In 2017, the corridors of Tata Motors were filled not with the hum of electric motors but the familiar, heavy thrum of diesel engines and the sombre reverberations of a ₹4,000-crore annual loss. The passenger vehicle business was struggling, market share was eroding, and the internal sentiment was one of survival, not reinvention.

Yet, in the middle of this crisis, Shailesh Chandra, now the Managing Director & CEO of Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles, saw a spark. While the rest of the industry viewed electric vehicles (EVs) as a distant, expensive experiment, Chandra, who was then Chief Strategy Officer, felt a shift in the wind. “I started feeling that an electric vehicle is now inevitable,” he recalls.

But turning an oil-dependent giant toward a green future wasn’t just a technical challenge, it was about a cultural transformation. The first hurdle wasn’t the technology; it was the mindset. Tata Motors was a house built by engineers trained in the art of the internal combustion engine (ICE). For many, the shift to EVs felt like a disruption to their hard-earned expertise and core competencies. The turning point came in 2018 when the State-run Energy Efficiency Services Ltd (EESL) announced a massive tender for 10,000 electric cars. With no existing product and a near impossible four-month deadline, the company’s leadership was hesitant. In a call to Tata Sons Chairman, N Chandrasekaran, who was in the US, Chandra argued that potential fines for late delivery were simply “investments in learning” and received his full support. “He strongly believed in an electric future for cars having witnessed first hand the remarkable progress of EVs in Norway during his marathon runs,” said Chandra.

An agile team of 35 rapidly fast-prototyped cars by literally removing engines and creatively reconfiguring existing vehicles. Aiming for a safe third-place bid, he was shocked to be named the lowest bidder (L1). Despite early breakdowns, he managed the crisis with “Safari backups” for stranded officials, using the real-world failures to mature the technology. This audacious gamble broke the internal culture of inertia. Today, that defiance has transformed Tata Motors from a struggling giant into an EV powerhouse, commanding a 45 per cent market share. Looking back, people often ask him why he took that risk. “Frankly, I was not thinking that way,” he says. “Many times, ignorance is bliss. What will happen at the maximum? My job will go. But what I gain is very important. If there is technology, I need to know.”

Cricket over math

That instinct, to learn by doing, even at personal cost, was not new to him. Chandra grew up in Ranchi in a household where education was both expected and revered. His father, a civil engineer from NIT Jamshedpur, retired as chief engineer in the public works department. His mother was a professor of psychology. Books filled the house. Encyclopaedias lined the shelves. Yet, as a student, he was anything but consistent. Cricket mattered more than maths. In one terminal exam, he got red marks in multiple subjects. A pivotal shift occurred after Std VIII after cracking a few complex math problems. His confidence soared, and his scores skyrocketed from 36 per cent to near-perfect marks.

However, this momentum stalled in Std XII when passion for cricket again eclipsed his academics. The wake-up call came during his IIT-JEE preparation, where dismal mock test results suggested he was falling behind. It was the sight of his father researching colleges that offered “donation seats” that finally sparked a fire in him. With only four months left, Chandra pivoted to an intense study regimen, eventually securing a rank high enough to claim a seat in mechanical engineering at the prestigious IIT Varanasi. “Even as young boy I was drawn by mechanics and the idea of working with car. Given my passion for cars and then my interest in Mechanics, I was clear that I had to work in an auto company in some capacity or other,” Chandra says as we meet him over lunch at the upmarket Rue Du Liban restaurant in Fort, Mumbai, just a five-minute walk from Tata Motors’ head office.

Tata Motors was always the destination. Campus placements at IIT offered other options, including a leading software company, but the choice was clear. He began in Jamshedpur, immersing himself in shop-floor learning, programming CNC machines on night shifts and pushing himself to understand manufacturing from the ground up. That obsession caught the attention of seniors. Asked to remove a bottleneck that limited truck output, he proposed changes that lifted capacity from 160 to 300 vehicles a day, without fresh investment, says Chandra, as hummus, baba ghanouj and falafel arrive at the table.

An Executive MBA at SPJIMR broadened his thinking. Strategy frameworks and finance appealed to his curiosity, even as he remained sceptical of management jargon. Being pulled into Mumbai to work with the then MD of Tata Motors, Ravi Kant, became another turning point. Boardroom exposure, followed by stints across manufacturing, vendor development, defence vehicles, and later Jaguar Land Rover after its acquisition, gave him a rare sweep across functions and perspectives.

By the time he returned to Tata Motors to head strategy and transformation, the company was losing heavily in passenger vehicles. Electric vehicles, still a sideshow, offered an opening. After the initial government fleet experiment, he pushed into employee transport, striking an agreement with Lithium Urban Technologies. “If Lithium has bought a car, it was a stamp of quality,” he says. Volumes rose from single digits to hundreds a month. Yet he knew fleets alone would not scale up. “If I become 50 per cent in this (fleet business), it will still be 3 per cent (of the overall volumes),” he says. The real opportunity lay in personal vehicles.

A contrarian bet

The Nexon EV was the contrarian bet. Built in 16 months, instead of the usual 36, it was designed to be aspirational and practical: at least 200 km range, acceleration on par with IC engines, no compromise on usability. The company accepted that it may not make money initially. “Whatever it takes,” he told the team. When it launched in 2020, it surprised the market, delivering 250 km range and repositioning the Nexon brand itself.

That confidence spilled into the wider passenger vehicle business when Chandra was asked to take charge during the pandemic. With sales at zero in April 2020, he used the pause to listen — to dealers, sales teams and customers. What he heard was simple: dealers were not making money, and customers did not even know Tata Motors sold products like the Tiago or Nexon. The response was equally direct. Dealer margins were raised, marketing spend increased, safety dialled up as a core message. Market share doubled within months. Production was pushed despite supply constraints.

As the main course — Manakeesh Za’tar, grilled Australian lamb chops, and roasted chicken — arrived, Chandra shared another story illustrating his relentless appetite for problem-solving. When the global semiconductor crisis threatened to paralyse the auto sector, he didn’t just wait for a solution — he dismantled the problem. Chandra launched an exhaustive deep-dive into the entire supply chain to bridge the company’s knowledge gap. “First, we made ourselves experts,” he explained. “We mapped out the distributors and decoded exactly how the ecosystem functions.”

That curiosity led to an uncomfortable discovery. “There was a chip which used to cost $2,” he recalls. “It was now available at thirty dollars.” In any large organisation, such a proposal would die instantly.

Chandra waved it through. “At the car level, it is not much,” he says. “Five thousand rupees per car. But I make 20-25 times more margin on that car.”

The problem, however, went beyond pricing. It was structural. “We don’t procure semiconductors as OEMs,” he explains. “It is the suppliers who procure. We had no knowledge.”

So, the team rewired the process itself. Engineers, purchasing heads and plant teams began meeting together, often daily. “We were huddling,” he says. “Working together.”

The next breakthrough came not in a factory, but late at night at home. “I was watching a movie,” he recalls. “An Amol Palekar movie. I don’t even remember the name.” On screen, a Premier Padmini cruised along Marine Drive. “I was struck,” he says. “Where was the semiconductor in this car?” The question lingered. “Why have we made ourselves so dependent on semiconductors?” he asked himself. He called the head of electronics engineering that night.

The challenge was blunt.

“Tell me a few features which are not used by customers,” he told the team. “Can we tweak them? Can we replace chips with simpler combinations?”

Within a week, the team came back with an answer. “There were three chips doing one function,” he says. “They brought it down to one.” Feature deletions followed. Circuit redesigns followed. Chip dependence fell.

Unconventional move

Then came another unconventional move. Chandra’s team began scanning the market for obsolete inventory. When they found a distributor sitting on large quantities of a previous generation chip, Chandra made a simple pitch: clear the stock at scale and Tata Motors would take the volume. “Your obsolescence has increased,” he told the distributor, who finally sold the $100 chip for $15 when Tata Motors bought onelakh units.

The payoff was immediate. “Suddenly our market share became 16 per cent,” he says. “Because we were producing more.” While competitors waited, Tata Motors shipped. It has since stabilized at 13-14 %, marking ~4X growth in 4-5 years

Looking back, Chandra is clear that the episode was not about heroics. “It was first principles,” he says. “And execution.”

Away from cars, Chandra’s life is anchored by family. His wife, Neha, runs a venture enabling talented women to freelance across industries. Their two daughters are carving their own paths. Chandra unwinds with music and sport. He plays instruments by instinct rather than training, sings on Sundays, and still carries the competitive kick of cricket — though, he admits, the body no longer keeps pace with the muscle memory.

In order to secure the future of the business, Tata Motors has announced a ₹33,000–35,000 crore investment plan over the next five years (FY26–FY30), aimed at accelerating its passenger vehicle and green mobility targets. This move is part of the organisation’s broader strategy to surpass its closest competitors — Hyundai and Mahindra & Mahindra — in the Indian market. The company also aims to increase its market share in the passenger vehicle segment from 14 per cent to 16 per cent by FY27, with an eventual target of 18-20 per cent by FY30.

The company’s ambitious outlook for electric vehicles includes plans to launch over 30 new models by 2030. It also targets raising the share of EVs to 20 per cent of PV volumes by FY27 and 30 per cent by FY30. And Chandra’s mantra to achieve these challenging targets? “When a problem is very difficult, go back to first principles,” he says.

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Published on December 22, 2025