Walk onto a mainstream dealer forecourt this week and there's stock to spare: industry-wide passenger-vehicle inventory is running at 38-40 days, according to the Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations — well above FADA's own recommended 21-day benchmark, and high enough that dealers have been urging automakers to align billing with actual retail sales rather than keep shipping into an already-full pipeline.
Walk into the EV section of that same dealership and the problem flips entirely. Inventory for electric models has slipped to single digits in parts of the dealer network, and buyers of some of the more popular models are still being quoted waits measured in weeks, not days. The MG Windsor EV — one of the segment's stronger sellers this year — currently carries an average wait of around two months in most cities, with some reports putting the range at four to twelve weeks depending on city, variant and colour. Earlier in 2026, the Windsor EV and the Maruti eVitara both sat at four to nine months for long stretches, before supply caught up somewhat.
The same showroom, two completely different inventory problems, and neither is really about demand falling short. One side has more cars than buyers right now; the other has more buyers than cars.
Two inventories, one dealer network
| Petrol/diesel | EV | |
|---|---|---|
| Dealer inventory | 38-40 days (industry average, August) | Single digits in parts of the network |
| FADA's recommended benchmark | 21 days | Not separately tracked |
| Typical buyer wait, popular models | Days | 4-12 weeks currently; ran 4-9 months earlier in 2026 for some models |
Some of the gap is structural rather than a sudden shift. EV lineups are narrower than petrol and diesel ones — a handful of models per brand against dozens of ICE trims and variants — so a single popular EV selling faster than expected drains a much shallower pool of stock than an equivalent petrol model would. Battery-pack sourcing and cell supply also constrain how fast a manufacturer can ramp output in a way engine assembly generally doesn't, which shows up as exactly this kind of lopsided inventory: comfortable on one side of the lot, thin on the other.
The cell shortage behind the car shortage
The deeper constraint sits one level further back, in battery cells rather than finished cars. India's Production Linked Incentive scheme for Advanced Chemistry Cells was designed to build 50 gigawatt-hours of domestic cell manufacturing capacity, with four companies — Reliance New Energy, Ola Electric, Hyundai Global Motors and Rajesh Exports — allotted capacity under the scheme. By most recent tallies, only around 1.4 GWh of that target has actually been commissioned, a small fraction of where the scheme aimed to be by this point. Until local cell manufacturing scales up, Indian automakers remain dependent on imported cells, mostly from China, which currently carry roughly a 25-30% cost premium over what Indian-made cells are expected to cost once the PLI incentive — worth 18-20% of net sales to qualifying manufacturers — closes that gap. That import dependence is a large part of why EV production can't simply be ramped to match a surge in bookings the way a petrol engine line can.
Demand, meanwhile, has a tax structure actively pulling it forward. Electric vehicles carry a flat 5% GST with no compensation cess, against 18% for small petrol cars and 40% for mid-size and larger ones under the GST structure simplified in September 2025 — petrol and diesel vehicles previously carried 28% GST plus a cess of up to 22% on top, an effective rate as high as 50%. That gap, layered on top of state-level EV incentives under the FAME framework, is exactly the kind of demand-side push that a supply-constrained category struggles to absorb smoothly — buyers have every tax incentive to choose electric, and not quite enough cars on the lot to meet them halfway.
The sales numbers underneath the wait times show who's actually selling. Tata Motors dispatched more than 10,000 EVs in a single month as recently as May, holding its position as the category's volume leader. Mahindra & Mahindra moved around 6,400 EVs that same month. MG Motor India, on a cumulative calendar-year basis, has posted 19,036 units for CY2026 — technically edging past Mahindra's cumulative tally on the strength of the Windsor EV and the more affordable Comet EV, even without leading on any single month.
None of that changes the arithmetic dealers are living with right now. A petrol or diesel dealer's problem this festive season is financing cost — every extra week a car sits unsold on a lot is an interest payment on floor-plan debt the dealer is carrying regardless of discounting. An EV dealer's problem is the opposite: a car that isn't there to sell at all, walking a customer's patience right up to the point where they either wait it out or buy something else off the lot that's actually in stock. Both are inventory problems. Neither is solved the same way, and this festive season is testing both at once, on the same showroom floor.
Timing makes the EV side of that problem sharper than usual. Navratri and Diwali, the two biggest vehicle-buying windows of the year, fall in mid-October and early November respectively — close enough to today that a four-to-twelve-week EV wait quoted now may not convert into a festive-season delivery at all. A petrol buyer walking into a full lot drives away the same day; an EV buyer facing that same wait has every reason to either book early and hope, or quietly cross the showroom floor to whichever model — electric or not — is actually sitting on the lot in front of them. That's the real cost of a single-digit inventory number heading into the country's biggest car-buying weeks: not lost sales on paper, but demand that had already chosen electric and then didn't wait for it.
