Tata Motors taps Chery platform to revive premium Avinya EVs

Tata Motors is leaning on Chinese engineering to accelerate its premium EV push, a move that could help India’s biggest electric carmaker get Avinya to market faster but also underscores how thin the country’s homegrown platform depth remains at the top end of the segment. The plan is to license Chery’s automaking architecture, build at least two premium EVs locally, and launch the first in 2027 at Tata’s newly opened factory in Tamil Nadu.

The strategy is aimed squarely at Avinya, Tata’s premium EV future, after earlier timelines slipped. Tata said it will leverage the Freelander platform from the Chery-Jaguar Land Rover joint venture in China, a notable choice at a time when Chinese technology remains strategically sensitive in India. For Tata, the tradeoff is clear: using an established platform can cut development time, lower technical risk and reduce the chance of another delay in a segment where software, battery packaging and platform efficiency matter as much as price.

The company has spent years building its lead in India’s passenger EV market, but the premium end has been harder to execute. In December 2025, Tata said more than 250,000 TATA.ev vehicles were on the road and that it held a 66% share of all EVs sold in India to date. It also said five new EV nameplates, including Sierra and Avinya, were planned by FY30. Yet outside reporting in 2025 said Tata’s passenger EV share came under pressure from rivals including JSW MG Motor India and Mahindra, making speed in higher-margin models more important.

Avinya itself has already gone through multiple public iterations. Tata first unveiled the concept in Mumbai in April 2022 as a pure-electric model based on its GEN 3 architecture. It later showed the Avinya X concept at the Bharat Mobility Expo in January 2025. Tata has described Avinya as a global premium brand built on multiple scalable platforms and architectures, anchored in its design, engineering and integration capabilities.

The Chery link also fits a wider shift. In June 2024, Chery and JLR said their CJLR joint venture would pivot to an advanced portfolio of electric vehicles based on Chery EV architecture under the Freelander name, suggesting the platform Tata may now use has already been recast for premium global applications. For India’s EV industry, the deal is a reminder that leadership in volume does not automatically translate into leadership in advanced platforms.