In the usual Q&A style that has become more of a necessity than a style for this kind of numbers-driven analysis that can be dry at times.
Dude, WTF!? Today is the 5th. You are 4 days late.
Lazy Reason: I was at a client’s office and realised too late that the Vahan Portal behaves erratically when accessed from outside India.
Honest Reason: I was too lazy to access it through a VPN.
Whatever! Give us the Numbers
They are great, and it’s a pity that I did not do this 4 days ago. India hit another high with the September numbers. Penetration levels have reached an all-time high of 11.6%. After hovering close to the elusive 200k mark, E2W sales finally crossed the threshold in September with sales numbers of 207k. This is a 77% bump from Sept 2025 sales of 117k units.
What makes these numbers interesting is that part of September (the last five days), to be exact, as per the Hindu calendar, is considered inauspicious for buying new vehicles, especially in the northern part of the country. That did seem to have a small impact on ICE two-wheeler sales, but completely left E2W sales untouched.
An anomaly? A one-off? Or is it that the E2W customer is very different from the ICE two-wheeler customer? Or maybe the recent strong E2W uptrend is steamrolling decades-old market seasonalities?
Either way, it was only 5 days out of 30 and did not dampen sales at all.
How about the Pecking Order?
Same old. Same old.
TVS continues to lead, and Bajaj follows, though Bajaj has nibbled some market share while TVS has lost a bit. The differences were small, so we will ignore them for now.
However, things change below that. Ather lost nearly 1.0% of market share and Hero-Vida gained nearly 1.5%. Ather’s market share loss comes despite decent growth in sales. It’s just that the temporary production constraints that the company is facing have an effect and come at the wrong time, when the market has gone on a different trajectory.
Meanwhile, Hero-Vida is surprisingly strong and has accelerated to near 25k units in sales. It was only last month that it crossed 20k.
Lower still, Ola managed to remain in fifth place, followed by Greaves Ampere, River, and BGauss in that order.
No surprises then. How do the month-on-month comparisons look?
You mean year-on-year, and nearly everyone rocked.
TVS was up 126%, Bajaj Auto up by 139%, and Ather Energy managed a 56% bump in sales. Hero sales were up 83%, while the lower players were even better placed statistically. Greaves is up 114%, River 193%, while BGauss nearly doubled its sales.
The only one with negative growth was Ola Electric, which was down 3% year on year. Statistics is a funny thing. How we look at you this month depends on how you did in the same month last year. Everyone else is coming off a smaller base and so has impressive growth numbers to report. Ola fell off a cliff sometime last year and continues to post negative growth numbers. We looked at the data, and it seems that it would be hard for Ola Electric to report any growth in sales in October as well, considering October 2025 was decently strong for the company.
