IN FOR THE LONG DRIVE

A stellar show in a difficult year. This could be the beginning of a dream run for Tata Motors

- NACHIKET KELKAR

Tata Nexon EV is the largest selling electric car in India

TATA MOTORS LAUNCHED the hatchback Indica in 1998. Though the company had been making trucks and buses for decades and utility vehicles for many years, it was its first attempt at cars. Indica was also the first car to be designed and manufactured by an Indian company. It was a good start. Tata Motors sold about a million Indicas, and went on to make several other models and cornered a market share of 17 per cent in a decade.

But things went south soon, as the company struggled with the ambitious Nano project. By 2013, its market share slipped to single digits, and questions were raised about its sustainability. Though it churned out at least one model every year, none made any impact till the Tiago in 2016 and the Nexon a year later. A game-changer came in 2019, in the form of the Harrier, made on the Omega platform derived from the Tata-owned British carmaker Jaguar Land Rover.

Even as the automobile industry struggled to deal with the pandemic and lockdowns, Tata Motors’s passenger vehicle sales surged 69 per cent from a year ago to 2,22,025 units in the year-ended March 2021. This is when the sector saw a drop of 2 per cent in sales. It was the highest sales in the segment for Tata Motors in eight years, helping it regain the third spot behind market leader Maruti Suzuki and Hyundai Motor India. “Tata Motors gained market share across segments, leading to overall market share of 8.3 per cent, on the back of a strong product portfolio,” said Jinesh Gandhi, research analyst at Motilal Oswal Financial Services.