ICE cars steal sales show so far this year, EVs in very slow lane
While the government has set an ambitious target for electric vehicles to make up 30% of all passenger vehicle sales by 2030, carmakers are hedging their bets, underscoring the wide gap between policy ambitions and market reality.
Maruti Suzuki
, India's largest carmaker, sold 87% ICE vehicles - those run on petrol, diesel and CNG - in the January-June period, with hybrid and mild hybrid EVs making up the remaining 13%, data collated by market researcher Jato Dynamics showed.
The ICE share of Mahindra & Mahindra, which currently sells three EV models in the country and has several more lined up, was 93% during the period while Kia posted near 100% ICE sales.
Clearly, the electric transition remains aspirational for most players, as consumers stay anchored to familiar, affordable technologies and remain reluctant to make the switch.
"This is the nature of transition-it's gradual, uncertain, and complex," said a senior official of a Delhi-based car company who requested not to be identified. By 2030, however, electric and hybrid vehicles will account for at least 30-40% of the market - a big leap from the current under 10%, he added.
Even Tata Motors, the market leader in electric cars, sold 88% ICE vehicles in the first half. A spokesperson said the firm's multi-powertrain strategy spanning petrol, diesel, CNG, and electric is "about giving consumers the power of choice while preparing for future shifts."
Only two manufacturers bucked the trend. Toyota, with a diversified approach, saw 55% of sales come from combustion engines, balanced by 29% hybrids and 16% mild hybrids. JSW MG Motor went all-in on electric, targeting urban buyers willing to pay premium prices. As a result, 81% of its sales came from battery electric vehicles (BEVs).
The government is playing its part, continuing to offer FAME II (Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles) subsidies and pushing stricter emission norms.
Yet, according to
Ravi Bhatia
, president of Jato Dynamics, price sensitivity and "charging anxiety" among consumers keep EVs largely confined to metro corridors.
India's automotive landscape is not just vast, but deeply varied. Urban buyers prioritise convenience, while rural customers focus on affordability and durability. Some regions are seeing growing EV infrastructure, while others still struggle with basic electrification. That's why carmakers aren't putting all their eggs in one basket, Bhatia explained.
CNG is gaining popularity in urban and semi-urban areas for its lower running costs. Diesel has lost its popularity but continues to dominate high-mileage segments such as SUVs. Petrol remains the most widely accessible fuel.
Meanwhile, EVs are making quiet but steady inroads as infrastructure begins to improve.
India's auto market could reach 7.5 million units by 2030, with electric and hybrid vehicles expected to capture a 30-40% share.
Tata Motors has committed ₹33,000-35,000 crore toward its passenger and EV businesses from FY26 to FY30 to drive product-led growth, including seven all-new nameplates and 23 model updates across ICE, CNG and electric segments.
As BS7 emission norms loom and global supply chains shift toward electrification, manufacturers are carefully balancing immediate consumer demand with long-term regulatory pressures. The question is no longer if the transition will happen, but which companies will survive the journey, industry executives said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Mint
an hour ago
- Mint
Made tough choice to close fast-fashion delivery startup Blip: Co-founder Ansh Agarwal
New Delhi, Jul 13 (PTI) Bengaluru-based startup Blip, which was into fast fashion delivery, has been shut down, co-founder Ansh Agarwal said in a LinkedIn post, citing limited capital and go-to-market challenges. Blip offered 30-minute doorstep delivery of the latest fashion apparel and accessories in Bengaluru, and its closure highlights the broader strain on early-stage innovation for startups, as they face harsh funding realities, despite promising growth narratives of the quick commerce space. In the backdrop of cautious investor sentiments and fierce competition, new ventures, overall, struggle to scale up and face operational challenges within the country's evolving startup ecosystem. Among the prominent startups that have shut down over the last one year are Koo, touted as an Indian replica of Twitter, now X (that blamed failed attempts at partnerships and harsh funding winter for its closure), and Nithin Kamath-backed edtech Stoa School. "Update: We are shutting down Blip after building for over a year. We have finally called it a day. While we continue to believe in this space, bootstrapping the business with limited capital made it extremely difficult for us to participate in the market," Agarwal wrote in a post. The Blip model, being different from the rest, did a lot of first-in-market implementations that took its own time to convince stakeholders. It affected a go-to-market strategy and "slowed things considerably down for us", he said. "The result of limited working capital and failure to implement our go-to-market in an efficient manner, it didn't make sense for us to continue, and hence, we had to make a difficult choice to shut blip down," he said. Agarwal conceded that he personally continues to believe in the space and understands the need for verticalisation of quick-commerce in general. "Sadly, it won't be us. I am extremely proud of what we did at blip. Being first in the market and changing the narratives with the resources we had kept me awake at night, but it was all worth it," he further said. Thanking co-founder Sarvesh Kedia, Agarwal said he couldn't have asked for a better partner, one who could take anything thrown at him, with rigour.
Mint
an hour ago
- Mint
Why space defence is no longer a pie in the sky for Indian companies
New Delhi/Bengaluru: Anirudh Sharma, chief executive of space startup Digantara, is setting up a satellite manufacturing assembly line at his company's Bengaluru headquarters. It's a bit of a departure from Digantara's original premise of selling 'space situational awareness'—a map for satellites to navigate increasingly crowded orbits. So, why is a company looking to sell satellite data to clients setting up an assembly line? Sharma says the decision was driven by the increasing interest over approximately the past six months from governments around the world to source their own space defence and surveillance infrastructure. Once a practically non-existent sector, space-based defence services, led by the demand for surveillance in the sky, is having a big impact on India. The country's space companies—once heavily questioned about their commercial prospects—now stand on the precipice of bagging contracts from countries around the world. Aside from Digantara, Bengaluru-based startups GalaxEye, Bellatrix Aerospace and Pixxel, and Hyderabad-headquartered legacy company Ananth Technologies, are all benefiting from this shift. Looking to get in on the action, last December, industrial conglomerate JSW Group entered the field, partnering with $3.5-billion US aerospace and defence-Tech company, Shield AI. As a consequence, India is quietly seeing the genesis of a sector that could give the country immense geopolitical soft power—akin to what Russia and France had previously wielded, in the global space race. At the heart are commercial contracts for manufacturing satellites, and for offering surveillance-related space data services to governments around the world. In less than eight years, the industry is likely to contribute over $17 billion to India's economy. And by the end of this fiscal year, it is set to get space-based surveillance contracts of varying kinds worth nearly $3 billion, Pawan Kumar Goenka, chairman of India's nodal space agency, Indian National Space Promotions and Authorization Centre (In-Space), had told Mint in May. At stake in all this is India's potential to take the challenge to the US and China—the de facto leaders in global space defence and surveillance technologies. Eye in the sky There is a rising demand for high-resolution imaging from satellites for earth observation and sovereign surveillance use cases. Over the past three quarters now, we are seeing an increasing interest from governments around the world to own their own space surveillance satellites," Digantara's Sharma told Mint. 'The contract sizes that we have been offered range from $1-15 million—varying by the number of satellites that a client is asking us for. The demand is certain, and is helping us generate a steady revenue stream this fiscal year." GalaxEye is a second entrant pivoting into this ecosystem. Last month, chief executive Suyash Singh announced the venture's entry into the high-resolution-imaging satellite market—with a view to tap the rising demand for surveillance data from around the world. On 2 July, fellow startup Bellatrix Aerospace followed suit, introducing what it said was an 'ultra-low-earth satellite delivering lower latency, sharper imagery and dramatically reduced mission costs" than established surveillance satellite projects. Each of them is vying for a market where Bengaluru-origin space startup Pixxel made an early entry, offering ultra-high-resolution surveillance satellites to nations in a 'data-as-a-service' format. The company has already established its presence in the US, winning contracts with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). There are veteran companies in this space, too. Ananth Technologies, run by Subba Rao Pavuluri—a former engineer with the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), today operates three satellite manufacturing lines in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Thiruvananthapuram. The company, established in 1992, has been a supplier to Isro for three decades, and has built surveillance satellites under the Earth Observation Satellite (Eos) series for New Delhi. Today, it is opening up its capacities to make satellites for global customers. To do that, Ananth Technologies is competing for global space defence infrastructure orders with Alpha Design Technologies, an aerospace and defence manufacturing company acquired in 2019 by Adani Group arm Adani Defence and Aerospace. Eying these opportunities, Big Tech is gradually making moves. In June 2023, Google became an early investor in Pixxel. On 8 July this year, Amazon Web Services announced a second edition of its Space Accelerator programme, with the goal of offering 40 startups with 'business resources, expertise and guidance". Two of Amazon's five key areas of focus in its space startups incubator campaign are satellite imagery and geospatial applications—key to the nascent space defence sector. Interestingly, while this year's edition of the Amazon accelerator will be available in four countries, the inaugural 2024 edition targeted India alone—reflecting the rising amount of interest in this industry. Each of these moves is boosting India as a key resource for geospatial defence infrastructure. Sarjan Shah, managing director–India at JSW Defence's US partner Shield AI, said that there is ample appetite for aerial defence infrastructure upgrades with private sector partnership in the country—a field that has received a 'considerable fillip since Operation Sindoor". 'There is a clear sentiment within the private industry as well as the government that India's defence forces are well-poised for infrastructure upgrades in aerial capacities," Shah added. The JSW-Shield AI partnership, valued at $90 million, will give the Indian company's defence and space subsidiary, JSW Defence, indigenous capability to manufacture unmanned surveillance and ballistic aircraft—crucial parts of modern-day warfare. The indigenization is currently underway, taking place through a transfer-of-technology agreement that the two entities have running. This will give JSW Defence access to Shield's proprietary unmanned aerial vehicle technologies—applicable in space warfare, defence and surveillance services. 'With technology partnership and transfer, India can also become a vital supplier of aerial defence infrastructure to trusted geographies—given the current balance of global geopolitics, which rules out multiple previously-established countries as viable partners for the world," said Shah. An opportune moment Why is there such a sudden flurry of activity in India to cash in on the space industry? The answers are not unidirectional, but all narrow down to one point: India is in the right place, at the right time. The embers began to glow in 2022, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine led to sanctions being imposed against it by most European nations. This led to a dearth in space engineering and manufacturing supply—Russia was a major provider of satellite manufacturing, especially in defence and surveillance use cases. Over the past nine months, rising geopolitical tensions in West Asia, and the India-Pakistan skirmish in April, have led to more nations wanting their own, sovereign geopolitical solutions. These factors, coupled with the US not catering to every nation as a result of its stringent defence partnership policies, have put India in a strategically advantageous position as a satellite and space technology supplier to the world. For instance, over the past two years, India has replaced Russia as the primary defence and national security supplier to Armenia. Today, the nation's reliance on India includes using its space technologies ecosystem—giving the private entities mentioned above a steady, recurring market to cater to. 'A large part of why India's space sector is seeing such a defence-led boom is the fact that many of the older, existing supplier markets are today out of the question," said Vinit Khandare, director at policy consultancy and services organization Strategy Research and Growth Foundation. 'The US does not supply space-based surveillance infrastructure or data to every country, and partnerships with Russia are no longer sustainable since Russia itself is engaged in various geopolitical conflicts. France was a key partner, but with the manufacturing sector being too expensive in the European Union, it is no longer an entity either. Enter, India." Companies are already seeing a rising amount of commercial activity. 'We're certainly getting an increasing number of orders from nations across Asia and the global South—which are India's focus areas," said Ananth's Pavuluri. 'In anticipation of rising orders for sovereign surveillance satellites, we've ramped up capacity to currently operate larger satellite assembly facilities than some of the world's biggest players in this sector—such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin." But it's not just a game of manufacturing, say stakeholders. GalaxEye's Singh noted that the 'rising amount of interest in the sector is giving India plenty of opportunity to innovate." 'There is of course one side of the industry, where India can tap a rising demand for satellite manufacturing—to simply be a direct supplier for satellites as per global specifications," Singh said. 'But, we're using this time to innovate upon the kind of surveillance resolution that we can offer—and subsequently sell the data as per sovereign requirements. We can even scale up the number of satellites that we build, depending on demand." A shot at the big bucks Data sourced from five industry executives showed that on an average, the global price of satellite surveillance data ranges from $10-100 per square kilometre per week, from a single satellite. With Indian companies also looking at similar pricing for satellite data, the revenue to be generated from an EU member such as Hungary, or a non-EU country such as Norway, as part of a bundled offering of surveillance satellite imagery and data analytics, is upward of $50 million from a constellation of high-resolution satellites. This pricing is for a surveillance area that only involves a nation's borders—contract sizes in space surveillance today run into hundreds of millions as nations generate interest to source high-resolution satellite data for various use cases. These include forestry, weather prediction, urban planning, disaster management and more. Three industry executives told Mint that for a full nation's satellite data, a single contract can cross $1 billion for a full year—underlining the business opportunity and explaining why so many private space companies are entering this field. In fact, each of the executives cited above suggested that while New Delhi is eyeing $44 billion in annual revenue from India's overall space industry by 2033, succeeding in space surveillance services around the world can single-handedly account for half of this economy. For space companies, this is key. Digantara, for instance, expects to cross $30 million in annual revenue by the next fiscal year. Ananth, already at over $30 million in annual revenue as of FY24, expects an exponential fillip due to this demand. While GalaxEye did not offer a projection, Singh said that there is 'ample scope for an exponential uptick in revenue, once our satellite is built and placed in orbit". Sensing the opportunity, the private companies are all looking to ramp-up capital expenditure and investments. Digantara, which has raised $12 million from venture capital firm Peak XV and others, is in the market for a $50 million funding round. GalaxEye, which raised $10 million from deeptech fund Speciale Invest, tech giant Infosys, and others, will also pursue a new funding round to expand its surveillance satellite offerings to various nations, after it places its first high-resolution satellite in orbit by December. Even Ananth Technologies, which has a steady revenue stream, is not opposed to a future funding round. Pavuluri said the company will 'definitely require funding to expand capacity and ramp-up production as per global demand", but did not confirm if it will pursue a public listing, or by when the funding round may take place. Catering to the world Behind each of these ventures and the entire space industry today is the fact that between 2022 and now, private space startups did not immediately find domestic avenues to scale up revenue. Last year, this prompted former Isro chief S. Somanath to state that the government had not emerged as a key customer of space services the way the US did for its private space vendors, almost three decades ago. Over the past 12 months, though, the industry has shifted upward. 'Global demand is seeing countries from Europe, Africa and the Middle East all look at India as a reliable space technology and satellite supplier," said Chaitanya Giri, space fellow at global policy think-tank, Observer Research Foundation. 'With India's stable geopolitical outlook, a sizeable economy, and the reputation that Isro enjoys globally, the domestic space market is ripe to expand globally." The US, to be sure, mostly caters only to large-scale contracts—that, too, after signing bilateral defence treaties as part of efforts to secure access to its defence infrastructure and blueprints. China, which has always been a protectionist economy, only builds for itself. With this, India sees a clear path ahead in the growth of geospatial defence services. And it all begins with startups and conglomerate-backed entities pursuing that low-hanging fruit: surveillance satellites. 'In the long run, there is deep potential for more complex and intricate engineering in the aerospace defence sector for India. For Shield, for instance, India represents a multi-year partnership agreement with the JSW Group—one that gives our US entity strong footing in one of the world's most important space economies," Shield's Shah said. Digantara's Sharma concurs. 'There is a clear need within India and across the world to build space infrastructure that is innovative, offers mapping and surveillance, and does so at a considerably more scalable and cost-efficient structure than what the rest of the world has offered," he said. 'We're here to do it, and the runway ahead for this sector is big and bright."
Indian Express
an hour ago
- Indian Express
Patna to Howrah Vande Bharat Express train gets 20-coach rake; check ticket price, stoppages and more
20 Coach Vande Bharat, 20 Coach Vande Bharat Express Train: Good news for rail passengers! Indian Railways (IR) has raised the coach composition of Patna to Howrah Vande Bharat Express train. Flagged off by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on September 24, 2023, this semi-high-speed train is being operated and maintained by the East Central Railway (ECR) zone. It also becomes the longest Vande Bharat Express train of the zonal railway. Developed by Chennai-based Integral Coach Factory (ICF), this 20-coach ultra-modern train has been introduced by replacing the 16-coach Patna to Howrah Vande Bharat Express. Speaking to a senior railway official has confirmed the same. The official added that the coach composition has been increased in view of the demand and for passenger convenience. 'Train number 22348/22347 Patna-Howrah-Patna Vande Bharat Express is running with 20 coaches instead of 16 now,' the official said. The Patna to Howrah Vande Bharat Express train covers a distance of 532 km in 06:35 hrs. The train runs on all days of the week except Wednesday. During its journey between Patna and Howrah, the Vande Bharat Express train stops at eight stations. These are — Patna Saheb, Bakhtiyarpur, Mokama, Luckeesarai, Jasidih, Jamtara, Asansol and Durgapur. Train number 22348 Vande Bharat Express departs from Patna at 08:00 hrs and reached Howrah Junction at 14:35 hrs. On its return journey, train number 22347 leaves Howrah at 15:50 hrs and reaches Patna Junction at 22:40 hrs. The Patna to Howrah Vande Bharat Express train has two types of seating arrangements – AC Chair Car and Executive AC. The ticket price for travelling between Patna and Howrah is Rs 1515 for AC Chair Car and Rs 2735 for Executive Chair Car.
