Every electric vehicle sold is one less catalytic converter needed, and that simple fact has led to plenty of predictions that the industry making them is on borrowed time. The picture on the ground is more complicated. In India especially, electric sales are growing quickly in some segments and barely moving in others, emission rules are about to tighten again, and several large vehicle categories have no practical electric option yet.

Catalytic converters will not disappear as EVs scale. Demand will shrink in segments that electrify fastest, such as three-wheelers and small city cars, while hybrids, CNG vehicles, trucks, buses, tractors, construction machinery and generator sets keep needing them for many years. At the same time, stricter norms like BS VII and Euro 7 are making each converter more demanding to build, so the industry shifts from high volume toward higher performance, more variants and tighter quality.

Where Electrification Actually Stands in India

Headlines about EV growth are accurate, and they can hide how unevenly it is spread across vehicle types.

Segment, FY 2025-26	Electric sales	What it means for catalysts
Two-wheelers	About 14 lakh, roughly 6.5 percent of the segment	More than 93 percent of two-wheelers sold still need a converter
Three-wheelers	About 8.3 lakh, around 61 percent of the segment	The segment shifting fastest away from engines
Passenger vehicles	About 2 lakh, up 84 percent	Strong growth from a small base; most cars sold still use engines
Commercial vehicles	About 19,600, up 122 percent	Diesel aftertreatment remains the norm for trucks and buses
All vehicles	About 24.5 lakh, 8.3 percent of sales	Roughly nine in ten new vehicles still burn fuel

Those figures, for FY 2025-26, show the real shape of the transition. Three-wheelers are already majority electric. Two-wheelers, by far the largest segment, are electrifying steadily but still sold more than 2 crore combustion models last year. Electric car sales nearly doubled but remain a small share of the market. And across all vehicles, more than nine in ten new purchases still need exhaust aftertreatment.

For converter manufacturers, that means demand from new vehicles is not falling off a cliff. It is being reshaped segment by segment, at very different speeds.

Emission Rules Are Getting Tougher, Not Easier

While electric sales rise, the vehicles that still burn fuel face stricter limits.

BS VII in India

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has said the draft of BS VII norms is expected soon, with the new standard broadly aligned to Euro 7 and adapted to Indian conditions. Reports indicate it will regulate emissions from CNG vehicles more strictly and monitor ammonia from light and heavy vehicles, alongside real-world emissions checking. Final timelines will depend on the published notification, but the direction is clear: combustion vehicles will need cleaner, longer-lasting aftertreatment.

Euro 7 in Europe

Euro 7 keeps tailpipe limits for cars broadly in line with Euro 6 but raises the bar elsewhere. Vehicles must meet the limits for much longer, around 10 years or 200,000 km, and onboard monitoring has to detect faults that would push emissions over the limit. For converter makers, the durability requirement matters most, because a catalyst that performs well when new but ages quickly no longer passes. Exporters supplying European vehicle makers feel this directly.

Fuel efficiency rules

India’s next corporate average fuel economy rules, CAFE III, are due from April 2027. Tighter fleet-wide carbon targets push manufacturers toward hybrids as well as EVs, which matters for catalysts, as the next section explains.

Hybrids Make the Job Harder, Not Easier

A hybrid still has an engine, and that engine still needs a catalytic converter. What changes is the conditions it works under.

In a hybrid, the engine switches off and on frequently, sometimes many times on a single trip. Each time it stops, the catalyst starts cooling. When the engine restarts, the converter may be below its working temperature, and emissions in those first moments are largely untreated. In a conventional car the engine warms the catalyst once and keeps it warm. In a hybrid, the cold start problem repeats throughout the drive.

That pushes catalyst design in specific directions: converters mounted closer to the engine so they heat faster, coatings that light off at lower temperatures, and in some vehicles electrically heated catalysts that use the hybrid’s battery to warm the brick before the engine starts. Each of these adds complexity and value to the converter rather than removing it.

In India, strong hybrids are gaining ground in the car market, particularly among buyers who want lower running costs without depending on charging infrastructure. Every one of them carries a catalytic converter, often a more sophisticated one than the vehicle it replaced.

Segments That Keep Their Converters

Application	Direction of travel	Catalyst outlook
Small cars and urban two-wheelers	Electrifying steadily, led by scooters and city cars	Declining over time, slowly in India
Hybrids	Growing in cars, especially where charging is limited	Still need catalysts, often more demanding ones
CNG vehicles	Large and growing fleet in Indian cities	Three-way catalysts with tougher methane duty
Trucks and buses	Electric buses rising; long-haul trucks mostly diesel	Full diesel aftertreatment for many years
Tractors, construction and gensets	Emission rules tightening	A growing aftertreatment market
Hydrogen engines	Early trials in heavy transport	Need NOx control such as SCR
Fuel cells	Early commercial use	Use platinum catalysts of a different kind

Trucks and buses

Electric buses are spreading quickly in Indian cities, helped by public procurement, and some urban delivery vehicles are going electric too. Long-haul trucking is different. Battery weight, charging time and the cost of heavy electric trucks keep diesel dominant for long-distance freight, and every BS VI diesel truck carries an oxidation catalyst, particulate filter and SCR system.

CNG vehicles

India has one of the larger CNG vehicle fleets in the world, from city cars and taxis to buses and light commercial vehicles. CNG engines use three-way catalysts, and treating their exhaust is harder than gasoline because methane is a stable gas that needs higher temperatures or more palladium to convert. Stricter CNG rules under BS VII would make these catalysts more demanding still.

Off-road machinery and generator sets

Tractors, construction equipment and diesel generator sets have historically faced lighter emission rules than road vehicles, and that is changing. As limits tighten for these machines, they move toward the same aftertreatment road vehicles already use. This is one of the few areas where catalyst demand is growing rather than holding steady.

Two-wheelers

Two-wheelers deserve their own mention because of sheer scale. India sold more than 2 crore of them in FY 2025-26, and over 93 percent still had engines. Electric scooters are gaining ground in cities, while motorcycles used for longer rides, rural travel and load carrying are electrifying more slowly. Most two-wheeler converters use compact metallic substrates, and even a gradual shift leaves a very large number of them needed each year for the foreseeable future.

The Vehicles Already on the Road

New vehicle sales are only part of the picture. India has hundreds of millions of combustion vehicles in use, and they will remain on the road for years after the last ones are sold.

Those vehicles create replacement demand as converters age, get damaged or fail inspections, and tighter in-use checking is likely to increase it. Real-world emissions monitoring, stricter pollution checks in cities and vehicle scrappage policy all push older, poorly performing vehicles toward either repair or retirement. Replacement demand tends to lag new-vehicle trends by many years, which cushions the industry as electric sales grow.

New Uses for Catalyst Technology

Some of the newest clean energy technologies still depend on catalysts.

None of these replaces automotive volumes on its own. Together, they show that catalyst coating skills remain useful even as the vehicle mix changes.

Precious Metals and Recycling

Catalytic converters use platinum, palladium and rhodium, and those metals are recovered when old converters are scrapped. As combustion vehicles retire over the coming decades, a large and steady supply of used converters will reach recyclers.

Two effects follow. Recycled metal reduces dependence on newly mined supply, which has historically been concentrated in a few countries and prone to sharp price swings. And India’s vehicle scrappage policy, which encourages older vehicles off the road, adds to the flow of converters available for recovery. Recycling is likely to become a bigger part of the catalyst economy as new-vehicle demand plateaus.

For manufacturers, precious metal prices remain the biggest cost risk. Using metal efficiently, applying exactly what the specification requires and no more, becomes even more important when volumes are under pressure.

What This Means for Manufacturers

The likely future is not a sudden collapse but a market that looks different from the one the industry was built for.

Flexibility Becomes the Key Investment

A coating line designed around one high-volume substrate size suited the industry when a few passenger car platforms dominated output. A market with more variants needs equipment that switches between substrate sizes, ceramic and metallic types, and coating recipes without long changeovers or large scrap at each switch.

Metallic substrates deserve particular mention. They are widely used in two-wheelers, the segment still making up the bulk of Indian vehicle sales, and they behave differently from ceramic during coating. How the two substrate types compare is covered in the article on catalytic converter substrates.

Automation helps here in two ways. Recipe-based control lets a line move between products with settings loaded rather than adjusted by hand, and data captured against each part makes it easier to prove that a small batch of a new variant was made correctly. Both matter more in a fragmented market than in a high-volume one.

Questions Worth Asking Now

For a manufacturer planning the next five to ten years, a few practical questions help turn the trends into decisions. Which customers and segments make up current volume, and how quickly is each one likely to electrify? How long does a changeover take today, and what would it cost if product variants doubled? How much precious metal is lost to overcoating across a year? And could today’s records show, years from now, exactly how a given part was made?

A Realistic Timeline

Over the next five years, Indian catalyst demand is likely to hold up better than global averages, supported by a large combustion two-wheeler market, growing hybrids, CNG fleets and tightening rules for trucks and machinery. Over ten years, passenger car and two-wheeler demand will decline as electric shares rise, while heavy vehicles, off-road machinery and industrial uses carry more of the market. Beyond that, the industry’s shape will depend on how quickly heavy transport finds practical alternatives to diesel.

Throughout, the converters that are built will be more demanding than today’s. The industry that remains will be smaller in unit terms than at its peak, and more technical.

Coating Lines from Cybernetik

Cybernetik builds substrate coating systems for heavy truck, passenger car and motorcycle catalytic converters, which covers the segments that will carry catalyst demand through the transition.

Several features suit a market with more variants and tighter requirements:

Projects are delivered by one team through design, factory acceptance testing, installation and commissioning, with lines engineered around the products a plant actually makes.

Frequently asked questions