By Shrinath Acharya, Co-Founder and CEO, Excelfore Corporation
India is having an automotive moment. EV penetration reached roughly 8.5% of vehicle registrations in FY2025-26, up from 7.7% the year before, with the market crossing 2.5 million units on about 24% year-on-year growth. Behind those headline numbers sits a more consequential shift — one that has less to do with what powers the vehicle and more to do with what runs it. The future of the Indian automobile is being written in software, and the OEMs that recognize this first will own the next decade.
The case for going software-defined is not a matter of fashion or of keeping up with Silicon Valley. For India specifically, it is a matter of competitive survival, export ambition, and national strategy.
India is built to execute this
For two decades, India served as the world’s low-cost engineering center – the place where global automakers sent their software and systems work to be delivered with discipline and at scale. That capability never went anywhere. It is still here, only now it can be turned inward. The same talent pool and execution discipline that built connected-vehicle platforms for manufacturers abroad can be applied to India’s own OEMs.
This is precisely the impetus behind Atmanirbhar Bharat: to look inward and develop products built for India, with a clear eye on the global market too. A software-defined vehicle (SDV) strategy is the natural expression of that ambition. It lets Indian manufacturers stop being the back office for someone else’s innovation and start being the author of their own — with the added advantage that software, unlike steel or sheet metal, scales without a proportional rise in cost.
The market’s shape demands a different playbook
The temptation is to copy the Western SDV playbook wholesale. That would be a mistake, because India’s market has a fundamentally different shape. Two-wheelers account for nearly 58% of EV sales here, with three-wheelers and commercial fleets close behind. India is not electrifying around the premium passenger car first; it is electrifying around high-volume, cost-sensitive, intensely used vehicles – the scooter that runs all day, the delivery fleet that lives or dies on uptime, the e-rickshaw whose economics are measured in paisa per kilometer.
That changes what software has to deliver. The Indian consumer is price-sensitive, and cost can balloon quickly if a vehicle is made too feature-rich. The answer is not a longer spec sheet. It is deployment on the basis of usability, not feature count – capabilities that earn their place by delivering real value to the driver and the operator. Features-on-demand (FoD) can absolutely work in India, but only when the economics are tuned to the market: many small features sliced at very thin price points. A ringtone for a few rupees works; hundreds of ringtones bundled for hundreds of rupees will not.
This is where high-end vehicles play a strategic role. They will carry the most advanced capabilities first, prove them out, and – over the coming years – support export markets as those capabilities mature and costs come down. The premium segment becomes the laboratory; the mass market becomes the scale.
What software-defined actually unlocks
Going software-defined is not a single feature; it is a new operating model, and it pays off in three concrete ways.
1. First, it changes customer relationships. The link between using a car and owning one is loosening worldwide as shared and autonomous mobility grows, and OEMs are entering that business directly. For those who continue to sell vehicles, FoD creates stickiness – the ability to deliver something new over the air, even when it is free, keeps the product feeling fresh and gives the manufacturer a reason to keep talking to the owner long after the sale. Applied well, SDV makes the customer experience measurably better over time, and that superior experience – more than any single paid feature – is what makes a brand sticky.
2. Second, it transforms maintenance and quality. Edge AI inside the vehicle now lets the car learn its own normal operating signature and flag deviations the moment they appear, rather than waiting for a failure or a trouble code. Paired with over-the-air updates, an OEM can detect an emerging condition, validate a fix in the cloud, and deploy it across the entire fleet – with no service appointment required. For Indian fleet operators, where uptime is existential, that is not a luxury. It is the bottom line.
3. Third and this is the foundation everything else rests on, it requires getting the plumbing right. OTA delivery has to be secure and standards-based, not proprietary nor locked to a single vendor. Security cannot be bolted on; the vehicle must reach out to a pre-programmed cloud destination on its own terms thereby closing off whole categories of attack before they begin, rather than listening for incoming connections. And the architecture must be open enough to evolve. Standards-based OTA, built on frameworks such as the eSync Alliance specification, is what lets manufacturers deploy advanced capability at the volume economics India demands.
The five-year window
India is positioned to become one of the most significant SDV markets in the world, not by imitating the global playbook, but by writing its own around two-wheelers, fleets, and frugal, scalable software architecture. The engineering talent is here. The market momentum is here. The national impetus is here.
What remains is the decision. The OEMs that commit to software-defined architecture now – open, secure, cost-disciplined, and built for the Indian consumer first – will not merely participate in the next era of mobility. They will define it, at home and abroad.