Multimodal solutions fuel efficiency and sustainability in auto supply
18 Sep 2025 | 2609 Views | By Shahkar Abidi
The call came just as the Lunar New Year festivities were at their peak across China's industrial heartland. In Pune's auto hub, production managers at a leading OEM were staring at empty assembly lines. The math was brutal: 800 vehicles needed to roll off the line, but the 160 MT ...
This is an Autocar Pro Plus article. Subscribe to continue reading.
The call came just as the Lunar New Year festivities were at their peak across China's industrial heartland. In Pune's auto hub, production managers at a leading OEM were staring at empty assembly lines. The math was brutal: 800 vehicles needed to roll off the line, but the 160 MT lithium-ion batteries that powered them were stranded 4,000 kilometers away in Wuhan, locked behind holiday shutdowns and bureaucratic red tape.
The potential loss stood at Rs 104 crores and the timeline was impossibly tight.
This is when Jayant Athawade’s phone rang. He is the Senior Director – Automotive Sector, Subcontinent, DP World. Within 48 hours, his team had chartered a cargo aircraft, navigating Chinese customs during a national holiday to move battery cells from Wuhan to Hong Kong to Mumbai to Pune in just four days.
DP World's team in China worked directly with battery manufacturers, expediting documentation, while their Mumbai counterparts secured air charter permits and coordinated with airport authorities. When the massive shipment—97 tons in a single lot, the largest lithium-ion consignment Mumbai had ever received—touched down, DP World's ground crew completed deconsolidation in eight hours instead of the usual twelve to fourteen, shaving lprecious time off an already compressed timeline.
Soon, trucks were rolling through the OEM’s industrial gates, their cargo holds packed with the power cells that would keep production humming. “With the delivery of the 100 MT batteries, we mitigated a loss of Rs 65 crore,” recalled Athawade.
In another instance, for a leading tyre manufacturing company located in Southern India, a different kind of logistical challenge was unfolding—one measured not in days, but in decades of inefficiency. Every morning, the tyre manufacturer’s five production facilities would dispatch 200 trucks northward, carrying their rubber cargo to distribution centers scattered across India’s heartland. The convoy was impressive in scale but dispiriting in its waste: each truck burned diesel, emitted CO₂, and required coordination with multiple vendors in a choreography that was both expensive and environmentally destructive.
The solution DP World proposed was simple. Instead of 200 individual trucks making 200 individual journeys, why not rethink the entire system? The company’s engineers designed a multimodal network that would transform the tyre manufacturer’s supply chain into something resembling a well-oiled machine rather than a daily traffic jam. Containers replaced traditional trucks, immediately increasing cargo capacity and reducing the number of trips required. But the real change lay in the route itself: coastal shipping would carry the containers along India’s seaboard, rail networks would handle the inland journey, and trucks would be relegated to first- and last-mile delivery, the segments where their flexibility mattered most and their inefficiencies caused the least damage.
The results spoke in the language corporate executives understand best: a 17% reduction in trips and a 50% cut in CO₂ emissions, all while eliminating the headache of managing multiple vendors.
These case studies highlight something larger about how modern supply chains actually work—or fail to work—in an interconnected world where a factory closure in Wuhan can shut down production lines in Pune, and where the efficiency gains of a single logistics redesign can ripple through an OEM’s cost and environmental goals.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. India is on track to become the world’s third-largest automotive market, a transformation that reflects both the country’s growing domestic demand and its emergence as a global manufacturing hub. Indian customers have become as discerning as their Western counterparts, pushing original equipment manufacturers to design India-specific vehicles for both domestic sales and export.
This evolution has created supply chains of staggering complexity. A single vehicle might incorporate components sourced locally, battery packs imported from China, and raw materials shipped from across the globe—all converging on assembly lines that operate with minimal inventory buffers. Any disruption—like a port strike, customs delay, or factory shutdown—can cascade through the entire system. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent supply chain disruptions have made resilience a boardroom priority. The semiconductor shortage alone caused a 10 million vehicle production loss globally in 2021–22, teaching automotive executives that efficiency without resilience is a false economy.
In this environment, disruption isn’t an exception—it’s the baseline. Whether it’s rare-earth shortages from geopolitical tensions, container backlogs from regional conflicts, or the sheer complexity of managing supply chains that span continents and time zones, the ability to absorb shocks and maintain operations has become a core competency. Nearly a quarter of Asia-Pacific business leaders have already begun strengthening regional sourcing to reduce dependence on external markets, according to the Economist Impact Trade in Transition 2025 report. But regionalization isn’t just about geography; it’s about building supply chains that function as integrated systems rather than collections of independent parts.
According to Athawade, the regulatory landscape in India is evolving rapidly, with government initiatives promoting logistics parks, multimodal corridors, and digital freight platforms. Sustainability has moved from corporate social responsibility to operational imperative, driven by both regulation and customer demand. As India’s automotive sector shifts toward electric vehicles, supply chains must adapt to handle temperature-sensitive battery components, new safety protocols, and the regulatory requirements of an emerging technology ecosystem. Furthermore, India’s efforts to reduce its average logistics cost to make it globally competitive have added another important dimension.
DP World’s strategy, Athawade says, for the next five years reflects this complexity. Rather than treating automotive as a monolithic sector, the company segments it into distinct categories: original equipment manufacturers, component suppliers, tyre manufacturers, and electric vehicle companies—each with different requirements for speed, cost, and reliability. For tyre manufacturers, scale and cost efficiency remain paramount. For traditional OEMs, network reach and delivery quality matter more than rock-bottom prices. For electric vehicle companies, the priorities shift again: battery-safe infrastructure, temperature control, and regulatory compliance become critical success factors.
DP World claims that it has built its Indian operations around a philosophy that runs counter to the “asset-light” models favored by many logistics companies. Instead of coordinating between disconnected vendors, DP World owns the infrastructure: five container terminals handling a quarter of India’s export-import container traffic with a total installed capacity of 6 million TEUs per annum, three free trade warehousing zones, 5 million square feet of storage space. It also boasts an express logistics network covering 15,000 pin codes and advanced freight forwarding expertise. It is also one of the largest private rail freight operators in India, with 16,000+ owned containers and seven inland rail terminals.
This asset-heavy approach means that when a crisis strikes—whether it’s a Red Sea shipping bottleneck or a semiconductor shortage—players like DP World can pivot without negotiating with third parties. Athawade illustrates this with another example. When one OEM’s containers were stuck in South Africa’s congested Durban port for 14 days, DP World’s local team simply rerouted the cargo to Maputo, cutting delays to just two days. Such flexibility requires global reach and local expertise—the kind of coordination that’s only possible when you own the chessboard, not just a few pieces on it.
The modern automotive supply chain is increasingly about information as much as physical movement. The digital connectivity of the entire ecosystem allows customers to book freight, compare rates, track containers across multiple modes of transport, and monitor inventory, all from a single dashboard. But the real innovation lies in how this digital integration changes the fundamental economics of manufacturing, says the top executive.
Consider a customer whose raw material deliveries consistently outpaced production capacity, forcing them to maintain expensive on-site storage. Athawade remarked that the solution they offered was counterintuitive: instead of speeding up delivery, they slowed it down, routing materials through a multimodal network that used coastal shipping and rail for the bulk journey. The slightly longer transit time transformed the shipping process itself into a virtual warehouse, with materials “on wheels” rather than sitting in expensive static storage. The customer saved on warehousing costs while improving working capital efficiency.
Engaging automotive manufacturers from the earliest stages of their investment and production lifecycles proves to be the most effective strategy for fortifying supply chains, according to Jayant Athawade. This proactive approach, he argues, is crucial for building resilience in an increasingly volatile market. For example, when an Indian original equipment manufacturer (OEM) or a supplier contemplates a new plant, it becomes important for them to enter these discussions with their logistical planners at the ideation phase. Such early collaboration enables co-design of the entire supply chain, addressing fundamental questions from the outset: identifying the most suitable port, assessing the necessity of a Free Trade Zone for efficient import staging, and determining the optimal mix of multimodal transport—be it rail, road, or coastal shipping—to balance cost and speed.
In an era where geopolitical tensions and supply disruptions define the automotive landscape, adopting resilient multimodal logistics strategies is essential for the industry to enhance efficiency, reduce environmental impact, and build adaptive supply chains that thrive amid uncertainty.