New Delhi: Situated 33 kilometers from the busy streets of Pune is Chakan, home to automobile manufacturers and their suppliers. One company in this area is electric bus maker Eka Mobility. Here, a team of young executives remains glued to their screens, looking at data relayed from hundreds of buses plying across the country.
“We can track the status and health of each of these buses. If even one stops functioning, we can immediately respond by diagnosing it quickly,” one of the executives explained.
Situations range from critical breakdowns to customer complaints about range. A customer once called, complaining of a sharp drop in the range of the bus he bought. Eka Mobility’s team diagnosed that the vehicle’s air conditioner was in use for a long time—even when the vehicle was idle and parked.
The company’s network centre, which mimics a ‘war room’, harnesses one of the biggest advantages of electric vehicles (EVs)—the software at the heart of these machines.
Eka Mobility’s attempt to check its vehicles, diagnose problems, and quickly deploy a team to fix issues underlines a key question troubling every other auto executive: how will such vehicles be serviced at scale? The answer could well determine whether India’s EV revolution sustains or stalls.
Unlike internal combustion engine (ICE) counterparts, EVs cannot rely on decades of institutional knowledge spread across formal and informal networks in the country. EVs are a relatively new phenomenon—while electric two-wheelers gained popularity since 2021, electric cars and buses started gaining mass acceptance only around 2023.
In the financial year 2026, total EV sales across all categories crossed 2.4 million, compared to 1.9 million the year before.
For years, makers of ICE vehicles had invested in service, onboarding the right dealer partners to ensure a smoother after-sales experience. However, EVs brought new complications. Automobile companies now have to rewrite the playbook—EVs, because of the software play mentioned, are fundamentally different from ICE vehicles where service is more mechanical.
Now, the service component is becoming a key differentiating factor for companies as they push the accelerator on sales, particularly in two- and four-wheelers. A study by the consulting firm Deloitte highlights this. 30% of respondents in its Global Automotive Consumer Study, 2026, India edition, stated that a lack of knowledge or understanding about EVs and the technology is one reason they would hesitate to choose them as their next vehicle. About 43% of the respondents in the study stated that a company’s service network presence is one of the most important factors they would consider before making a purchase decision.
And Indian automakers have already learnt a lesson.
Lessons from Ola
Service, or the lack thereof, can impact a brand’s reputation and eventually sales. Take the example of Ola Electric, once the poster child of India’s EV revolution.
The Bhavish Aggarwal-led startup, which first launched scooters in 2021, quickly shot up the pecking order of electric two-wheeler makers to become the No. 1 player. In March 2024, the company crossed monthly sales of more than 50,000 scooters, cornering more than half the market share.
But soon, things began to unravel. In September that year, Mint reported that the Bengaluru-based company had been receiving nearly 80,000 complaints every month, and its service centres were struggling to keep pace. On some days, the number of complaints spiked to 6,000-7,000 a day, causing long delays, leaving service staff overwhelmed and customers frustrated.
Soon, the Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) started a formal investigation. And consumer trust waned. Legacy rivals—Bajaj Auto and TVS Motor—started catching up.
From more than 400,000 scooter sales in calendar year 2024, Ola Electric’s numbers halved in 2025. From being the market leader in 2024, the company nose-dived to the fourth position by unit market share.
“We do have a service challenge which we are working through. That has impacted brand trust and hence sales are down in the last couple of quarters,” Aggarwal acknowledged, during a 13 February earnings call with investors. “But the good news is that we have improved our service operations meaningfully in the last three-four months or so,” he added.
A complex task
Typically, an EV scooter costs ₹20,000 to ₹40,000 more than an ICE equivalent. With higher upfront costs, service delays create a spiral of negative perceptions, harming brands, experts say.
“EV service demand is dominated by electronics. Component failures often immobilise the vehicle,” Ravindra Patki, managing partner at Vector Consulting Group, said. “Early-life failure rates in EVs remain higher than those of ICE, and even firmware or BMS (battery management system) updates can temporarily disable the vehicle if not executed well.”
EVs saw high early life failures in past years because many companies were still figuring out what works. Battery packs, for instance, needed to be designed keeping Indian weather conditions in mind. Energy management and heat management needed to be well-balanced in the design. There were mechanical issues, too. Ola’s S1 scooter, the company’s first e-scooter model, had a Dutch design suitable for the smooth roads in Europe but it posed critical safety risks for riders on Indian roads.
But customers have zero tolerance for service delays.
“Hence, an uptime-restoration system with fast diagnosis, daily parts availability, and short turnaround times becomes central to customer satisfaction and brand competitiveness,” Patki added.
EVs nearly have 40–80% fewer moving parts compared to ICE vehicles. And yet, servicing these vehicles is more complex. Failures mostly pertain to the software, battery or the motor control unit—these components require engineer-driven solutions; there are no quick fixes.
“When we started and had less vertical integration of components and electronics, we faced issues in displays, etc. in vehicles. Over time, we internalized a lot of tech—made components on our own. This helped reduce problems,” Madhumita Agrawal, founder and CEO, Oben Electric, an electric motorcycle maker, said.
She added that cracking the servicing piece is easier once companies have a better understanding of what goes into their vehicles.
Some companies like Ather Energy are trying to ensure the availability of robust service capabilities with the dealer as a prerequisite to opening a store. Furthermore, the company has dedicated teams for random checks at service stations, Ather’s founder Tarun Mehta said.
From Bajaj Auto, Hero MotoCorp to Tata Motors, all other automakers are now working to increase the number of service touch points.
Not all companies disclose the number of service centres they operate. However, industry estimates suggest that the EV industry, collectively, would have crossed 5,000 service centres as of today.
Training an army
Automobile companies have also begun training a number of service providers.
India’s largest carmaker, Maruti Suzuki, began its EV sales in February—a latecomer compared to other carmakers. However, it claims the delay was due to its efforts to ‘build an ecosystem for EVs’. The company has set up more than 1,500 service workshops with over 150,000 trained workforce.
In an earlier interview with Mint, around the testing of Maruti’s first EV, Partho Banerjee, senior executive officer, sales and marketing, Maruti Suzuki, said that service was one of the major inhibitions about EVs which the company wanted to resolve before launching.
“In the informal sector, mechanical repairs are all very much doable. But today, the vehicles have more electronics, more software, many modules. That they can’t do,” Banerjee said, noting that the role of a trained service technician has increased significantly with EVs.
Ather Energy and Oben Electric are also ensuring that the service technicians are trained by the company themselves.
Eka Mobility is blending youth with experienced professionals. Sudhir Mehta, founder and chairperson at Eka Mobility, told Mint that senior professionals bring in institutional knowledge, the fundamentals needed to crack relationships with customers and retain them. Young executives, meanwhile, bring in the knowledge of software and how to apply technology.
Disappointed dealers
Meanwhile, the EV technology, with less moving parts as compared to ICE, is less lucrative for dealers.
A June 2025 study by the Council on Energy Environment and Water stated that EVs have considerably lesser annual maintenance cost compared to ICE equivalents. For instance, the annual cost of maintenance for an electric SUV is at least 32% less than a diesel SUV. The difference suggests that dealers would make less money on the servicing piece.
While dealers dealing with ICE makes money on multiple components related to the engine such as engine oil, filters, and spark plugs among others, the battery is the most critical component in the world of EVs. And batteries are mostly under warranty, controlled by the manufacturer rather than the dealer. The dealers also do not stand to gain much from software-linked problems—again, these issues are resolved by the manufacturers through over-the-air updates.
The scope of work for EV service stations includes resolving problems that are common across ICE and EVs—such as vehicle body dents, problems with brake pads—besides regular maintenance work.
“It’s correct that there is less revenue to be made from EVs through servicing but they also require lower investments from the dealers,” C.S. Vigneshwar, president of the Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations, said. “EVs do come for body parts servicing. While currently any critical issue related to batteries is referred to manufacturers, in the future, dealers could build capabilities,” he added.
American carmaker Tesla, which launched in India in July last year, also indicated that it would invest in body shops to deal with regular repairs even as it deals with software issues remotely.
Auto makers, meanwhile, are also working on superior products which should logically require lower servicing.
“If your service centres are full, it points to an issue with the vehicle. A good vehicle should need far fewer instances of service,” Ather’s Mehta noted in the interview cited earlier.
Ola Electric’s new generation of vehicles are of superior quality, Aggarwal insists. The company is now mostly focusing on its Gen 3 vehicles and has phased out its first and second generation ones.
“On Gen 3, we feel our quality metrics are by far industry leading,” Aggarwal said during an earnings call on 29 May. During a 6 November call with analysts and investors, he said that Ola Electric had stopped the sale of Gen 2 products and was solely focusing on Gen 3, with more than 90% of sales in the second quarter of FY26 coming from the platform. According to the company’s data, shared with investors during the November earnings call, defect rates in Gen 3 scooters were less than half the previous models.
“There is no doubt that the new generation of vehicles are much better compared to the older iterations, which is reducing the number of hardware and software issues faced. However, teething issues remain,” Priyans Murarka, founder at Experiences with EVs, an EV analytics company, said.
The teething issues range from glitches in the electronics to the need for regular software updates.
The service playbook for EVs, in short, is still getting firmed up, with multiple companies vying to get their formulas right. That could have a bearing on tomorrow’s pecking order, as automakers race each other to find the next set of customers.