India’s electric scooter and bike market has a new record, and it arrived in a month when the headlines were all about petrol cars. Electric two-wheeler registrations reached 2,23,887 units in October 2026, up 48 percent year on year, according to Vahan data reported by The Financial Express and The Economic Times. It is the highest monthly figure the segment has ever recorded, beating the previous high set in October 2024, and it came on top of a 7 percent rise over September’s 2,08,707 units.
Spend a week in any Indian city and the shift stops looking like a statistic. Delivery riders, college commuters, families replacing a second petrol scooter: the electric two-wheeler is no longer a curiosity bought by early adopters. It is the default shortlist for a growing slice of buyers, and October’s numbers show that shift accelerating rather than levelling off. The festive season helped, with new models and discounts pulling buyers in, but a 48 percent annual jump is bigger than any festival effect alone.
Electric two-wheeler sales: who actually won October
TVS Motor kept the top spot and stretched it. The company registered 60,433 electric two-wheelers in October, nearly double its figure from a year ago, The Financial Express reported, taking its market share to 27 percent from 20.6 percent. Bajaj Auto held second with 49,068 units, up 51 percent year on year, its share steady at 22 percent. Together with Ather Energy, the top three makers accounted for 63 percent of the market, The Financial Express reported.
Ather is the interesting case in that top three. It grew only 5 percent to 31,796 units, not because demand dried up but because it could not build fast enough. Co-founder and chief executive Tarun Mehta told the company’s earnings call it produces about 33,000 units a month on average and carries roughly 20,000 units a month of unrealised retail it cannot yet tap, The Financial Express reported. That is a company losing sales to its own factory ceiling, and it explains the capacity race now under way.
The sharpest mover was Hero MotoCorp’s electric brand, VIDA, which jumped 81 percent to 29,936 units, lifting its share to 13 percent from 11 percent a year ago, The Financial Express reported. Hero also holds a 32.8 percent stake in Ather, and combined, the two companies sold 61,732 units for a 28 percent share, a bigger bloc than TVS alone. The one major maker going backwards was Ola Electric, down 26 percent to 12,096 units, with its share more than halving to 5 percent, and sales also falling from 13,458 in September.
The strange part: a record month, a smaller share
Here is the twist that stops October being a simple success story. Even as electric registrations hit a record, their share of total two-wheeler sales fell to 9.65 percent, down from 11.58 percent in September, Newsbytes reported, citing the same Vahan data. Petrol two-wheelers simply grew faster in the festive month, with the whole market expanding around the electric segment.
That matters for anyone reading the record as proof that petrol is finished. It is not, not yet. Electric two-wheelers are winning a bigger absolute market while still losing share in the biggest buying month of the year, because commuter petrol bikes and scooters remain cheaper to buy and easier to fuel on a long intercity run. The electric story in India is a steady grind, not a takeover, and October shows both halves of that at once.
Capacity is now the story, not demand
If demand is not the constraint, factories are, and every large maker is now spending to fix that. Ather plans to raise annual capacity at Hosur to 4,95,000 units from 4,20,000 and at its upcoming Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar plant to 6,50,000 from an earlier target of 5,00,000, taking total capacity beyond one million units a year, The Financial Express reported. TVS says it runs at about 65,000 units a month today and has planned expansion to about 80,000. Bajaj is expanding total annual capacity to around 7,75,000 units from 6,25,000 over the next six to nine months, and aims to lift Chetak capacity to 80,000 a month by the fourth quarter, its joint managing director Rakesh Sharma told reporters, after producing only 40,000 units in September against a planned 60,000.
For buyers, that capacity race is the most practical news in the whole record month. Waiting lists, not prices, have been the real barrier for several popular electric scooters, and the factories now being expanded are the ones that decide whether a buyer in early 2027 gets a scooter in weeks or in months. The same electric shift is reshaping cars, where new entrants such as VinFast VF6 and VF7 are fighting for showroom visits, while petrol performance still has its own audience, as the updated KTM 200 Duke proved last month. October’s record belongs to electric two-wheelers, but the factories behind it will decide how long the record stands.