From the Apex · Axle to Grind · 2026-05-30

Tata wins the safety test. It still has to win the ownership test.

Tata has become desirable enough that inconsistency is now its biggest brand risk.

• Tata has more 5-star cars than any other mass-market brand in India. Maruti, Toyota, Hyundai and Kia all have fewer.
• It was India's third-largest carmaker in 2025, with 5,67,607 registrations. More people are buying Tatas, not fewer.
• Almost every complaint lands after delivery: laggy infotainment, rattles, uneven panel gaps, repeat service visits.
• Tata has said so itself, and added 73 service outlets in six months.

India loves Tata's design, safety and SUV confidence. The problem begins after the delivery ribbon comes off.

In April 2021, the man who taught Tata cars to look expensive handed in his notice. Pratap Bose had spent the better part of a decade as Tata's design boss, and the cars shaped under him, the Nexon, the Harrier, the Safari, were the ones that made buyers stop thinking of a Tata as a compromise. Two months later, Mahindra hired him to lead its global design: the face of Tata's design revolution had crossed the road to the one rival with the SUV swagger to hurt it most.

Tata moved on, of course. Martin Uhlarik, already inside the house, took over and has carried the language forward with skill; the Curvv and the reborn Sierra are his. But the ambition was older than any design chief. It ran back to the late Ratan Tata, who willed India's first indigenous car, the Indica, into being in 1998 and championed the Nano a decade later. He died in October 2024 without ever sketching a Harrier, yet the instinct behind it was his: that India could build cars Indians genuinely wanted to be seen in. Which frames the strange position Tata is in today: a company that has won almost every argument about how a car should look and how safe it should be, and still leaves a surprising number of its own buyers a little nervous.

The cars India wants to love

Tata builds cars people genuinely desire. The design has stance and confidence; the cabins, on the showroom floor, feel a class above the price. And it read the EV moment earlier than anyone else here and blanketed the market with it: six electric models, from the sub-₹10-lakh Tiago.ev to the ₹30-lakh Harrier.ev, the widest EV range any Indian carmaker sells, even if Mahindra and MG have since eaten into a once-runaway lead. This is emphatically not a decline story: in calendar 2025 Tata was India's third-largest carmaker, with 5,67,607 registrations, ahead of Hyundai. People are not staying away. They are queuing up.

So the question isn't why India fell out of love with Tata. The opposite is true: buying a Tata has become a quiet point of national pride, a handsome, genuinely safe car that's unmistakably made in India. Which only sharpens the real one. How does a brand with this much goodwill, design credit and safety authority, and this strong a claim on the heart, still leave so many buyers anxious about what happens after they've handed over a substantial chunk of their hard-earned money?

Safety stopped being a nerd statistic

Start with what Tata got gloriously right. It understood before almost anyone here that safety could be made aspirational, a footnote for engineers turned into a showroom argument a whole family could rally around, a reason to buy Indian and feel good about it. And it didn't just talk it. Tata builds some of the structurally strongest cars in the country, strong enough that there's a standing joke it forges its own steel, which is nearly true: the same house owns Tata Steel.

No mass-market carmaker in India has more five-star models than Tata. Not Maruti, not Toyota, and certainly not Hyundai or Kia, the country's second-biggest force, who manage three apiece. Virtually the whole core range now carries the rating, the Punch, Nexon, Curvv, Harrier, Safari and reborn Sierra, the Altroz and the EV versions of those cars, across the older Global NCAP tests and India's own Bharat NCAP, with the Harrier.ev posting a perfect adult-protection score. Only the budget Tiago and Tigor twins sit a notch lower, at four. That is a genuine moral high ground, and Tata earned it.

But here's the line the brochure won't draw for you. A five-star structure tells you the car will protect you in the worst ten seconds of your life. It tells you nothing about the next three years of actually living with it.

The ownership tax

And the next three years are where Tata's argument gets messy. The complaints are familiar to anyone who has spent ten minutes on an owners' forum or a YouTube ownership review: infotainment that lags, freezes or wants the occasional reboot; inconsistent fit and finish, with rattles and uneven panel gaps on a car that photographed beautifully; the odd owner posting a connected LED tail-lamp with half the bar gone dark on a car still wearing its temporary plates; and service visits that take repeat trips to close. Plenty of it is the luck of the draw, but the pattern is loud enough that it follows the brand around.

The temptation is to wave this away as internet noise. Tata didn't. On its FY2025 earnings call, passenger-vehicle boss Shailesh Chandra described a year of deliberate repair, saying the company had put a "disproportionate focus" on after-sales because the customer experience had been "under pressure", and owning up to product-quality problems, especially on the software side. It named 21 hotspot cities where the service network couldn't cope, said it had got comfortable in 16, and added 73 outlets in the second half of the year alone. It's rethinking the front end too: in early 2024 it opened dedicated "Tata.ev" stores, pitched in Chandra's words to "sell experiences rather than cars". This isn't a critic's hit piece. It's the company admitting the boring half of the business had to be rebuilt before the next wave of growth.

There's a fair caveat, and it cuts in Tata's favour: scale amplifies everything. A brand selling more than half a million cars a year will generate more angry posts than one selling sixty thousand, even at the same defect rate. So the honest claim isn't that every Tata is troubled. It's that inconsistency is uniquely damaging here, because trust is the entire pitch. When you've sold someone on safety and substance, a rattling trim panel doesn't read as a small fault. It reads as a broken promise.

The toughness it sells but doesn't build

Then there's the curious gap in the line-up. Tata sells some of the most rugged-looking SUVs in India: the Harrier and Safari look ready to climb a mountain. Almost none of them can.

Of Tata's 325 variants on sale, exactly two send power to all four wheels, and both are the new Harrier.ev. Everything else is front-wheel drive, road-biased, built for the school run rather than the riverbed. Mahindra, meanwhile, owns the emotional off-road ladder outright, with the Thar and Scorpio-N and a mythology of authenticity Tata has never really tried to claim. The dual-motor Harrier.ev Quad Wheel Drive, launched in June 2025, was a genuine statement: 390 horsepower and the first Tata to drive all four wheels since the Safari Storme bowed out in 2020. But it's an EV. On the petrol and diesel side, where the die-hard Thar buyer actually lives, Mahindra is still alone, a strange door for a brand that wants the enthusiast's heart to leave shut.

The Land Rover in the room

Which makes the next bit almost poetic. Tata has owned Jaguar Land Rover since 2008, and with it the most powerful off-road luxury mythology on earth. The Harrier already rides on Tata's OMEGA platform, derived from a Land Rover D8. Tata has the bones and the know-how to build the rugged halo it's missing, and has mostly left them on the shelf.

It gets sharper still. Tata's grand premium-EV project, Avinya, was meant to ride on JLR's own electric architecture. That plan was shelved when JLR decided against building those EVs in India, and Tata now has to lean on a Chinese-influenced platform, the Chery-JLR Freelander, to go upmarket at home, while a homegrown rival owns the rugged-SUV dream Land Rover practically invented.

axler8's take

The cars were never the problem; plenty of owners are genuinely, lastingly happy, and the things Tata gets right are the things that close a sale. Tata isn't struggling because people don't want its cars. It's succeeding despite the parts of ownership that should have stopped being excusable by now. That's a far more flattering problem than Honda's, and a more fixable one. Honda has the dependability Tata is still chasing, and it hasn't saved it: an ageing three-model line-up and no real new launch left it ninth in 2025. Tata's trouble is the mirror image, cars people ache to own wrapped around an ownership experience that doesn't always deserve them.

The next leap is consistency: making ownership hassle-free.

Tata has already won the hard arguments, the way its cars look and the way they keep you alive. The day the ownership experience catches up, I'll be first in the queue for one. It'll be a long queue, the rare one worth standing in with a smile.