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By Ketan Deorankar
Every year, somewhere between Ganesh Chaturthi & Diwali, India takes measure of it’s own confidence. Weddings are fixed, gold is bought, and in the most telling ritual of all - cars are booked. The automobile has always been the festive season’s most honest economic indicator: nobody signs up for a multi-year loan on a depreciating asset unless they genuinely believe in their own future.
By that measure, India is brimming with belief. And nowhere is this more visible than at the very top of the market.
The first half of 2026 has been quite remarkable for luxury cars in India.The segment grew a healthy 4 percent in volume terms - modest sounding, until you remember that this growth came on top of a record base. Mercedes Benz posted its best-ever first half, with the second quarter alone setting a new record. BMW grew 17 percent year-on-year - its fastest clip in India - and its electric vehicles a staggering 78 percent, making it the country’s best selling luxury EV brand. Audi, Volvo and Lexus all grew. This is not a market limping along on discounts; it is a market being pulled forward by demand.
Three structural shifts explain why.
The buyer has changed. The archetypal luxury car customer - the third generation industrialist in South Delhi or South Mumbai- has been joined and in many showrooms outnumbered, by a new cohort: professionals, start up founders and first generation wealth creators, largely between 30 and 49. At Audi, over 70 percent of customers are now under 50. These buyers arrive armed with weeks of online research. They know the variants, the on-road price in at least 3 cities, and the resale value even before they ever meet a salesperson.
The map has changed. Luxury demand is no longer a metro story. Mercedes-Benz has credited Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets for record months and has opened showrooms in cities like Patna. In the pre-owned luxury segment - itself booming - nearly 40 percent of demand comes from cities like Chandigarh, Jaipur, Lucknow and Indore. Aspiration has gone national; distribution and communication must follow in their respective language.
The product has changed. One in two BMW’s sold in India today is a long-wheelbase model; SUVs make up to two-thirds of its volume; and electrification is no longer a token gesture but a growth engine. Buyers are choosing technology, personalisation and experience over badge heritage alone.
If H1 is the appetiser, the festive season is the main course. And the precedent set last year was extraordinary: Navratri 2025 saw overall vehicle retails surge 34 percent - the highest for any festive period on record - as GST 2.0 rate cut collided with genuine consumer optimism. Carmakers called it their best Diwali ever. Passenger vehicles wholesales in October alone crossed 4.6 lakh units.
That momentum has carried into 2026. With income tax relief in consumer’s pocket, a stable rate environment, a wave of luxury EV launches scheduled for the second half, and the India-UK FTA poised to make marque British imports more accessible, the coming festive window may well be the most competitive selling season the luxury market has ever seen.
Which brings us to the real battleground. When every brand has a strong product, festive financing, and full order book of launches, the differentiator is no longer what you sell. It is how and where you tell your story.
Here is the uncomfortable truth for anyone who is still planning festive campaigns the old way: The luxury car buyer’s journey, now begins, matures and very nearly concludes on a screen. By the time they walk in a dealership, the decision is 80 percent made.
Three shifts in India’s media landscape mirror - almost perfectly - the three shifts in the car market.
Digital is now the main stage and not the side act. Digital commands roughly two-thirds of India’s advertising expenditure and festive digital ad spends have been growing at 20-25 percent annually - nearly twice the pace of traditional media. Automotive consistently ranks among the top festive spending categories, precisely because buyer research models, prices, reviews, and financing online before they visit the showroom.
The television has been reinvented, and it now knows who is watching. Connected TV is fastest growing screen in the country: monthly CTV viewership crossed 166 million in early 2026, up 23 percent in a year, with nearly 60 million Indians now watching only streaming, entirely bypassing traditional television. For a luxury brand, this is close to a perfect medium: the cinematic storytelling of 55-inch living room screen, combined with the targeting precision of digital. A campaign can reach affluent households in Indore differently from those in Mumbai, insert the nearest dealership into the creative, and invite a test drive via a QR code - all within the same film.
Interactive CTV formats have already demonstrated measurably higher engagement and completion rates than linear TV.
The buying of Media itself has become intelligent. Programmatic advertising - where algorithms, not insertion orders, decide which impression reaches which household at what moment - already accounts for over 40 percent of India’s digital media market and is headed to 44 percent this year. Layer artificial intelligence on top, and campaigns can now optimise themselves in-flight; shifting budgets between platforms, managing frequency across mobile, CTV, audio, and digital out-of-home, and tying exposure to real outcomes like configurator visits, and test-drive bookings rather than vanity impressions.
The season will be won by Full Funnel.
Put these threads together and the conclusion writes itself. The luxury buyer is getting younger, digital first, and geographically dispersed. The festive window is short, loud and brutally competitive. And the media ecosystem has finally matured to the point where a brand can run one connected, AI driven, full funnel campaign - awareness on connected TV, consideration through premium video and rich media, precision through being contextually relevant all the time and measuring the whole journey against actual showroom visits.
My conviction, having spent some time on both sides of this business - inside the automotive brands and inside the media ecosystem - is that this festive season will draw a clear line between two kinds of automakers. Those who still buy media the way they did five years ago will spend more and see less. And those who embrace programmatic, connected TV, and AI lead outcome driven platforms will not merely ride India’s festive wave – they will decide who catches it.
The cars have never been better. The buyers have never been readier. The only question left for every luxury brand this Diwali is whether their media is as intelligent as their machines.
The author is a professional in the media industry with prior experience in the automotive sector. Views expressed are personal and do not represent those of any organisation, past or present, that the author is or has been associated with.
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