Up to 20,000 a Month: Ather's Good Problem Gets a ₹122 Crore Fix

Representative image (AI-generated)

Ather builds about 33,000 scooters a month and gets about 60,000 pre-orders a month. That gap is why CEO Tarun Mehta told analysts on 26 October that the company is leaving roughly 20,000 retail sales a month on the table. Autocar Professional, which first reported the Q2 FY27 call, put the range at 18,000-20,000.

This is a problem every EV maker wants to have. It is also one Ather has already started paying to fix.

The numbers behind the gap

• Average production in Q2 FY27: about 33,000 scooters a month
• Pre-orders in the quarter: about 1.8 lakh, or roughly 60,000 a month, up about 108% year on year
• Hosur plant utilisation at peak: about 98%
• Vahan market share: 15.1% in Q2 FY27, down from 17.2% a year ago

Read those together and the share drop makes sense. Ather didn't lose buyers. It ran out of scooters to sell them.

The ₹122 crore answer

On the same call, Ather's board approved about ₹122 crore to add roughly 2.25 lakh units of annual capacity by Q2 FY28: ₹58 crore at Hosur and ₹64 crore at the new Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar plant. Total capacity after that lands near 11.4 lakh units a year.

That is a cheap fix by industry standards. The cost per unit of added capacity works out to about ₹5,400 (₹122 crore ÷ 2.25 lakh), because Ather is adding lines inside plants it already owns rather than building new ones.

What this means for you

If your Ather delivery date keeps slipping, this is the company telling you why. It is a factory problem, not a demand problem, and the extra capacity arrives in stages through FY28. Ask your dealer whether your variant is one of the mid-range models Ather is prioritising; the entry-level Konarc has been pushed back to protect margins.

The EVGyan take

Admitting a shortfall on an analyst call is unusual, and the context matters: Ather posted its first quarterly profit in Q2, so it can afford to say demand is ahead of supply. The ₹122 crore plan is small enough that it should land on time. The test is whether the 15.1% share recovers once the new lines run. We'll check the Vahan numbers every month.