Introducing India’s First Lifetime Warranty

When I was younger, my grandfather never asked how new something was. He asked one question instead: “What happens if something goes wrong?” 

That question is the reason I am writing this blogpost now. 

He kept an old scooter for years. It was not flashy. It was dependable. More importantly, if it broke, he knew who would fix it and how it would be handled. He disliked choices that left you stranded later.

Today, Cars24 is introducing India’s first Lifetime Warranty on cars: coverage on engine, transmission and drivetrain for up to 12 years or 1,50,000 kilometres. Put simply, if the mechanical heart of the car fails during the meaningful life of the vehicle, the company that sold it will stand with you.

When we were discussing internally I was asked, why lifetime? I am sure you have this thought too. Because the real risk in used cars does not live in the first six months. Serious failures show up over years. Engines and transmissions reveal their problems across miles and seasons, not across a few paperwork months. If confidence in a car is genuine, it should extend into the period where risk is real.

In India, a car is daily infrastructure. It takes children to school, gets people to work, carries family responsibilities. Roads, weather and traffic are not gentle on machinery. That makes durability practical, not aspirational. A lifetime promise changes how a person plans and how a household treats the car. It converts a purchase from a risky bet into a long-term, usable asset.

Our decision to make this bold move came from selection. At Cars24, a large number of cars never make it to the platform because long-term mechanical behaviour does not meet the standard. The filters are built on real performance data: how certain engines behave after 8–10 years, how specific transmission combinations respond to Indian driving patterns, where recurring failures appear. The cars that pass these filters are the ones I am personally comfortable owning and recommending to my family.

Offering lifetime required operational changes. Inspection protocols had to be deeper. Repair partnerships had to be reliable and auditable. Pricing and reserves had to reflect real-world failure models. None of that is visible to a buyer at the moment of sale, but it is essential for the promise to mean something years later. If a warranty is easy to give, it will be easy to break. This one is not easy to give and that is deliberate.

Lifetime does not mean denial of reality. Mechanical parts wear and some failures are the result of accidents or misuse. Lifetime means this: within the reasonable working life of the car, if a covered mechanical failure occurs, Cars24 will accept responsibility for remediation. The aim is not to create paperwork friction but to remove the quiet anxiety that follows so many used car purchases.

A lifetime commitment works best when both sides take the relationship seriously. When you take care of the car and we stand behind its core systems, ownership becomes stable and predictable.

For customers, this changes behaviour. You no longer have to mentally discount the value of a used car for future catastrophic risk. For the company, it forces discipline in selection, inspection and repair. It aligns incentives. If the backing is real, the company has to make sure the cars listed deserve that backing.

My grandfather cared about one practical thing, that a decision should not leave a person stranded later. This warranty is my way of answering that question for anyone choosing a used car through Cars24. If something goes wrong in the parts that matter, you will not be on your own.