The future of the automobile is electric, connected and autonomous, even in India, predict experts

The world over, the focus on autonomous vehicles and the need for alternative fuels is pushing the automotive industry to develop cutting-edge innovations. Although companies are investing heavily to make these technologies relevant today, there are pertinent issues to address before these modern innovations become part of our daily life.

Considering that autonomous vehicles are a lot closer to real-worldliness than anticipated earlier, key industry specialists, who participated in a NASSCOM-Autocar Professional round-table discussion, on the sidelines of the 8^th NASSCOM Engineering Conference held in Bangalore on October 6, are of the opinion that the future is going to be much more exciting on the automotive technology front. And it will primarily be driven by electric, connected and autonomous trends.   

The theme for the round table debate was a pertinent one – ‘Building Capabilities for Connected Vehicles in India’ and the panelists comprised Vijay Ratnaparkhe, MD, Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions; Anup Sable, CTO, KPIT Technologies; Samir Yajnik, president, Global Delivery and COO APAC, Tata Technologies; and Gyana Bardhan Pattanaik, global head, Embedded Horizontal Group, L&T Technology Services. The discussion was moderated by Sumantra B Barooah, associate editor, Autocar Professional.

A US$ 22 billion opportunity

In his opening remarks, and speaking on the increasing growing computing power in cars, Sameer Yajnik of Tata Technologies said, “Globally, engineering R&D is a $22 billion opportunity today which will grow to $35 billion. This is likely to double by 2025 with the IoT wave; the majority constitutes automotive which is related to connected cars.”

According to Anup Sable of KPIT, there are nearly 100 microcontrollers and close to 100 million lines of software codes in high-end cars today. This is going increase significantly as the world moves closer to autonomous and connected vehicles.

Elaborating this further, Vijay Ratnaparkhe of Bosch said, “Two decades ago, there was hardly any electronics in cars. Today, when a consumer pays for a car, virtually 30% of the cost is for electronics and software. Day by day, the software part is increasing and the differentiation of Tier 1 suppliers is coming in software and not much in hardware or electronics.”

Highlighting a point about the growing software content in cars, Pattanaik from L&T said, “We are working on an infotainment project which has nearly 80 million software codes and one which will go for production in 2018-19.”  This underlines the fact that vehicles are increasingly getting complex and have becoming a moving computer.

According to estimates on an infotainment program, around 800-1,000 engineers work for 2-3 years to create a platform –staggering from the autonomous vehicle perspective. Currently, Indian companies are getting involved in the development of architecture for vehicle-to-vehicle (VtoV) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (VtoI) systems in a bid to deliver a better customer experience.

Speaking on the level of connectivity in Indian vehicles in the next 5-10 years, Sable said, “Five years from now, connectivity will percolate down to the entry level cars and the platform cost will reduce too. Further, competition will drive development of interesting models and the overall cost will shrink, whereby the consumer pays less."

Tata Technologies’ Samir Yajnik said in connected cars there will be a level of autonomy and with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems or ADAS, there is a combination which will go into play. Before level four, which will be full autonomous, level three will have some control with the driver. He predicts that India could see level three of autonomous driving in the no-so-distant future. 

However, Ratnaparkhe said, when it comes to fully connected cars, a lot depends also on the psychological perspective of an individual about when is he/she ready to give up control as there are security and safety angles involved.  

The panellists were of the view that, given the development of the autonomous vehicle market today, start-ups clearly have the advantage compared to established Tier 1 suppliers and OEMs, who carry a lot of baggage as they cannot easily let go of already-developed platforms. Start-ups have the luxury to look at mobility afresh.

India to take lead in connected two-wheelers

There was consensus among the panellists that the best of innovation on connected two-wheelers will come from India simply because the centre of gravity of the global two-wheeler market is India. This is more so, given the fact that two-wheeler development platform cycles are shorter and lend themselves to disruption cycles much faster compared to passenger cars.

Similarly, the amount of infotainment going into the two-wheelers is no less than cars, though the premise is different. In the near future, there will a lot of connectivity opportunities including OBD (on-board diagnostics), helmets, immobilisers and telematics.

There was a point of view that India, to some extent, is lacking in innovation due to the absence of a connected eco-system which is not upgraded technologically. However, this has already started happening and India will see mobility sharing entering in the two-wheeler field as well.

Commenting on the fundamental point that why do people commute, Bosch’s Ratnaparkhe said, essentially people commute to communicate and given that they are so connected, there will be a time when they will hardly commute and mobility sharing will bring about a disruption in traffic. Seconding Ratnaparkhe, KPIT Technologies’ Sable said nearly 20% of the on-road car parc will decline if there is a reasonably practical transport model in place.

On the question of growing connectivity and the Internet of Things (IoT) into the automotive industry and the impact this have on the growth of the industry, all the panellists were of the opinion that the mobility industry will increase as people will opt for shorter commutes with multiple modes.

As regards progress of driverless vehicles in India, the four speakers were of the view that it’s already started and likely to come much faster that one would expect. Electrification of public transport is around the corner and will be affordable too given a faster payback from 10 years of vehicle life and 250km of average running a day.