By- Vikram Chopra, Builder, Cars24
Can an industry built and run by men for decades be led by women just as well, if not better?
The result is in. It can.
Last month we launched India’s first all-women automotive hub at DLF South Court, Saket, Delhi. The idea was simple: every Car Advisor, Ops Manager, Hub Head: all women. Sales, operations, financing, everything, owned entirely by an all-women team, held to the exact same standards as every other hub we run. We let it run for a month and looked at the numbers.
The hub outperformed every other hub we have in Delhi NCR. Not some of them. All of them.
To understand why this matters, you need to understand what the auto industry actually looks like.
Walk into any car showroom in this country and tell me what you see. Who’s on the floor. Who’s behind the finance desk. Who’s closing the deal. I have spent my career building in this space, and the picture has never been good enough. Earlier this year I put out a post: Cars24 has 6,803 people, 951 of them women, and not a single woman at director level. I said it publicly because I think leaders should be uncomfortable enough to say these things out loud.
But saying it is the easy part. What do you actually do about it?
This hub is one of our answers and I think it’s an answer the whole industry needs to pay attention to, not just us.
I have a theory on why they won.
Car buying in India is high-pressure and has always felt that way. When you change who’s on the floor, the entire dynamic of that interaction shifts. Customers walk in differently. The conversation is different. The experience becomes less transactional, and people trust it more. All customers, not just women.
And a team that knows it’s making history works like it. That motivation is real, and it showed.
This hub runs to exactly the same standards as every other Cars24 hub. Same targets, same processes, same accountability. The women here weren’t chosen to fill a quota, they were chosen because they were ready and capable. The only thing we did differently was make sure they weren’t the exception on the floor. We made them the norm.
There is no man sharing the floor with them or handing anything off to them when it gets hard. They own the whole thing: every negotiation, every delivery, every customer who walks in, every close. That’s what we meant by a pilot. Not a gesture, but a real test run under real conditions against every other hub in one of our most competitive markets.
They didn’t just pass the test. They topped the region. Today, this hub alone is selling 100+ cars in a month with a 55% financing penetration.
That tells me something I want every auto company in this country to sit with: the reason women aren’t on the floor isn’t capability. It’s that nobody gave them the floor.
This idea came from the men in our team. They saw the gap, pushed for it, built it. I said yes. I should have said yes sooner. But it matters that the men in this company wanted this as much as anyone, because change at this scale doesn’t happen when only women are asking for it.
We are expanding to Mumbai and Bengaluru next. We want women mechanics in these hubs.
But our long term goal is to make an initiative like this unnecessary. To reach a point where women leading in automotive operations is the norm and not the news. One hub in Saket is not the point. What Saket proved is the point. And we intend to take that proof as far as it can go.