L&T Technology Services, the Mumbai- based engineering and R&D (ER&D) company which offers its services to the automotive and other sectors has been approached by a leading European customer for securing its sedan models of a certain year and make. This is because the company is concerned about the likelihood of its GPS getting hacked.

The demand related to cybersecurity of vehicles has been witnessing a rising trend, which was not visible even until two financial quarters ago, the company top leadership claimed. The company did not divulge the name of its customer, apparently on account of confidentiality clauses. 

In an investor call, Amit Chadha, CEO, L&T Technology Solutions did not mention the company concerned. He limited his comments to "There is a certain customer I have. He's actually pulled us in and expanded.  And these are not huge teams that you expand with. But there are high calibre people that are working with one of our clients on a certain model year and model of sedans of a European customer, who says that “I feel that these sets of sedans will get hacked and somebody will come in and create problems on the GPS system".

The development should be seen in context of several industry estimates suggesting that the automotive cybersecurity market is expected to jump to nearly $28.7 billion by 2030 from just about $6.2 billion in 2021, at a CAGR exceeding 18.6 percent during this period.

Amongst other key industry trends where the auto industry is putting their money, Chadha said is in the e-mobility d, though not the pure electric but hybrid ones. The development may come as a surprise to many in the Indian automotive industry including the Government which has been clear in its intentions right from the start in promoting pure electric vehicles instead of hybrids. It is worth mentioning that in a recent draft, Haryana has proposed sops for hybrids. Further, there are also rising trends for V2X technologies, which in layman's language translates to real time information exchange between the vehicles, related infrastructure and the cloud systems, aspects that pertain significantly to making driving safer and more efficient.