1. Indian car sales are close to 4.6 million now in Trailing 12 Month sales. We had the tallest January ever by a huge 13% over last January. Even a 10% growth over last year will end up in over 5 million cars this year. October was up 17%, November was up 19%, December was 26%, and now January is up at 13%.

Hatches are back to showing negative growth. As usual it’s the UVs showing much of the volume growth with over 80% of all volumes credited to SUVs alone.

Tatas are up by almost 50% over January last year. Mahindra is a good 25% up. With new models like Sierra for Tata and XEV9S for Mahindra in the pipeline, the party has only begun for the Indian OEMs.

Ranking over the year

In the monthly sales stakes, Mahindra and Tata are fighting cats and dogs over the No 2 rank.

Ranking over the year (Trailing 12 Months)

In the TTM numbers Mahindra has been consistently at Rank 2

Tata is at No 2 with a good 70,222 (Up 46.1% YoY) cars dispatched and Mahindra is at No 3 with 63,510 (Up 25.4% YoY). Hyundai is at No 4 with 59,107 (Up 9.5% YoY). Maruti has sold an amazing 174,529 numbers which is marginally up by 0.5% over January last year

2. Tata has crossed 600k in TTM sales for the very first time and is performing very strongly with new brilliant models in place. Last January TTM sales were 556k. They have gained almost 50k in TTM sales just in 12 months. For context Hyundai actually are down from 600k to 576k

With models like the Sierra being brought in, Tata should go to greater heights. Tatas fortunes this year will be completely dependent on the Sierra. If that car can bring it an additional 10-15k extra sales on a monthly basis, Tatas will give Mahindra a very tough fight. In fact my take is that this year 2026 will be the year of the BIG Fight between Mahindra and Tata.

3. The top selling model this month has been the Nexon from Tata which at 23,365 is also its lifetime high sales. 

4. The Creta was topping the TTM sales at a model level for the first 6 months of this financial year. Since then its been taken over by Maruti Dzire thanks to its brilliant fuel average and demand in the cab segment. This month the Tata Nexon overtook the Creta to stand at Rank 2 in the TTM Sales numbers.

5. Market Share in January

Maruti back in the below 40% market share this month. This is despite the brilliant performance of the newly released Victoris. This is because of the huge fall in sales MoM in the Baleno, Fronx, and also the Grand Vitara. 

Niranjan N Prabhu is Head of Analytics and Data Insights Specialist at Cargraphical Analytics Solutions. Views expressed are the author's own.