India's electric-scooter market is sorting its winners

In late June, on a line in Hosur, TVS Motor rolled out its millionth iQube. The scooter is barely six years old. The photograph the company released marked a real milestone, but it sat against a stranger fact: India now registers well over a million electric two-wheelers a year, a market built almost from scratch since 2020, and the firm that did most to build it is the one now losing ground fastest.

01A market built from almost nothing

Five years ago the segment barely existed. In calendar 2020, buyers registered 29,132 electric two-wheelers across the whole of India [1], a rounding error against a two-wheeler market of some fourteen million. The government's second Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles programme, FAME-II, had launched in 2019 with an outlay of $1.05 billion (₹10,000 crore) [5]; dollar figures here use the Reserve Bank of India reference rate of ₹95.3 to the dollar on 10 July 2026 [6]. For a year or two the money sat mostly unspent, the products were thin, and buyers stayed with petrol.

The turn came in 2021, when the government sharply raised the demand incentive for electric two-wheelers, to as much as ₹15,000 for every kilowatt-hour of battery, and pump prices climbed toward record highs [5]. Registrations jumped to 156,336 that year, then to 631,420 in 2022 and 860,500 in 2023 [1]. A category that had taken two decades to reach thirty thousand a year was suddenly adding more than half a million in a single twelvemonth.

By 2025 the segment sold 1,342,315 units, a compound growth rate of 115 per cent a year across the five years, or 29 per cent a year once the market found its feet after 2022 [1]. Few consumer categories anywhere have scaled that steeply from so small a base, and fewer still while the country's petrol two-wheeler market kept growing alongside them.

The base kept growing underneath, which makes the shift larger than the unit count alone. In 2020 electric models were one in every five hundred two-wheelers sold; by 2025 they were roughly one in sixteen, a 6.4 per cent share [1]. In June 2026 the figure crossed 10 per cent for the first time in a single month, as 194,300 electric two-wheelers were registered, three-quarters more than a year before [3]. India had registered more than a million in the first half of 2026 alone [1].

02The reversal at the top

For most of the market's short life, one name led it. Ola Electric, a pure-play maker with no petrol past, held about 35.5 per cent of registrations in 2024, more than a third of every electric two-wheeler sold in India [2]. It had the loudest brand, a single vast factory, and a founder who promised to reinvent the scooter. No legacy manufacturer came close.

In 2025 that lead broke. Ola's registrations fell 51 per cent year on year, from 407,700 to 199,316, even as the market around it grew [2]. Its share dropped to 15.6 per cent. The four makers behind it posted their best years yet: TVS at 298,867 units for a 23 per cent share, Bajaj at 269,836 and 21 per cent, Ather at 200,785 and 16 per cent, and Hero MotoCorp's Vida brand at 109,167, up 150 per cent [2]. For the first time, the two makers at the top had been selling two-wheelers in India for decades, and the pioneer that had led a year earlier had fallen to fourth.

The explanation analysts reached for was not about any single product. It was about the plumbing of selling a vehicle: showrooms, mechanics, financing, and the confidence that the maker will still be there in three years.

India's electric two-wheeler market is becoming highly competitive, but currently TVS Motor and Bajaj Auto look better positioned for long-term leadership. Both companies already have strong dealership networks, trusted brands, better service infrastructure and financial strength, which gives customers more confidence while shifting towards EVs.

Ravi Singh, Chief Research Officer, Master Capital Services, 10 June 2026

Ravi Singh, whose firm rates the listed players, was blunter about the leader's slide. Ola, he said, remained aggressive on capacity and battery plans but was still dogged by “concerns around service quality, execution and profitability” [4]. A buyer weighing a first electric scooter, or a second, could read the same signal the analysts did, and increasingly chose a badge with a workshop down the road.

The pattern hardened into 2026. Through the first half of the year Ola's share fell under 7 per cent, and Hero's Vida overtook it for fourth place [2]. Ola stayed the only one of the top six makers whose sales were falling while the market climbed [3]. Its rivals were not quiet about their own ambitions, and Ola itself kept expanding; but registrations, the one number that cannot be spun, moved the other way.

03What the incumbents brought

The advantages the legacy houses carried into electric scooters were the ones they had spent decades building in petrol ones. TVS sells its iQube through more than 3,300 touchpoints across over 3,000 cities, and the same dealer who services a petrol Jupiter can hand back a charged iQube. That network is expensive and slow to build, which is exactly why a newcomer struggles to copy it: a start-up can raise money for a factory far faster than it can staff a service counter in a district town.

Brand did similar work. Bajaj revived the Chetak, a nameplate an older generation associates with the scooter that once carried a whole family, and gave the electric version a metal body and a familiar line. It priced the 2026 C25 at $959 (₹91,399), within reach of a mass commuter, and undercut that with an early-bird offer on the first ten thousand units. It has since layered on navigation, higher top speeds and new ride modes, the steady cadence of a maker treating the scooter as a long product line rather than a single bet.

Scale also buys patience. TVS reported record revenue of $4.96 billion (₹47,270 crore) for its 2025-26 financial year, up 30 per cent, with operating profit before tax up 40 per cent. A group that size can lose money on electric scooters for years while it learns the category; a business funded by equity rounds has a narrower runway. Part of what the share table measures is simply who can afford to keep going.

That is not the whole story, and the newer makers know it. Ather Energy, the other pure-play still gaining share, has competed on the machine itself; Singh credited its “technology, premium quality and strong product experience”, while noting it “still needs a larger scale and wider reach” than the incumbents command [4]. A newer family-oriented model has widened its appeal beyond the young city rider it began with. Distribution wins the present phase of the contest; it does not settle whether the better engineering eventually tells.

A word on the count is worth adding, because it is where the headlines often mislead. Measured across every electric vehicle they register, Bajaj and TVS look larger still, but much of that extra is electric three-wheelers, the auto-rickshaws Bajaj in particular sells in volume. Strip those out, as the table above does, and the two-wheeler race is the one shown: TVS ahead, Bajaj close behind, and the distance to the rest widening rather than closing.

04The hand of the state

None of this happened without public money. FAME-II put $1.05 billion (₹10,000 crore) behind electric vehicles from 2019, most of it flowing to two-wheelers, and at its peak paid as much as ₹15,000 for every kilowatt-hour of battery in a qualifying scooter [5]. Its successor, the PM E-DRIVE scheme, replaced it in late 2024 with $1.14 billion (₹10,900 crore) committed over two years [5]. For most of the period, a slice of every electric scooter's price was underwritten by the exchequer, and several states waived road tax and registration fees on top.

That support is designed to shrink. PM E-DRIVE pays a demand incentive of ₹5,000 per kilowatt-hour in its first year, halving to ₹2,500 in its second [5]. On a scooter like the Chetak C25, with its 2.5 kWh pack, that is the difference between roughly ₹12,500 and ₹6,250 off the price. The long-standing worry was that demand would sag as the subsidy thinned, the way it has done in other markets when incentives lapsed.

So far it has not. 2026's surge came with the per-unit incentive already halved, the first hard evidence that the Indian market can stand with less of a crutch. Whether it can stand with none, when the PM E-DRIVE window closes, is the policy question the next two years will answer, and it matters as much to the component and battery suppliers who bet capacity on the scheme as to the makers themselves.

05The road ahead

For a moment in 2025 the market looked as though it might be maturing early. Penetration barely moved, from 6.07 to 6.38 per cent [1], and some read the early-adopter wave as largely spent. 2026 has complicated that reading. Registrations reaccelerated, monthly penetration passed 10 per cent, and the first half alone matched a large share of the previous full year [1][3]. Saturation, if it is coming, is not here yet.

Underneath the leaders, the field is thinning. Some 231 makers registered at least one electric two-wheeler in 2025, yet the top six took close to 89 per cent of the market and the top ten 93 per cent [2]. A long tail of sub-scale brands is caught between the incumbents' networks above and the cost of building batteries at volume below, and each year more of them slip out of the count. Consolidation of this kind is ordinary for a maturing industry; it is also unforgiving to anyone on the wrong side of it.

Three fronts will shape the next phase. Electric motorcycles, still a sliver of sales, open a category the scooter boom never touched, and whoever builds an affordable electric commuter bike reaches the largest two-wheeler segment of all. Rural and small-town demand, where a nearby mechanic counts for more than a touchscreen, remains overwhelmingly petrol. And the price of a scooter once the subsidy is gone will decide how far down the income ladder the market can reach.