L&T Enters EV Powertrain with a Five Lakh Motor Order

L&T EPS Mobility, the automotive arm of Larsen & Toubro's Electronic Products and Systems division, has booked its first commercial contract. An order for five lakh electric-vehicle traction motors from a two-wheeler manufacturer it has not named yet, to be delivered over three years.

"We have closed a contract for a two-wheeler electric vehicle for five lakh motors. It has already been booked," said Prashant Chiranjive Jain, Managing Director of L&T Vyoma and head of the group's Electronic Products and Systems division, at a briefing on Wednesday. Pilot production begins at Coimbatore in August and series production in September.

The order amounts to about 1.67 lakh motors per year. India sold 2.14 crore two-wheelers in FY26, of which 6.54 per cent were electric, according to the Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations, which compiles vehicle registration data. That places a single buyer at close to an eighth of a segment of roughly 14 lakh units.

Much of that segment is closed to outside suppliers. Ola Electric and Ather Energy design and build their own motors and controllers as a matter of strategy, and Ather's FY26 annual report identifies vertical integration by manufacturers as an industry-wide trend. TVS Motor Company, which led the segment in FY26, and Bajaj Auto both have long-standing supplier arrangements.

L&T does not intend to stay in two-wheelers. The motors span 8 kilowatt to 200 kilowatt and 48 volt to 800 volt, and the company plans to supply three-wheelers, passenger cars, trucks and buses as well, the management said.

Three-wheelers are the most electrified segment in the country, with electric vehicles accounting for 60.95 percent of the 13.63 lakh units retailed in FY26. That maturity works both ways. Most of the conversion has already happened, leaving less headroom than in two-wheelers, and buyers in the segment are among the most price-sensitive in the market, served for years by low-cost motors.

L&T argues that the gap in the market is technological rather than industrial. "We do not have from India a technology-driven tier one who is supplied from India for Indian customers and also to the world," said Sudeepth Puthumana, head of the mobility business at L&T Electronic Products and Systems. "Most of the tier ones today present in India are from the global." 

Jain said the opening lies with startups, which "do not have that scale where they can get the custom product designed for them" by a global supplier. Conventional manufacturers moving into electric vehicles have also found imported systems insufficiently adapted to Indian conditions, he said.

That reading is being tested elsewhere. In March, Bosch Limited and Tata AutoComp Systems announced a 50:50 joint venture to engineer, manufacture and sell electric axles and traction motors in India, with operations planned from the middle of this year, subject to approvals. It pairs one of the largest domestic component groups with the incumbent global supplier on the same product.

L&T has taken a different route, licensing motor technology in May from EVR Motors of Israel, a design that uses a trapezoidal stator to raise torque density and reduce the volume of magnet required. The management said 98 percent of components and about 70 percent of value are local, though high-performance variants still use imported rare earth magnets, in grades not covered by export controls.

The Coimbatore plant sits on a 40-acre campus under expansion, with a second phase due within 10 months and full capacity targeted by March 2027. The board has approved about ₹5,000 crore over five years for the electronics division, spread across mobility, power electronics, robotics, electronics manufacturing services and its existing defence electronics business, and the company expects more than 5,000 direct and indirect jobs.

L&T is targeting 10 to 15 percent of what it assesses as a $2 billion Indian industrial electronics market, which it expects to reach $4.85 billion by 2031. The division carries an order book of close to $1 billion, drawn from defence electronics and battery storage rather than mobility.