Tata opens the Electric Cars index with a double lock: Nexon EV at 61.3% SoV, Punch EV second at 55.3%.

Day one of the Electric Cars arc establishes a Tata-dominated baseline. Tata Nexon EV takes the index outright at 61.3% combined SoV across 92 mentions, winning ChatGPT (58%) and AI Mode (68%).

Tata Punch EV sits second at 55.3% on the strength of a 76% Gemini reading — the largest single-engine share recorded anywhere in the snapshot — but collapses to 28% on ChatGPT, where it falls to rank 6.

Mahindra holds the entire middle of the table with BE 6 (46.7%) and XEV 9e (44%) in lockstep across all three engines, while the import set — Kia EV6, BYD Seal, BYD Atto 3, Hyundai Kona EV — clusters between 8.7% and 23.3% with Hyundai effectively absent from Gemini (0% SoV) and AI Mode (4%).

The opening picture is a citation-pool story before it is a brand story.

Tata's lead is built on the four domains that dominate Indian EV discovery — cardekho.com (31 cites), autocarindia.com (30), carwale.com (30), and Tata's own ev.tatamotors.com (12) — and these are the surfaces an AEO team needs to be on to compete at all.

The Punch EV's ChatGPT-vs-Gemini gap (28% vs 76%) is the most actionable asymmetry on the board: it tells you ChatGPT is leaning on a different source mix reddit.com/r/CarsIndiatimesofindiabikencars.com than Gemini's editorial-heavy diet, and any brand wanting to move ChatGPT specifically should be working forum threads and tier-one news, not OEM microsites.

Hyundai Kona EV's near-zero presence on Gemini and AI Mode is the category's clearest exposure: a legacy nameplate that the newer surfaces have effectively stopped seeing.

For everyone outside the Tata-Mahindra core, the question this index will answer over the coming weeks is whether earned citations on cardekho, autocar, and carwale can be moved at all — or whether Tata's lead is structural.