Until now, Tata Motors had maintained fairly distinct positioning of each model in its EV portfolio. However, with the new Sierra EV having a sizeable price overlap with the Curvv EV and the Harrier EV at the two ends of its price range, it begs the question is Tata Motors cannibalisation its own products? Shailesh Chandra, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles, thinks not, as the company is banking on differences in size, design, cabin experience and vehicle character to mark out the individual models. 

Tata Motors Plays Down Cannibalisation

The Sierra EV is, in fact, very closely related to the Harrier EV, sharing similar battery capacities, common front and rear drive units, the thermal management system and also have broadly comparable performance. The former is priced between Rs 18.79 lakh and Rs 25.99 lakh, whereas the latter is priced between Rs 21.49 lakh and Rs 28.99 lakh.

According to Chandra, some movement between models within a broad portfolio was inevitable and is not the company’s primary concern. However, he said buyers do not evaluate models only through price and specifications. Their preferences are also shaped by styling, dimensions and their individual idea of what a model should represent.

“That’s why you see that the buyers of Harriers are very different than Sierra buyers, even in the ICE world,” Chandra said to our sister publication Autocar professional. “Somebody does not like boxy style. Somebody does not like dynamic style. So, first differentiation comes from there.”

Chandra also said size plays a particularly important role in India, where buyers often expect the value of a higher-priced vehicle to be visibly reflected in its dimensions and road presence. Different price and accessibility points will further separate the vehicles, he added.

“It’s a combination of all this,” Chandra said. “There is clear separation of what you see in the ICE world also. Same will apply here.”

Any immediate cannibalisation may also be limited by Tata Motors’ supply constraints. “Harrier EV demand is twice of what we are supplying. It is a supply-driven issue,” said Chandra. 

Shared constraints in battery-pack production, power electronics and other aggregates require Tata Motors to allocate components across its electric portfolio, he added. The company is working on capacity expansion and supplier debottlenecking to close the gap between demand and production.

Anand Kulkarni, Chief Product Officer at Tata Passenger Electric Mobility, further reiterated the differences between the two electric SUVs. “These products don’t necessarily compete with each other,” Kulkarni said. “They are enabled by a common underlying technology stack, but they are tuned completely differently and operate differently.”

 

Kulkarni highlighted that the Sierra EV has a different cabin ambience from that of the Harrier EV. He compared this approach with the ICE versions of these SUVs, where they share the engine but deliver different driving and ownership experiences. “Just because two cars have a common engine, that does not make them a choice of one over the other,” he said.

Commonality gives scale and shared costs 

Commonality allows Tata Motors to distribute engineering, supplier-development and localisation investments across more products. “A lot of technologies that we developed in Harrier EV allowed us to also give it in the Sierra EV,” added Chandra, alluding to the ADAS suite, automatic parking and vehicle summoning features, as well as the all-wheel-drive technology,

The Sierra.ev and Harrier.ev will test both sides of Tata Motors’ EV strategy. Shared engineering must deliver scale, localisation and development-cost benefits, while Tata hopes styling, size and positioning creates enough distinction to expand the company’s addressable market. Some cannibalisation may be unavoidable. The larger test is whether the two SUVs collectively attract more customers to Tata Motors than either model could have done on its own.

With inputs from Saptarshi Mondal