Automotive Yearbook 2026

For a decade, India's passenger vehicle industry followed the same plot. Maruti Suzuki led, Hyundai held second, SUVs kept climbing, and electric vehicles stayed a rounding error watched mostly by policy wonks. FY26 broke nearly all of it. Mahindra and Tata Motors both pushed past Hyundai, and the BMW iX1 became the first electric vehicle to crack India's luxury top five. Even so, in a year the market fell hardest for SUVs, the Maruti Suzuki Dzire topped its segment in the mass market, and the Mercedes-Benz E-Class did the same in luxury, two sedans working against the current.

None of it was an accident. New policy on tax, trade and emissions rewrote what carmakers could build and what buyers could afford.

The Autocar Professional Yearbook FY26 is our newsroom's full reckoning with what happened, and to whom. It runs company by company through the top twenty passenger vehicle manufacturers in India, from Maruti Suzuki defending a lead thinner than it looks, to BYD and Tesla making their opening bets in a market still deciding what it wants from them. Every chapter weighs what a company sold against what it earned, and says plainly where its strength ends, and its risk begins. Few in the industry get this close to the numbers, or ask harder questions of the people behind them, across a full year. The year is done. This is the record of it, built to outlast the next one.