India's three-wheeler market is in the middle of one of its most significant transformations in decades — a shift from internal combustion engine auto-rickshaws and cargo carriers toward electric variants whose adoption is accelerating in urban and peri-urban markets across the country. Maharashtra's cities — Pune, Mumbai, Nashik, Aurangabad, and Kolhapur itself — are among the most active early-adoption markets for electric three-wheelers, and the manufacturing ecosystem that produces these vehicles is disproportionately concentrated in the Pune industrial corridor. Yet most of Kolhapur's foundry cluster operators, when asked about their three-wheeler casting business, describe it as marginal or absent — a commercial blind spot in a segment whose casting demand is growing faster than almost any other category in the Maharashtra automotive supply chain.
The Scale of India's Three-Wheeler EV Transition
India sold approximately 700,000 three-wheelers in FY2025-26, and electric variants have captured an increasingly dominant share of this market over the past three years — crossing 50 percent of new three-wheeler registrations in multiple quarters and continuing to grow as charging infrastructure expands and total cost of ownership calculations increasingly favour electric over petrol and CNG variants. The L-category EV regulatory framework — which covers three-wheelers, quadricycles, and light electric vehicles — has been one of the most commercially dynamic segments of India's EV market, moving faster than passenger cars and commercial vehicles in the percentage shift from combustion to electric.
Pune's position in this market is structural. Bajaj Auto — whose Pune campus at Akurdi houses the engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain operations for its RE electric three-wheeler range — is one of the market leaders. Mahindra's Treo electric auto-rickshaw, engineered and manufactured through its Chakan operations near Pune, is another major market participant. The smaller EV startups targeting the urban three-wheeler market — Piaggio's Ape E-City variants, Euler Motors, and others — similarly draw on the Pune engineering and component supply ecosystem. This concentration of three-wheeler EV manufacturing in and around Pune creates a casting demand geography that is as accessible to Kolhapur's foundry cluster as the four-wheeler automotive casting business that the cluster has built its automotive reputation around.
What Electric Three-Wheelers Need from Aluminium Casting
The aluminium casting content of an electric three-wheeler is different from its ICE predecessor in ways that are commercially significant for casting foundries. The ICE three-wheeler's principal aluminium casting requirements were the engine crankcase, cylinder head, and gearbox housing — drivetrain castings whose specifications were well-understood by the supply base and whose production was largely consolidated among established component manufacturers. The electric three-wheeler replaces these ICE drivetrain castings with a different set of aluminium casting requirements whose production is not yet fully consolidated and whose supply chain is still developing.
The electric motor housing is the new central casting in the three-wheeler EV's drivetrain — replacing the ICE crankcase in importance if not in manufacturing complexity. The motor housing must locate the stator accurately, provide the bearing positions for the rotor shaft, contain the coolant passages where liquid cooling is specified, and achieve the dimensional accuracy of the stator bore and bearing housings that motor performance requires. For the motor sizes used in three-wheeler EVs — typically 3 to 8 kW peak output — the housing dimensions are well within the production scale of most gravity die casting operations in Kolhapur's foundry cluster.
The battery enclosure — the structural casting that protects the battery pack — is the other major new casting category that three-wheeler EVs introduce. Three-wheeler battery enclosures are smaller in overall dimensions than passenger car equivalents, reflecting the smaller battery capacity required for the three-wheeler's range requirements and operating duty cycle. This size characteristic — enclosures that are compact enough for standard gravity die casting equipment — is the factor that makes three-wheeler battery enclosure casting more accessible for Kolhapur's MSME foundries than the large passenger car battery enclosures that require low-pressure or high-pressure die casting at a machine scale beyond most MSME operations.
Additional aluminium casting demand from electric three-wheelers includes wheel hubs — similar in specification to those for two-wheelers but adapted for the three-wheeler's geometry and load rating — controller housing and power electronics enclosures, and structural bracket castings for motor and battery mounting within the three-wheeler's frame. Each of these represents incremental casting demand beyond what ICE three-wheelers generated, and the aggregate casting content per electric three-wheeler — when motor housing, battery enclosure, wheel hubs, and electronics housings are combined — is meaningfully higher than the aggregate casting content of the ICE variants they are replacing.
The Supply Chain Gap — Why This Demand Is Underserved
The three-wheeler EV casting supply chain is underserved by Kolhapur's foundry cluster for reasons that are commercial rather than technical. The three-wheeler segment's OEM customer base is smaller in individual programme size than four-wheeler automotive, and the procurement relationships that Kolhapur foundries have developed in the automotive sector are weighted toward four-wheeler Tier 1 suppliers whose individual casting volumes are larger. The three-wheeler OEMs — including Bajaj Auto's RE programme and Mahindra's Treo — source casting components through Tier 1 suppliers who in turn source from casting foundries, and the Tier 1 supply chain for three-wheeler casting has not been systematically developed with Kolhapur foundries in the way that four-wheeler automotive casting supply chains have.
The quality documentation requirements for three-wheeler EV casting supply are equivalent to those for four-wheeler automotive — IATF 16949 alignment, PPAP documentation, statistical process control on critical dimensions — because the three-wheeler OEMs and their Tier 1 suppliers apply the same quality management frameworks across their product ranges. A Kolhapur foundry that has qualified for four-wheeler automotive casting supply has the quality infrastructure to qualify for three-wheeler EV casting supply — the barrier is commercial awareness and targeted outreach rather than quality system development.
Commercial Development in the Three-Wheeler Segment
The commercial development approach for the three-wheeler EV casting market is direct and accessible for Kolhapur foundries that have automotive quality credentials. The Tier 1 suppliers who serve Bajaj's RE programme and Mahindra's Treo — primarily located in Pune's Chakan and Akurdi industrial areas — are the entry point rather than the OEMs directly. These Tier 1 suppliers need motor housings, battery enclosures, and electronic housing castings from qualified foundry sub-contractors, and they are actively developing their three-wheeler EV supply chains in response to the growth of the OEM programmes they serve.
A Kolhapur foundry that proactively identifies the Tier 1 suppliers serving Bajaj's RE and Mahindra's Treo programmes, presents its casting capability and quality credentials through sample and quotation, and demonstrates delivery reliability through trial orders is pursuing a commercial development path that is no more complex than developing any other automotive Tier 1 relationship in the Pune corridor. The difference from the established four-wheeler automotive business is that the three-wheeler EV casting supply chain is earlier in its consolidation — the established supplier relationships are fewer, the foundries that have already captured this business are less entrenched, and the commercial opportunity for a new entrant with genuine capability is proportionally larger. The time to develop this commercial relationship is now, before the three-wheeler EV casting supply chain consolidates around established suppliers in the way that four-wheeler automotive casting has.