Marketing for Automotive Dealerships and EV Brands in Central India

A dealership's digital spend should be bought on cost per completed test ride and then cost per retail, measured per outlet — because the test ride is where a vehicle purchase is actually decided, and enquiry volume is the easiest number in retail to inflate. That part of performance marketing for automotive is well understood.

What is not understood is that the two most common pieces of dealership creative both carry expiry dates nobody tracks. A certified test-cycle range figure presented as real-world. And an on-road price built on a subsidy or tax exemption that may already have lapsed.

Here is a live example. Madhya Pradesh's 100% motor vehicle tax exemption for electric two-wheelers, three-wheelers, cars and light commercial vehicles came with a registration deadline of 26 March 2026. That date has passed.

Truth line: half the price claims in Central India's EV creative are advertising a benefit whose registration window closed seven months ago.

Has the Madhya Pradesh EV exemption actually lapsed?

For most categories, the window in that notification has closed, and anyone still running the claim should check before the next campaign goes live.

Madhya Pradesh Notification No. 857/2320711/2024/VIII, dated 9 April 2025, granted a 100% exemption from Madhya Pradesh Motor Vehicles Tax on new electric vehicles, with registration deadlines by category:

• Electric two-wheelers — register by 26 March 2026
• Electric three-wheelers — register by 26 March 2026
• Electric cars, standard price up to ₹20 lakh — register by 26 March 2026
• Electric light commercial vehicles — register by 26 March 2026
• Electric buses, private and government — register by 26 March 2027

So under that notification the two-wheeler, three-wheeler, car and LCV windows closed in March 2026. Only the bus categories remain open.

One honest qualification, and it matters: I could not verify a further notification extending those deadlines. The state may have issued one. What a dealer should not do is assume either way — confirm the current position with the Madhya Pradesh Transport Department before publishing an on-road price that depends on it. The point stands regardless of the answer: the claim had an expiry date, nobody owned it, and seven months later it is still in circulation.

What does the central EV scheme actually say now?

Less than the numbers circulating would suggest, and the gaps are instructive.

The operative instrument is S.O. 4424(E), issued by the Ministry of Heavy Industries on 10 August 2026, amending the PM E-DRIVE scheme notified as S.O. 4259(E) on 29 September 2024. From the gazette notification itself:

• The terminal date for all segments is 31 March 2028, with the last date to submit a claim 31 December 2027
• A scheme or sub-component closes early if its funds are exhausted
• The electric two-wheeler incentive is limited to the specified amount or 15% of ex-factory price, whichever is lower
• Support extends to up to 45,79,120 registered electric two-wheelers
• The per-kWh incentive amount is subject to review and will be notified separately

That last line is the one dealership marketing teams need to read twice. The notification does not fix a per-kWh figure. It says the rate is reviewed and notified separately — which means any per-kWh number in your creative is a number you must re-confirm, not inherit. Figures for the current rate are circulating widely; I am not going to publish one, because the gazette expressly reserves it.

And the registered electric three-wheeler category has closed, because its target sales were achieved. A dealer advertising a central incentive on an L5 three-wheeler is advertising a scheme component that is no longer accepting claims.

Put the three facts together — a category closed, a rate reserved for separate notification, and early closure on fund exhaustion — and subsidy-led price creative is the most perishable content a dealership publishes. It needs an owner and a review date, not a design template.

What is the Shelf-Life Audit?

Every claim in dealership creative belongs in one of four classes, and each class gets a different handling rule. We call it the Shelf-Life Audit, and it takes an afternoon.

Class 1 — Permanent. Outlet address, categories of vehicle sold, service availability, workshop capability, years in operation. Publish freely, review annually.

Class 2 — Slow-moving. Model variants, features, warranty terms, colours. Changes with the product cycle. Review each model-year change, with a named owner per brand.

Class 3 — Perishable. Subsidy amounts, tax and registration exemptions, on-road price, finance offers, exchange bonuses, scheme end dates. Every asset in this class carries a visible internal expiry date and a named owner, and nothing in it goes into an evergreen campaign, an always-on Performance Max asset group, or a landing page that nobody revisits. This is where the damage happens, because perishable claims get built into templates and outlive the thing they describe.

Class 4 — Never publish unqualified. Range, mileage, charging time, running cost per kilometre. These are certified test figures, and the next section explains why.

The audit's only real discipline is that Class 3 and Class 4 assets cannot be set and forgotten. Most dealerships have no register of where a subsidy figure appears — website, landing page, Business Profile post, catalogue, hoarding, WhatsApp broadcast, a sales executive's saved image — which is precisely why a lapsed claim survives for months.

Why is the range figure a Class 4 claim?

Because the number on the brochure is a laboratory measurement, and presenting it as real-world performance is where this category's consumer-protection exposure sits.

An electric vehicle sold in India is homologated for range under the Automotive Industry Standard for electric power train vehicles, tested by an authorised agency — the Automotive Research Association of India or the International Centre for Automotive Technology — on a chassis dynamometer running a prescribed drive cycle, at a controlled ambient temperature and with auxiliary electrical loads minimised.

Real-world range is lower, and the reasons are physics rather than marketing:

• Heat. Lithium-ion cells work efficiently in a relatively narrow thermal band. Central Indian summer temperatures sit well outside it, and the battery management system spends energy on thermal management that would otherwise go to the wheels.
• Air conditioning. In a combustion vehicle the cabin draws on waste engine heat and a belt-driven compressor. In an electric vehicle it draws directly from the traction battery.
• Speed. Aerodynamic drag rises with the square of velocity, so a highway run depletes a pack far faster than the moderate-speed laboratory cycle suggests.

Figures for the size of the gap circulate widely and I am deliberately not quoting one, because the numbers in circulation come from enthusiast testing rather than from any published methodology, and a dealer who quotes a precise variance is making a second unsubstantiated claim in the course of correcting the first.

What the law requires. The homologation standard governs how range is measured; it does not, by itself, require a dealer to add a consumer-facing disclaimer. But advertising is separately governed by the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, under which a false or misleading advertisement by a manufacturer or service provider attracts penalties — up to ₹10 lakh and imprisonment up to two years for a first contravention, rising to ₹50 lakh and five years for a subsequent one. Presenting a certified test figure as a guaranteed everyday range conceals a material limitation.

The regulator is already looking at this category. In October 2024 Ola Electric disclosed a CCPA show-cause notice alleging violations of consumer rights, misleading advertisements and unfair trade practices. No penalty was imposed at that stage and the company said it would reply — so this is a signal of regulatory attention rather than a concluded case, which is how it should be read.

The self-regulatory position reinforces it. The Advertising Standards Council of India requires claims about objectively ascertainable facts to be capable of substantiation, and requires a disclaimer to be clear, prominent and legible — and, critically, holds that a disclaimer may expand or clarify a claim but cannot contradict it. A headline range in large type with "under test conditions" in six-point grey does not comply, because it is not clarifying the claim, it is reversing it.

The compliant construction is also the better advertisement. State the certified figure, say what it is, and give the buyer the honest working number for their use case: "Certified range 450 km under standard test conditions. Expect roughly city-and-highway mixed use with air conditioning to differ — ask us for the real figures from owners in Indore." A dealership that leads with that converts better in a category where range anxiety is the dominant objection, because the buyer's actual fear is being misled, not the number itself.

How do you measure a retail that happens in the showroom?

Through offline conversion import, and the configuration is the whole job.

Capture the Google Click ID when a prospect submits a test-ride request or calls a tracked number — or the WBRAID and GBRAID parameters where the click ID is unavailable — and store it against the lead in the dealer management system. When that person completes a test ride and then takes delivery, send the conversion and its value back with the stored identifier. The platform then optimises toward people who buy vehicles rather than people who fill forms, which is the only version of this that survives contact with a dealer principal's retail report.

One dated change that will have silently broken older setups: from 15 June 2026, offline conversion imports and enhanced conversions for leads uploads moved to the Data Manager API and are blocked in the Google Ads API, per Google's offline conversion documentation. If your integration predates that and nobody has touched it, your retails may have stopped reaching the ad account months ago.

Store visits reporting is the other route, and worth attempting rather than assuming. Google's eligibility conditions require an eligible country, location assets that are active and opted in at campaign level, all locations set up and verified in Business Profile, a single offline conversion goal, and enough click and foot-traffic volume to clear privacy thresholds that Google does not publish. Multi-outlet dealership groups are better placed for this than most local retailers.

Measure both at outlet level. A group-level cost per retail averages a strong outlet with a weak one and tells you nothing about which — the same averaging failure that breaks most ROI reporting.

Should sales and service have separate Google listings?

Often yes — and the rules are looser than the advice circulating, while the duplication rule is stricter.

Google's guidelines for departments state that publicly facing departments operating as distinct entities should have their own page, subject to two firm conditions and one soft one:

• The exact name of each department must be different from the main business and from other departments
• The most representative category must be different from the main business and from other departments
• Departments typically have a separate customer entrance
• Hours may differ, and each department lists its own hours on its own profile

Two corrections to what dealers are commonly told. There is no department-specific phone rule in Google's guidelines — the general requirement is that the number connects to the individual business location and is under the direct control of the business. And the separate entrance is described as typical rather than as an absolute condition. Google's own examples of what does not qualify are an Apple products section inside Best Buy and a hot food bar inside Whole Foods — sections of a single business rather than distinct public-facing operations.

The hard rule is the other one: "Do not create more than one page for each location of your business," and "there should only be one profile per business." A sales showroom and a workshop with its own name, its own category and its own hours are two operations. Three listings for one showroom floor are a duplication problem, and a suspension takes your local visibility to zero across the group, which is a far larger loss than the extra pin was ever worth. The sound approach is the conservative one, run alongside genuine local search work.

What about the insurance and finance attach?

This is the part of the dealership that is actually regulated, and the rules changed recently.

A dealership arranging motor insurance operates under the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India's Motor Insurance Service Provider framework, which requires the dealer to be sponsored by an insurer or a broker, to have a designated trained person, and to follow a code of conduct — including prohibitions on premium manipulation, forced selling, and tying a cashless claim to where the policy was bought.

What changed is the money. The earlier product-specific commission caps for motor insurance distributors were replaced by the IRDAI's 2024 expenses-of-management regulations, which work through an insurer-level limit rather than a per-product cap. Dealer remuneration is now set within the insurer's board-approved policy. I am not going to publish a percentage here: the figures in circulation vary, and the number that binds you is the one in your sponsoring insurer's policy. Ask them for it in writing.

The marketing consequence is narrow and worth getting right. An advertised on-road price that bundles insurance is advertising a regulated product, which means the insurance component has to be described accurately and the customer's freedom to buy elsewhere cannot be obscured. Likewise an advertised monthly instalment: an EMI figure without the tenure, rate and down payment behind it is a price claim with its conditions removed, which is the same construction the range disclaimer problem takes.

When does the money get spent?

Into the festive window, and the Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations' dealer-level retail data — which is built from Vahan registrations rather than factory dispatches — is the right reference for the pattern rather than any manufacturer's wholesale numbers.

The shape of the year is well known to anyone in the trade: a monsoon slump with inventory building and discounting pressure, then a sharp Navratri-to-Diwali concentration where stock depletes and the job shifts from demand generation to allocation and margin protection.

Two consequences for spend. Concentrate paid budget into the festive window and the four to six weeks before it, when shortlisting happens, and accept a higher cost per completed test ride there because the alternative is missing the season. Then use the slump to build the Class 1 and Class 2 assets — model content, workshop capability, the honest range explainer — that the festive campaign will point at, rather than buying reach into a market that is not shopping.

And during the slump, when OEM discounting is heaviest, be disciplined about what goes into evergreen templates. A monsoon offer baked into a landing page is a Class 3 asset with no expiry date attached.

Is dealer-level marketing even the right lever?

Four objections, and they are stronger in this category than in most.

The manufacturer creates the demand. Largely true. A buyer decides on a brand and a model from national campaigns, product cycle and reviews long before a dealership enters the picture. The dealer is competing for share of a decision already partly made. That does not make dealer spend pointless — it reframes what it is for. You are not creating demand; you are winning the walk-in among dealers carrying the same brand, and that is a real and winnable contest.

Proximity and discount decide between same-brand dealers. Also substantially true, and it argues for concentrating on local presence, response speed and test-ride conversion rather than on top-of-funnel content the OEM already produces better. Where it is wrong is EV: category education genuinely is unresolved at the point of purchase, and the dealer who answers range and charging honestly is doing work the OEM's brand campaign does not.

You may be bidding against your own manufacturer. This is the most practical objection in the list. Where an OEM runs national search campaigns and distributes leads to dealers through a captive platform, dealer spend on the same brand keywords can raise cost for both parties and produce no incremental sale. The answer is a conversation with the OEM's digital team about keyword and geography separation before the budget is set. Note also that the specific contractual constraints — co-op funding conditions, brand guidelines, mandatory lead portals — sit in confidential franchise agreements, so no published source can tell you your own position. Read your agreement.

And test rides are easy to fake. The sharpest objection, because it attacks this article's own metric. A test ride costs the customer nothing, and staff under an OEM monthly target will log a service-lounge visitor or a casual browser to make a number. So the metric only works with the definition tightened in advance: a qualified test ride, with the prospect's own contact detail captured, a model and variant recorded, and a follow-up logged — and with the no-show and the test-ride-to-booking ratio reported alongside it. If test rides rise while bookings do not, the ride count is being manufactured, and that is the measurement telling you something true about the showroom rather than about the campaign. This is the same discipline that separates real from decorative lead generation.

One gap worth stating: there is no published, methodologically sound Indian benchmark for walk-in-to-test-ride or test-ride-to-booking conversion. Those sit inside dealer management systems and are not aggregated publicly. Build the baseline from your own outlets over three festive cycles.

What this looks like when Midgrow runs it

The first deliverable is the Shelf-Life Audit, and it is mostly a register: every live asset, every claim in it, which class the claim falls into, who owns it, and when it expires. For most dealership groups that surfaces at least one lapsed subsidy or exemption still running.

Then: range and mileage claims rebuilt with the certified figure labelled as certified and an honest usable range offered alongside, offline conversion import configured from the dealer management system with the June 2026 migration confirmed, store visits attempted and reported per outlet, Business Profile structure reviewed conservatively against the department and duplication rules, insurance and EMI creative checked for the conditions behind the number, and spend concentrated into the festive window with the slump used for asset building.

We report cost per qualified test ride and cost per retail, per outlet, with the no-show rate shown. We will also tell you when your own numbers say the ride count is being manufactured.

We are an AI-powered agency, and in this category the useful application is volume and vigilance: variant creative across models and outlets at festive pace, and automated checking of live assets against their expiry dates, which is exactly the kind of tedious monitoring that lets a lapsed claim survive for seven months. Not generated vehicle imagery, because a render of a variant you cannot deliver is a misleading advertisement with extra steps.

We are based in Indore, we work across regulated and high-consideration categories, and we handle adjacent energy and infrastructure clients where the same disclosure discipline applies. Social content and reporting run continuously underneath the seasonal spend.

If your EV creative still carries a Madhya Pradesh tax exemption, start there today.

Talk to us. Book a consultation or message us on WhatsApp at +91 7415603507. Bring your outlet list, your last festive season's enquiry-to-retail numbers and whatever creative is currently live. We will run the Shelf-Life Audit before proposing a budget.

This article summarises the regulatory and scheme position in general terms and is not legal advice. Subsidy, tax and insurance positions change by notification; confirm the current position with the relevant authority, your OEM and your sponsoring insurer before publishing any price.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Madhya Pradesh EV road tax exemption still available?

Under Notification No. 857/2320711/2024/VIII of 9 April 2025, the 100% motor vehicle tax exemption required registration by 26 March 2026 for electric two-wheelers, three-wheelers, cars up to ₹20 lakh and light commercial vehicles, and by 26 March 2027 for electric buses. The first four windows have closed under that notification. Confirm with the MP Transport Department whether any extension has been issued before advertising it.

What is the current PM E-DRIVE incentive for electric two-wheelers?

The scheme runs to 31 March 2028 with claims closing 31 December 2027, and the two-wheeler incentive is capped at the specified amount or 15% of ex-factory price, whichever is lower. The per-kWh amount is expressly subject to review and notified separately, so re-confirm the live rate rather than reusing a figure. Components also close early if funds are exhausted.

Can we advertise a subsidy on electric three-wheelers?

Not under the central scheme. The registered electric three-wheeler category has closed, because its target sales were achieved. Any three-wheeler incentive in your creative needs checking against the current notification.

Can we advertise the ARAI certified range?

Yes, labelled as what it is. It is a laboratory dynamometer figure measured on a prescribed drive cycle at controlled temperature with auxiliary loads minimised. Presenting it as guaranteed real-world range conceals a material limitation, and under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 a misleading advertisement attracts up to ₹10 lakh and two years for a first contravention. ASCI also requires that a disclaimer clarify a claim rather than contradict it.

Should our service centre have its own Google listing?

Possibly. Google requires a department's exact name and its most representative category to differ from the main business, and says departments typically have a separate customer entrance. There is no department-specific phone requirement. But only one profile per location is permitted, so three listings for one showroom floor risks suspension across the group.

How should we measure dealership marketing?

Cost per qualified test ride as the leading indicator and cost per retail as the governing metric, both per outlet, with no-show rate and test-ride-to-booking ratio reported alongside. Define "qualified" in writing before the campaign starts, since an unqualified ride count is trivially inflatable.

Why did our offline conversion tracking stop working?

Possibly the migration. From 15 June 2026 offline conversion imports and enhanced conversions for leads uploads moved to the Data Manager API and are blocked in the Google Ads API. An integration built before that date needs confirming.

Can we advertise an insurance-inclusive on-road price?

With care. A dealership arranging motor insurance operates under the IRDAI's Motor Insurance Service Provider framework, sponsored by an insurer or broker and bound by a code of conduct. Dealer remuneration now sits within the insurer's board-approved policy under the 2024 expenses-of-management regulations, so get your permitted position in writing from the insurer.