Lifetime warranties

A double edged sword

In 2024, JSW MG changed the way EVs are sold in India. They were the first ones to launch lifetime warranty for their newly launched Windsor. This move, along with some good marketing was an attractive pull for existing and new EV owners. Existing EV owners had seen various battery pack failures with Tata Motor cars and this was a welcome relief.

Other OEMs couldn’t be behind. Mahindra announced lifetime warranties during their BE6 and 9E launch. Tata went one step further at Harrier EV launch. The existing owners of Nexon 45, Curvv EV (both models launched last year) would also get lifetime warranties.

In today’s article, we will look at my take on what these lifetime warranties are, what they could really be and where corners are being cut.

Image generated via ChatGPT

Housekeeping

We are back in Delhi from our 15 day, 6000km+ long South India tour, in our ZS EV. A lot of you joined along the way to support us digitally and in person! Thank you so much.

We also published an article on what is happening in the battery market across Asia.

Content recommendation for the week :

Preetesh Singh from Nomura Research Institute publishes deep dives on various topics around electrification. Do take a look at his earlier episodes too!

Lifetime warranty

The government defines the life of an electric vehicle as fifteen years. The OEM means that for these fifteen years, if the battery pack fails, then the OEM will replace it under warranty, subject to their terms and conditions.

Isn’t lifetime warranty good for EV customers? Does it not induce confidence in them to buy electric vehicles? Ofcourse it does.

It is good business sense to have terms and conditions around products and services to avoid abuse. Burying terms under fine print puts the customer in a situation where they can accidentally get rid of their lifetime warranty. That is not a pleasant experience.

All three OEMs here, i.e., TataEV, Mahindra and JSW MG, have some of the cars under lifetime warranty and some aren’t. Let us take a look at when they were launched, when the warranty was announced, who is the battery pack maker, who is the cell supplier and what cells are used.

You can sort this table via headers in desktop view.

One clear pattern is that newer launched cars are coming with lifetime warranty for the three OEMs. Some older cars, despite having the same battery pack assembler, same cell manufacturer and same chemistry do not get lifetime warranty.

Problematic terms

Neither the OEMs nor the dealerships come out and openly state that these are the MITC (Most Important Terms and Conditions) for LTW, like we have in the finance industry. The battery pack is the most expensive system of the car and the more transparent the OEM is about it, the customer can take better decisions.

I find the following three conditions problematic for customers. Some form of these conditions are valid across all three OEMs. You can refer to the warranty booklet for the exact terms.

• Validity only for first owner

• LTW benefits are valid if the State of Health (SoH) is above xx% (where xx is generally around 70%) (Edit on 22nd Sept 2025 - Not applicable for Mahindra EV Cars)

• AC charging cycle after repeated DC cycles

First owner

An OEM truly caring about circularity will make cars that last a lifetime. A car that is good to be sold off by the first owners to others. The restriction on transfer of lifetime warranty from the first owner to the next makes it less attractive in the second hand market.

There can be rules and regulations around resale of cars. The OEM can mandate that if lifetime warranty has to be carried from first owner to the second owner, it must undergo thorough checks at the designated service center. It can act as additional revenue stream for the service center. The second owner will also be assured that the car they are getting is fit and fine.

This also allows the OEM to redefine the terms for lifetime warranty for the second owner, if there’s a need. Outright denying the warranty to the second owner is just stupid, in my opinion.

SoH

The battery pack warranty is subjected to the state of health of the battery pack, also known as SoH. For a regular customer, there’s no way of knowing what the SoH is without visiting the service center. Even then, there’s high resistance from the service center to certify “This car has xxx% SoH as observed on yy date at zz service center”.

OEMs are being too cautious here by not giving the desired confidence to the customer. The OEMs should ideally have SoH metric on their connected car app, visible at all times. Or like Tesla does, a customer should be able to do entire test of charging and discharging a battery pack to calculate the real time SoH. But that’s expecting too much from our desi OEMs.

Battery replacement is usually subject to the state of health of the battery pack. The battery pack is the most expensive component in the car, the health of the pack also determines the range that one can expect from the car. Being transparent about this metric allows OEMs to educate customers and assure them that they have made a decision to buy a good car.

AC cycle after DC

All the three OEMs - MG, Tata and Mahidra, have mandatory or recommended slow charge cycles after four to ten fast charging cycles. The mandate is to charge to 100%.

I see multiple problems with this approach.

The public infrastructure to do slow charging, i.e. Type2, is poor. Public Type2 chargers do not make business sense for CPOs. The CPOs sell much fewer units per hour as compared to a CCS2 fast charger but their rental costs stay the same. The CPOs do not have high upfront cost to setup Type2 infrastructure. This makes great business sense where the CPO doesn’t have any operating costs like the rental of the place.

The hotels and resorts do not have the necessary education to setup Type2 charging infrastructure in their properties. Most places do not have a grounded 15A socket to help charge the car. Expecting mass market hotels to have a Type2 charger is a distant dream today.

JSW MG can counter that they’ve installed 500 chargers in 500 days, but majority of these are mere 15A sockets. It is not really a realistic option. Most modern cars will take closer to a day to fully charge on these 15A sockets, making it highly impractical.

Tata Motors via their sister entity, Tata Power, has huge number of public Type2 chargers in premium properties by the IHCL group - i.e. Taj, Oberoi, Le Roi, etc. It is certainly not present in the mass market segment.

Mahindra hasn’t mentioned anything publicly on their Type2 infrastructure plans.

The OEMs are providing conflicting ideas here - they want users to travel outside the city, take the car on a roadtrip, and while doing that accidentally void the lifetime warranty of the battery pack. We recently completed a 6000km+ roadtrip from New Delhi to South India. Our community members followed our trip live on WhatsApp. We found it very tough to find reliable working slow chargers. More details will come in our trip report.

I would like to assume that I am a fairly experienced highway roadtripper. I’ve covered almost 50,000 km on highways doing roadtrips in electric cars. If someone like me can face problems in 2025, then clearly the infrastructure is lacking.

Why are they doing this?

The OEMs here are being extremely cautious to the detriment of the EV ecosystem. Mahindra and BYD cars use similar batteries from BYD. In China, BYD doesn’t have this restriction on AC charging after DC charging cycles. Infact, taxis in China rely majorly on fast charging and thousands of cars have clocked over 100,000km, with little to no issues with the battery pack.

All the three OEMs have analyzed the data from existing customers — their driving patterns, performance of the battery pack etc. These insights must’ve helped them make a decision on the lifetime warranty for their upcoming cars. Tata has had the most number of models out in the market, with most number of electric vehicles being sold by any OEM. Despite this, they were the last movers to bring in lifetime warranty for their cars.

It seems that MG pushed other OEMs to offer lifetime warranty as a feature in their cars.

OEMs also mandate that customer must have access to the car’s connected app to maintain access to lifetime warranty clause. The customer has to pay for the connected app. I would really like OEM representatives to keep a straight face and explain why having a connected app is necessary for lifetime warranty of the battery pack.

Isn’t fast charging regularly bad for the battery pack?

To a certain extent, yes. But is it bad enough to warrant voiding of the battery pack warranty? No. If the OEM’s battery pack is sensitive to fast charging, then the OEM should display it on the instrument cluster - “charge to 100% to balance the battery pack. It has been a while you did that”. Or, if they want to be more cautious - “Not charging your battery pack to 100% may lead to reduced range and performance.”

When such messages are shown to the customer, they know that okay, now they need to charge to 100% and if they don’t, they’ll see reduced performance. The choice is left to the customer if they are ok with the reduced performance or not. The warranty is intact and the customer is not forced to jump through certain artificial hoops setup by the OEMs.

What is the necessity of charging to 100%?

Charging to 100% allows for cells balancing. During discharging, certain cells may discharge more than usual, leading to a voltage differences between cells. During charging, the cells get charged parallelly to reach full charge. Before full charge is reached, the battery management system (BMS) would prefer to have as little voltage difference across cells as possible. This ensures that the battery pack’s performance is at the peak. Unbalanced cells can cause vehicles to suddenly lose power.

Naturally, the next question is, can the balancing of cells be done on fast charging instead of slow charging. The battery pack does not distinguish between fast and slow charging when charging above 90-95%. It takes the same amount of time to charge when it is closer to 100%. The insistence of slow charging after few fast charging sessions is illogical.

Contradictions

The total cost of owernship for an electric vehicle keeps going down as one drives it more. Thereby, users are incentivized to drive as much as they can in their electric cars. This is especially relevant for cab fleets. They cannot afford to have any downtime, as that is lost business.

The lifetime warranty clause is not applicable for fleet owners, but I believe they would have similar terms and conditions around the limited battery warranty provided by the OEM. Slow charging is a time and revenue sink, which has to be accounted and planned for, by the fleet operator.

Tata Motors management, namely Mr. Shailesh Chandra and Mr. Anand Kulkarni, took park in Kashmir to Kanyakumari drive in their Nexon EV to promote inter city driving. It was great publicity for their cars. The cherry on the top was that this was done in record four days. They even made it to various record books for achieving this feat.

Did the Tata Motors management stop to slow charge their car during this trip? Nope. “(During this trip) Not for a single time, was this car charged using a slow charger” said Shailesh Chandra, MD Tata Motors, in this interview with BTTV. This is for a car giving 300km range, covering a distance of over 4000 km in 4 days. You can do the math.

The OEM is promoting cross country drives in an electric vehicle, while not following their own recommendations. The OEM, under the garb of publicity, is falsely showing it to the world that such trips are possible. If the customer ends up doing it, then they will void their warranties! Talk about false advertising.

The advertising regulator should take a closer look at the misleading promotional content.

Mahindra, too, has given their cars to influencers who do long road trips in their cars without clearly following or mentioning the guidelines by the OEMs. Here’s an example of 91Wheel's Bunny Punia’s latest trip with Mahindra BE6 to Pangong Lake from New Delhi.

There’s not a single mention to slow charge the car or follow the recommendations. We see Bunny fast charging regularly.

Let us not even talk about MG here. Their Windsor and Windsor Pro has multiple issues to charge on various types of fast chargers. It is unlikely that any of the influencers will take the car on long trip, or mention this issue to their audience.

If an OEM is mandating slow charging for whatever technical shortcomings they have, then they should represent this information clearly to the customers before they make an informed decision. And to run big disclaimers stating to “Not try this at home” on influencers marketing roadtrip videos.

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