Tata Motors Chief Financial Officer Balaji questioned the growing demand for hybrid vehicles. While the interest in electric cars is said to be declining in India and globally, customers are returning to hybrid cars instead of electric cars.
Also, the government is expected to offer various incentives along with reducing the GST tax on hybrid cars in order to increase the sales. Earlier, India’s Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari announced incentives for hybrid vehicles and asked the finance ministry to reduce tax on hybrid cars from 28% to 12%.
Currently India has 28% GST on petrol and hybrid vehicles and 5% GST on electric vehicles. Talking about the growing interest in hybrid vehicles, Balaji of Tata Motors said that one should always think towards a permanent solution and not a temporary one.
While hybrid cars are expected to be a bridge between fuel and electric cars, most hybrid car owners report that they run their hybrid cars on fuel, and the use of electric motors in hybrid cars is very limited, which defeats the purpose of electric vehicle use.
Before introducing fully electric vehicles, companies like Maruti Suzuki and Toyota are introducing hybrid cars. On the contrary, Tata Motors has been increasingly introducing fully electric cars in India since its inception. Tata is selling four electric car models in India namely Tiago EV, Decor EV, Nexon EV and Punch EV.
With these models, the company has sold 73,800 electric cars in India in the last financial year (FY24) alone. This is 48% higher than the previous fiscal year (FY23). Also, the company has produced 1,50,000 electric cars.
Tata currently holds 85% market share in the Indian electric car market. Also, while the company is planning to launch the Curve EV electric car this year, it is noteworthy that the company is also developing electric variants of the Harrier and Sierra models.
