into ready-to-use kits. This reduces the time spent locating, sorting and preparing the necessary parts. Maintenance bays are also designed to minimise movement and improve workflow efficiency, allowing mechanics to focus on repairs rather than logistics.
Technology also plays a critical role in achieving high speed and precision. Through Yuzen, Yulu’s proprietary internal workflow management system, the company introduced automated diagnostic and electrical health checks that identify potential issues and guide mechanics towards likely fault points. What previously relied heavily on manual inspection is diagnosed faster and more consistently through data-led workflows. Internally, these systems function much like a Formula 1 team’s telemetry system, helping identify problems before they become a larger maintenance challenge.
Behind every successful ride is a network of mechanics, processes, diagnostics and operational systems working together. The result is that maintenance becomes less about repairing individual vehicles and more about managing fleet readiness at scale.
The Yulu Way!
In many ways, that is where the Formula 1 comparison becomes most relevant.
Fans see the driver crossing the finish line, or in Yulu’s case getting your orders in time. What you rarely see is the highly engineered system working behind the scenes to make that performance possible.
In electric mobility, the real race is not just building vehicles. It is keeping them available, reliable and earning every day. Like Formula 1 teams, Yulu’s success ultimately depends on what happens in the pit lane!
This blog is authored by Aman Mehrotra, Associate Director- Strategy and Operations at Yulu.
