The math is brutal. While manufacturers in our northeastern neighbors build facilities sized for 80% of global capacity, ZF India President Akash Passey admits the local industry is "very happy" with just five to seven percent. He called this complacency a trap at the Autocar Professional EV Conclave 2026, warning that the gap in scale is a structural weakness that must be addressed before it becomes a dead end.
The bottleneck, according to Passey, is power electronics. "It is a very weak area we have," he said, noting that EVs are hungry for these components. If Indian suppliers can't localize this tech, the entire EV push stalls. But the problem isn't just technology; it's economics. Passey wants to localize more, but the business case doesn't work today because volume predictions are shaky. You can't bet the farm on a forecast that keeps changing.
The business model is breaking, too. In the old ICE days, suppliers got a Request for Quotation (RFQ) late in the game. For EVs, ZF is brought in at the basic design stage. "The time of just being a component manufacturer is gone," Passey explained. Now, it's about being a system integrator. It’s about on-time delivery, project management, and partnerships. And for India, there’s a specific twist: "value" and "frugal engineering" to keep prices low enough for the mass market.
The workload is massive. India is currently developing more than 50 new car platforms. ZF is rolling up its sleeves to handle this, deploying around 5,500 engineers across 12 technical centers in the country. Not all of them are working on EVs, but the pivot is clear. The industry isn't just buying parts anymore; it's building ecosystems. Whether India can scale from 7% to 80% is the question that will define the next decade of auto manufacturing here.