The Ather Rizta promises to be a family scooter while retaining the fun-to-ride aspect that is synonymous with the Ather brand. We take a closer look.
Story: Sayantan De
Photography: Sanjay Raikar
The founders of Ather Energy set out to create a performance scooter with handling to match and this they achieved with the 450 series. It packed a bunch of thoughtful features to make life easier on a day-to-day basis. However, “performance” is a niche market in India, so Ather decided to apply their know-how to creating their version of the ultimate family scooter and they called it the Rizta. We think this is a stylised version of the Urdu word rishta, which means “relation”. Can the family scooter become a family member? We went to Nandi Hills in Bengaluru to find out.
Ather went for a rather conservative styling for the Rizta, which means while the design is not going to excite anyone, it is also not going to offend anyone. The scooter’s bodywork has flat panels and straight lines, which give it a functional appearance. This works in the scooter’s favour, particularly with the dual-tone colours available on the higher trims, though the monotone colourways are appealing on account of their simplicity. The flat floorboard and the huge seat are all straight lines as well and the exposed belt drive of the 450 series has been given a neat little cover on the Rizta.
Thanks to the aforementioned huge seat and tall-ish handlebar, it was easy to find a comfortable riding position as I had ample room to slide back on the seat. We tried two-up riding as well and, true to Ather’s claim, it was a cinch to fit two riders and a packed camera bag between them on the seat. Under the seat, there’s a 34-litre storage which has a light and a port to connect the Power Hub accessory which can charge mobile phones as well as the Ather Halo smart helmet. However, the coolest storage accessory is undoubtedly the organiser that can be lifted straight out of the storage loaded with your shopping and luggage, thus ensuring that forgetting to pack a shopping bag is a thing of the past on the Rizta. An optional front luggage organiser, which Ather call the “Frunk”, adds 22 litres of storage. One of the major irritants was the side-stand, which has a tendency to bounce back if opened in haste and without deliberation. Ather promised us that they would look into this.
The Rizta also marks the début of AtherStack 6, the sixth generation of Ather’s operating system (OS) for their scooters, and there are some hits and misses. On the one hand, the ability to share your live location with a pre-set contact as an SOS is incredible in terms of security, along with Google Maps integration which makes life so much easier; and Magic Twist, where you rotate the throttle in the opposite direction for braking—this feels really natural to use (this is not based on regen, as it works the same on any charge level—regen doesn’t kick in properly until the battery is at about 80 percent charge). On the other hand, as we have enough distractions now-a-days, WhatsApp notifications should have been left out. Furthermore, Alexa integration works only for Alexa owners and, I believe, Alexa is still not mainstream enough for this to be super useful. Ather also took this opportunity to give the companion app a comprehensive update and the app is more intuitive than before as a result, showing you the information you are most likely to need at that moment—such as parking location and remaining charge, etc.
We rode the Ather Rizta Z with the smaller 2.9-kWh battery which gives it a claimed range of 123 kilometres. Our test vehicle was equipped with the Pro Pack, which adds Skid Control, Ather’s version of traction control. The mid-drive motor has 4.3 kW (5.8 hp) and 22 Nm, which give the Rizta a 4.7-second time for 0 to 40 km/h and a top speed of 80 km/h. It picks up speed quickly but in a relaxed way, in keeping with its family scooter character. There are just two ride modes, Smart Eco and Zip, and we were able to attain the claimed top speed in the Zip mode with ease. Braking performance was decent on all kinds of surfaces and the Magic Twist feature works really well and feels completely natural to use, to the point I ended up not touching the brake levers unless I needed to brake hard.
It handles like an Ather scooter is expected to, with excellent stability at high speeds on the highways and also during extremely low-speed U-turns, but the real news here is the ride quality. We rode this scooter over smooth tarmac, broken asphalt as well as over rural gravel roads and the it soaked up everything in its path with aplomb. So comfortable was the ride that I ended up doing much higher speeds than I realised over less-than-perfect surfaces. The Rizta instils a high level of confidence in the rider to execute such feats. The Skid Control works exactly as expected, with the scooter rolling off smoothly on loose gravel, places where the rear wheel chirps with the Skid Control turned off.
It is quite clear that Ather have put a lot of thought into the development of the Rizta and people actually lived with the scooter day to day as evidenced by the number of thoughtful touches on it. The price starts from Rs 1.10 lakh (ex-showroom), though the one you want will be the Rizta Z, with either the smaller or the larger battery. That said, we would definitely recommend adding the Pro pack, so you will likely end up spending Rs 1.25 lakh-Rs 1.45 lakh (ex-showroom), plus another Rs 15,000-Rs 20,000 for the Pro pack, like our test vehicle.
But keep aside the numbers for a moment and consider how much this scooter means to Ather, who already have a scooter with headline-grabbing figures in the form of various iterations of the 450 series, to invest their time and effort into crafting a companion for your daily lives. The more I rode the scooter, the more I felt like it will be one of those vehicles which will blend so seamlessly into your life and improve the quality of it that you will miss all the little things that make the Rizta unique the next time you ride a different scooter. In my opinion, that means it may very well end up becoming a member of the family.
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