How Cars24 Earned Authorised Dealer Status for Deemed Ownership Across India

For the first three essays I stayed mostly off Cars24 on purpose. The problem of post-sale liability, the 2022 law meant to fix it, the mechanism of deemed ownership — those stand on their own, regardless of who is writing about them.

This piece is different. This one is about what we have actually been doing, because we have been working on this problem for years, mostly out of public view, and the account of that work — including the parts where our own fixes were not good enough — is worth putting down.

Let me start with an admission.

What is Seller Kavach and what does it cover?

For a long time, our answer to the RC transfer problem was to throw our own muscle at it. When you sell a car to us, we manage the transfer with the RTO directly, rather than leaving you to chase it. We built a seller protection product, Kavach, that covers you during the transition period, from the moment you hand over the car until the transfer completes. The idea was to absorb the risk the system left sitting on the seller.

Seller Kavach is Cars24's seller protection policy that covers the seller from the moment of car handover until the RC transfer completes. It shields the seller from challans, accident claims, police queries, and legal liability during the interim period. Kavach includes free legal support if issues arise. For a nominal one-time fee, the seller is protected against any violation, complaint, or legal issue that surfaces after the sale.

That was a stopgap. A well-intentioned one, built because the law that should have protected our sellers was not being implemented on the ground, so we built private scaffolding to stand in for public infrastructure that did not yet work.

A stopgap has limits. Protecting a seller from the consequences of a delayed transfer is not the same as removing the delay. We were managing the symptom well. We were not curing the disease. As long as the underlying RC transfer still depended on a slow, manual, state-by-state process, we were always going to be running to stay in place — covering the gap rather than closing it.

The numbers told us so. Sellers still wrote to us. The tickets still came — roughly 40% of all our support volume, the same anxious question about a car someone thought they had finished selling. The message was hard to miss: at some point you have to change the structure itself, not keep padding it.

So we went and worked on the structure itself. Two ways at once.

How did Cars24 engage with MoRTH on deemed ownership reform?

The deemed ownership framework existed in national law from December 2022. The problem was never the rule. The problem was that almost no state had implemented it, the entry barriers were high, and several critical pieces were missing.

So we did the slow, boring thing. We engaged — state by state, ministry by ministry, RTO by RTO — to move this from a gazette notification toward something a seller could actually use.

That meant formal submissions to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways on the specific blockers: the GST prerequisite that excludes small dealers, the absence of a dealer-to-dealer transfer mechanism, the inconsistent interpretation of a dealer's powers, the lack of interstate form generation, and the need for time-bound state adoption. It meant working with the people who run VAHAN on how these processes get digitised. It meant going to individual state transport commissioners and, in several cases, helping the RTO itself develop the process for operationalising a framework that existed on paper but had never been run there.

Where this has landed deserves precision, not spin. The Ministry has engaged, and has drafted amendments to strengthen the framework, based on industry recommendations including ours — drafts that are working toward public consultation. That is real progress and it is also not finished law. Better to tell you exactly where it stands than dress it up.

The part I am genuinely proud of is not the policy engagement. It is the ground game.

Where is Cars24 registered as an authorised dealer in India?

While the national framework was being debated, we were not willing to wait for uniform adoption to protect the sellers selling to us now. So we earned authorised-dealer registrations state by state, the hard way.

This is tedious, deeply unglamorous work, and it deserves to be named because it is exactly the kind of work that never shows up in a keynote. It is months of local liaisoning. It is helping an RTO that has never processed a deemed-ownership registration figure out how to process one. It is physical inspections, document verification, follow-up after follow-up.

Key milestones in Cars24's deemed ownership journey:
 

• First authorised used-car dealer registered in Gurgaon and all of NCR.
• First authorised used-car dealer in the city of Mumbai.
• Registrations now covering states responsible for more than half of all cars Cars24 procures nationally.
• Largest remaining states in active pipeline.

None of that came from a strategy deck. It came from people on the ground being relentless on the follow-through, in offices most people building a tech company would never set foot in. The credit for that is theirs, not mine.

How does deemed ownership plus Seller Kavach protect car sellers at Cars24?

Put the two tracks together and something becomes possible that was not before.

In a meaningful and growing set of states, we can now do what no one in India has credibly offered: take a car from a seller and have their liability genuinely end at handover. Not managed, not cushioned by a protection product — ended, because we have become the deemed owner under a framework we spent years helping make real on the ground.

That is a different thing from the stopgap we started with. The stopgap protected you from the consequences of the gap. This closes the gap. One is insurance against a broken process. The other is a fixed process. We spent years on the first because we had to. We are able to do the second now because the ground-level work finally compounded.

The honest shape of it

The truth is more useful than the polished version, so here is the truth.

This was not a master plan executed flawlessly. It was years of doing a slightly-better-than-adequate job at managing a problem we could not fully solve, while grinding away at the structural fix in the background, with no guarantee the structural fix would ever land. For a long time it looked like a lot of effort for a framework that most states were ignoring. The pieces only started clicking into place recently, and fast — licences earned over years suddenly compounding into something we could offer at scale.

That is usually how these things go. Structural problems do not yield to clever products. They yield to years of quiet, compounding, ground-level work — policy submissions nobody sees, RTO meetings nobody attends, registrations earned one state at a time — until the accumulated work crosses a line and a thing that was impossible becomes routine. It took years longer than anyone wanted. Then it clicked all at once.

We are at that line now. What it actually takes to deliver on it — every check that has to clear before a transfer can happen — is the next piece. And why we were willing to take the heaviest part of this, the legal liability itself, onto our own books rather than leave it with our sellers, is the one after that.

The one-line summary of years of work: we spent years protecting our sellers from a broken system, and those same years quietly helping fix the system itself. The second one is the part that matters. And it is finally real.