Kinetic Engineering is a fifty-year-old Indian automotive story that rewrote its own ending - twice. It began in the 1970s as an iconic two-wheeler maker, giving India the Luna moped and the country’s first gearless scooter, before making a hard pivot around 2009 from building complete vehicles to manufacturing the precision metal parts inside them. That shift turned a loss-making vehicle manufacturer into a profitable auto-component supplier, and the company has since added a second act by returning to vehicle manufacturing through a subsidiary that now makes an electric scooter bearing the same Kinetic DX name it made famous decades ago. The recurring approach is vertical integration - forging raw metal in-house, cutting gears on its own CNC machines, and assembling finished gearboxes and chassis under one roof - which lets it promise development cycles of 30 to 40 days against an industry norm of four to six months.
Business segments
Three engines at different stages - a transmission-and-driveline cash cow, an electric-vehicle components business feeding the green transition, and a consumer electric-scooter bet built on the group’s shared battery and electronics capabilities.
1. Transmission and driveline components: the precision metal parts that keep vehicles moving
KEL makes the gears, shafts and yokes that transmit power from an engine to the wheels, and it does it faster and with less wasted metal than most rivals.
- Complete gearboxes, not just loose gears - the company’s core niche is manufacturing entire constant-mesh gearboxes for commercial vehicles, alongside planet gears, sun shafts, shifter sleeves and knuckle assemblies for cars, tractors and two-wheelers. These two verticals together brought in over 80% of sales in the most recent year.
- Forged in-house, finished in days - KEL starts with its own forgings, achieving a 65% material yield compared with an industry norm of 60-62%, and moves from raw forging to finished goods in about seven days, roughly half the typical 15-20 day cycle. Export orders turn around in about four days.
- A dedicated factory line for a single customer - the company built an exclusive, epoxy-floored shed with dedicated CNC machines in Ahmednagar solely to produce high-quality gears and shafts for Mahindra & Mahindra, showing how deeply it embeds itself in a large OEM’s supply chain.
- Mistake-proofed and tested under load - on its driveline products, KEL uses poka-yoke (error-proofing) systems on spline-yoke machines and has developed an in-house end-of-line test that simulates vehicle-like loads to check deceleration before parts leave the factory.
2. EV components: the electric transition, supplied from Ahmednagar
KEL makes the axles, gearboxes, chassis and body frames that electric two- and three-wheeler manufacturers need, often bundling them into a single kit.
- A complete powertrain kit from one supplier - the company developed the “Kinetic Josh kit,” which combines a motor, axle, gearbox and controller into a single solution for electric-rickshaw and e-auto makers, so an OEM can buy one integrated package instead of sourcing four separate parts.
- Import-substitute axles and transaxles - KEL has engineered a single-speed transaxle with a 1:10 ratio at 5.5 kW and a two-speed rigid axle with gearbox for electric three- and four-wheelers, products it describes as replacing imports with 100% Indian-made alternatives.
- The E-Luna’s skeleton comes from here - KEL set up a dedicated production line with over 30 welding machines to supply the main chassis, side stand, swing arm and other fully painted and coated frames for the electric Luna moped, starting at an initial capacity of 5,000 sets per month. It invested more than Rs 3 crore upgrading its paint and fabrication shops to meet that order.
- Robotic welding for scooter chassis - the company uses a robotic welding approach for its scooter frames, a method that improves consistency and speed in the body parts it supplies for electric two-wheelers.
3. Kinetic Watts & Volts: the electric scooter with the family name on it
KEL’s subsidiary has put the historic Kinetic DX badge onto a new electric scooter, assembling it from components made by sister companies across the group.
- A scooter built by the family ecosystem - the DX electric scooter integrates mechanical parts from KEL, electrical systems and controllers from Kinetic Communications Ltd, and LFP batteries from Micro Age Instruments under the Range-X brand, so the vehicle is effectively a group-wide collaboration.
- A battery designed for Indian heat and long life - the scooter uses a 2.6 kWh LFP (lithium iron phosphate) battery rated for 2,500 to over 3,500 charge cycles, roughly four times the cycle life of typical NMC batteries, with better thermal sensitivity suited to Indian conditions and a 0-100% charge time of four hours.
- Twenty showrooms and a connected scooter - KWVL had established 20 dealerships across seven states by early 2026 and partnered with Jio Things Limited to add voice-assisted controls, IoT-powered digital instrument clusters, and cloud-based diagnostics to the scooter, turning it into a connected device on two wheels.
- Over Rs 72 crore invested, with more pledged - the subsidiary has absorbed more than Rs 72 crore in investment to build an 87,000-square-foot plant with a 55-metre assembly line, robotic welding and battery-pack assembly, and promoters have pledged an additional Rs 177 crore in KEL, with a significant portion dedicated to scaling up the DX platform.
Group structure and partners
KEL sits at the centre of a family-controlled group where each company makes a different piece of the electric-vehicle puzzle, and the scooter subsidiary draws on all of them.
- Kinetic Engineering Ltd (KEL) is the listed parent, manufacturing transmission, driveline and EV components from its 50-plus-acre Ahmednagar plant, and it held an 84.7% stake in Kinetic Watts & Volts Ltd. as of the latest filing.
- Kinetic Watts & Volts Ltd (KWVL) is the electric-two-wheeler subsidiary, incorporated in September 2022, which KEL has repeatedly recapitalised - its stake has moved from over 92% at incorporation down to about 62% after a battery-company investment and back up to nearly 85% through subsequent infusions.
- Kinetic Communications Ltd (KCL), in which KEL holds a tiny 0.3% stake, makes the BLDC hub motors, frame-mounted motors, controllers and touchscreen display clusters that go into the group’s electric vehicles from its Pune facility.
- Micro Age Instruments Pvt Ltd (MAIPL), in which KEL holds 24.9%, recently commissioned a battery plant in Ahmednagar with an annual capacity of 60,000 units under the Range-X brand, producing LFP and NMC batteries with IoT-enabled quality checks and AIS 156 compliance.
- The Firodia family promoters have steadily raised their shareholding from 49% to 61% over five years and infused Rs 160 crore through warrants, with a portion converted into equity by early 2026.