The incumbents are slowly and surely making their presence felt in in the EV scooter space.
Bajaj Auto was the top selling electric two wheeler manufacturer in March 2025. It was followed by fellow legacy two wheeler company TVS Motors. Ola Electric, which until a few quarters ago had more than a 50 percent share in the overall market, has now slipped to third position.
In March 2025, Bajaj Auto sold 30,133 units, and garnered 25.8 percent market share. TVS followed closely, selling 26,481 units. Ola Electric was in third place with 22,685 units and a 19.4 percent market share. Fellow startup Ather came in fourth with 14,447 units sold with a 12.3 percent market share. Hero Vida was fifth with 6,539 units sold.
Electric two wheeler sales are have been sagging in recent times. In February, overall sales fell 7 percent year on year. But what’s more interesting about the data from the last few months is that slowly but surely, traditional automakers have pulled ahead of dedicated EV startups. In June 2024, Ola alone had a 50 percent share in the overall market. But since then, Bajaj and TVS have clawed their way up — in December 2024, Ola had lost its top spot for the first time to Bajaj. In January, however, it had bounced back and regained the pole position. Ola says that data from February wasn’t accurate because of disputes with its vehicle registration providers, but also seems to have decisively lost the top spot in March, and has slipped to third spot.
Ola Electric, for its part, has also had to deal with lots of bad press and service issues over the last quarter. There had been several incidents of customers complaining about delayed service to their scooters, and an irate customer had even set its service station ablaze in Karnataka. Ola had then been rapped by SEBI for sharing business updates on X before informing stock exchanges, and in January, had fired 1,000 employees in a restructuring. Around this time, its CMO and CTO had also quit. Earlier this month, Ola had seen its showrooms be raided over trade certificate violations at its stores, and one of its creditors had filed an insolvency plea against the company. It appears that all these events could have been affecting Ola’s overall sales and efforts, and it’s been pushed to third place behind Bajaj and TVS. In 2021, when his company barely had a presence in the EV space, Bajaj CEO Rajiv Bajaj had said that Bajaj would eat EV startups like Ola and Ather for breakfast. And with Bajaj now decisively ahead of these startups in the overall EV sales figures, he might just have been right.