Mahindra Puts AI on Board its New Heavy Truck and Keeps it Off the Cloud

Mahindra & Mahindra has put a machine-learning chip inside its new heavy truck that chooses the engine's power mode without the driver touching anything and, in a deliberate design choice, has kept the computation off the cloud.

The BLAZO i-TRK range, launched here on August 14, is built around what Mahindra bills as India's first AI-enabled automatic drive mode in the heavy commercial vehicle segment, with the computation running on a chip in the vehicle rather than in the cloud. A GPS antenna feeds the on-board processor real-time road and gradient data. A machine-learning model infers the vehicle's load. Three further inputs: accelerator pedal position, engine speed and selected gear are layered on, alongside parameters the company declined to disclose.

The system then shifts the engine between low, medium and turbo modes on its own.

That distinction matters commercially. Mahindra brought three-mode power selection to Indian trucking with the Blazo series at the 2016 Auto Expo, pairing its mPOWER CRDe engine with light, heavy and turbo switches the driver operated by hand.

"In industry, we were the first one to launch FuelSmart," Sahay said. "Three engine mode, we were the first ones to do it." Rivals followed, he said: "It was earlier a manual switch, which most players copied."

The saving, however, depended on the driver reaching for the switch at the right moment.

"But then the customer feedback came that you have provided a very good solution," Sahay said. "But the driver is not switching at the right time."

The company has held a fuel-efficiency guarantee in the market since the Blazo's 2016 launch, and Sahay claims it remains the only one of its kind. "If my truck gives lower fuel mileage in any application, or any like-to-like application and tonnage, than anyone else's truck, I will take their truck back," he said. The proposition stuck, he said — but it ran into a ceiling.

"There are customers who said you have the best fuel efficiency but the delta is very narrow for me to switch," Sahay said. "We are saying in a 2,000-kilometer trip, if your truck saves 10 to 15 liters of diesel, it's not lucrative enough."

The headline profit figure rests on the top of that range rather than the middle of it. "Ten percent better fuel efficiency in heavy truck, which on an average flies one lakh kilometers in a year, at the current diesel price translates into 15 lakh rupees in five years," Sahay said.

His pitch to fleet buyers is arithmetical: "If you buy three Blazo, it will earn another Blazo free of cost."

Learning on the Route

Because inference runs in the vehicle rather than in a data center, the model improves through data collected when trucks return to the workshop.

"The more data we have, the machine becomes that much smarter," Sahay said. He put numbers to it, using the Khandala ghat section on the Mumbai-Pune corridor as his example: a model taking five seconds to switch today will, after five months on the same route, do it in milliseconds.

"That's the power of learning," he said.

Mahindra says the technology is protected by intellectual property, and Sahay called it an industry gold standard. "People will not find it easy to copy it anytime soon," he said.

The company also chose not to make mode selection remotely controllable by fleet operators, on the view that an office-based manager cannot read road conditions in real time.

"Remotely you cannot do it, because operators will not know the situation," Sahay said. "Otherwise it becomes a computer game."

The Security Argument

The architecture doubles as a risk-containment measure. Asked about the prospect of a third party taking control of a connected truck, Sahay pointed to where the computing sits.

"Our vehicle is not on cloud," he said. "Vehicle is doing its own algorithm."

The residual exposure, he acknowledged, sits in the telematics layer , the iMAXX 2.0 system, which adds remote immobilization, remote air-conditioning shutdown, air-filter and DPF monitoring, and driver scoring.

He framed connected-vehicle security as a group-level concern rather than a divisional one. Under a policy set by Mahindra Group, he said, cyber-security investment identified by group technology team cannot be overruled by a business head on budget grounds, even where the spending was not provided for.

The Power Play

Sahay rejected the premise that rivals hold a power advantage.

The competition brought 320 hp into the mainstream only months ago, he said, and 380 hp exists in India only at the high-end tipper segment. "That's not the segment where we play." What separates Mahindra, on his account, is uniformity: competitors cover 25 to 55 tonnes with three engines at 230, 240 and 320 hp, while Mahindra runs one.

"We are going to be the first brand where across the range we are going to provide 320 HP," he said. The automatic switching is what makes that affordable in fuel terms: "If the trucks are going to do automatic switch in the different power node, then I don't have a disadvantage of giving a higher power ratio in a truck which can lead to lower fuel efficiency in certain application where you don't need that horsepower."

A single engine across the range also thins the spare-parts catalogue a dealer must stock; a quiet enabler of the 48-hour repair promise Mahindra is selling alongside the truck.

That promise is a bet on its own reliability: the i-TRK carries a 48-hour uptime guarantee under which Mahindra pays the owner Rs 10,000 a day if a breakdown is not repaired inside the window, backed by a parts commitment covering 250 critical components, which the company supplies free if it cannot deliver them within 24 hours.

Sahay costed a stopped heavy truck - EMI, driver salary, operating expenditure at Rs 6,000 to 7,000 a day, and set the payment deliberately above the operator's own loss. "If I can't deliver on this promise, I will lose more money in giving the penalty than what I earn out of selling the trucks," he said. The structure is an escalation rather than an invention: the 2016 Blazo already carried a 48-hour service guarantee, at Rs 1,000 rupees a day.

The launch lands in a heavy truck market that has moved quickly this year. Tata Motors introduced 17 next-generation trucks in January spanning 7 to 55 tonnes, including a battery-electric range and a portfolio-wide upgrade to ECE R29.03 cabin safety, while Ashok Leyland revived its Taurus and Hippo nameplates on its modular AVTR platform and has signaled 320- and 360-hp engines.

Tata Motors, Mahindra and Ashok Leyland together accounted for just over 80% of India's 1.06 million commercial vehicle retails in fiscal 2026, according to Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations (FADA) data, with Tata at 34.2% on 362,428 units, Mahindra at 28.1% on 298,237 and Ashok Leyland at 17.9% on 189,567. VE Commercial Vehicles was fourth at 8.3%.

Mahindra's second place, though, rests almost entirely on sub-3.5-tonne pickups and light trucks. In heavy trucks, the segment the i-TRK contests, it remains a marginal player.

It also lands mid-restructuring. Mahindra's board approved the transfer of the Truck & Bus Division to listed subsidiary SML Mahindra on a slump-sale basis for about Rs 525 crore in July, with completion targeted by January 2027. The combin business held about 6% of India's above-3.5-tonne market in fiscal 2026 and is targeting 10 to 12% by fiscal 2031, rising above 20% by fiscal 2036, on the numbers management put to analysts on July 29.

That aggregate breaks down unevenly across segments. In ILCV buses, where Mahindra and SML together were already the second-largest player on 26.6% share in the first quarter of fiscal 2027, the target is 30%. ILCV trucks, in the early teens today, are meant to reach the higher teens. Heavy trucks, the segment in which the i-TRK firs— carry, the lowest ambition of the three: roughly 3% now to 5% by fiscal 2031.

The Way Forward

Sahay attributes that caution to a segment he says has not opened up the way others have: light commercial vehicles were once effectively a single-model market until challengers broke it, and buses followed. Heavy trucks, in his description, are "not democratized yet."

"We have taken a modest target," he said. "Internal target, we will do it much faster. And this launch today will help us with that. If we do it faster, we will revise the target."