The Manesar-based ICAT (International Centre for Automotive Technology) and Hella today jointly took the initiative to speak on the high rate of road accident fatalities during the biennial International Symposium on Lighting (ISOL-2015), organised by ICAT. India has one of the highest road accident rates in the world and it is estimated there is one death every four minutes. This issue has strong relevance to the automotive Industry in general and the automotive lighting industry in particular, due to the safety criticality of lighting and signaling devices while driving on Indian roads.

Dr Michael Kleinkes, vice-president - Development Lighting Technology, Hella Germany and one of the key persons in bringing the latest and future lighting technologies in the automotive industry, presented his technical paper on ‘New Semiconductor Light sources (LED, OLED, Laser) – Future possibilities for Styling and Functionality’. It was followed by a panel discussion on ‘Losing light of life on Indian roads:  Let’s join hands together in arresting road accidents in dark hours’.

Ramashankar Pandey, managing director of Hella India Lighting, spoke on ‘Arresting the alarming road deaths involving Commercial Vehicles – is there a business case for safety in India?’ which was followed by a panel discussion. The panelists were of the view that education and individual behavioral change among automotive users has to form an integral part to make Indian roads safer. Engineering and regulations alone will not be enough and effective for such a massive problem at hand. Educating users and bringing urgency to this topic is a shared responsibility of the automobile and auto component industry. Key decision makers in the industry have to partner and pool resources needed for the same.

“The latest data about road accidents in India doesn’t show any decline and having one accident every minute means the country is losing approximately 3% of its GDP as economic loss. This situation is very critical and cannot be left unattended for long,” said Ramashankar Pandey.

The panellists agreed to initiate a scalable approach to promote road safety and focus on improving visibility on roads as a key measure to ensure safer roads in India. This doesn’t stop individual companies to focus on technology upgradation of lighting systems as a means to fight these accidents. They arrived at a consensus to work on bringing safety as a differentiator for their products and publicise safety as a USP and critical decision criteria for vehicle and component purchase.

One of the technology examples from Hella, shared during Ramashankar Pandey’s presentationwas about full LED tail-lamps developed and produced locally for trucks. These provide four metres of extra braking distance in an accidental situation due to their superior LED technology.