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Lead with Lead Acid: Facilitating India's Green Energy Transition

Autocar Professional Bureau — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 16:23:51

What if one of the most credible answers to India's energy transition is a technology that is 160 years old?

We spend a great deal of time talking about the future of batteries — gigafactories, new chemistries, next-generation storage. And rightly so; India's clean energy ambition demands bold bets. But in our enthusiasm for what is coming, we have quietly stopped asking a harder question: are we being honest about what we already have?

This is not an argument against innovation — it is one that supplements it. The scale of India's storage challenge, 411.4 GWh needed by 2031–32 per the Central Electricity Authority's National Electricity Plan, is too large to solve with a single answer. Which brings me to the lead acid battery: managed well, one of the most credible circular economy assets India possesses, and a case rarely made with the seriousness it deserves.

Generation is Outpacing Storage

India's renewable achievement is real: capacity crossed 250 GW by late 2025, and the country hit its 500 GW non-fossil target years ahead of schedule. But generation and storage are different problems. In April 2026, peak demand hit 256 GW; nearly a third was met by renewables, yet the grid still leaned on thermal power for the evening peak — because there wasn't enough storage to hold the clean energy already being generated. With BloombergNEF projecting global storage to grow seventeen-fold by 2035, the question for India is not whether to build storage, but which technologies we can deploy at the speed, cost and supply-chain depth we require.

The Technology Already At Work

Lithium-ion is the deserved frontrunner for grid-scale storage. But India is not a single market. It is the telecom tower backup behind 600 million mobile connections; the home and business inverters relied on across states with uneven grids; the electric three-wheelers that are the workhorses of tier 2 and tier 3 India, for whom cost is a constraint, not a preference.

The numbers bear this out: the lead acid market, valued at $5.6 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $9.23 billion by 2035, is 55% of the country's entire battery materials market. And the cost gap is decisive — lead acid runs ₹8,000–12,000 per kWh against lithium-ion's ₹20,000–30,000. For rural solar and community microgrids, that is not a footnote. It is the deciding factor.

The Circular Economy Advantage

This is where our industry has undersold itself — and where, for any leader, the proof of the pudding lies. Sustainability claimed is easy; sustainability demonstrated is the test. Unlike most battery chemistries, lead acid's closed loop is not a future promise. It has been operational for decades.

Lead is among the most recycled materials on Earth, with recycling rates exceeding 99% in mature markets — the highest of any consumer product. A spent battery's lead, plastic and acid are almost entirely recoverable, and the lead can be reused indefinitely with no loss of performance. India's secondary lead already supplies more than 80% of domestic output, drawing on that infinite recyclability and the far lower energy cost of secondary smelting.

The loop is so economically sound that it sustains itself without subsidy — which is why the World Economic Forum and MIT have called lead acid recycling one of the most successful circular economies in existence. It is the model that newer chemistries, whose recovery networks are still being built, aspire to reach.

Honesty demands we name the problem too. Of the roughly one million tonnes of used batteries India recycles each year, 25–30% still moves through informal operators — backyard smelting outside any safety or environmental control, exposing workers and communities, children among them, to lead. That is not a case against the technology; it is the strongest case for formalising it.

The Battery Waste Management Rules of 2022, with Extended Producer Responsibility targets of 80% recovery by 2026 rising to 90%, are the right instrument. The responsibility of those of us who manufacture is to meet them in full — to invest in formal recovery and bring that lead back into a clean, closed loop. Closing the gap between what the rules require and what happens on the ground is a problem of governance and commitment, not technology.

The Real Measure of Sustainability

As World Environment Day asks what a sustainable future requires, one observation is worth sitting with: the greenest solution is not always the newest. Sustainability is about using resources wisely, recovering them fully and building systems that endure. By those measures, the lead acid battery — domestically made, deeply embedded in India's energy infrastructure, and able to close its own material loop more completely than any other chemistry — deserves a more serious place in our clean energy thinking.

The transition needs all technologies: lithium-ion for grid scale, hydrogen for long duration, and lead acid for the affordable, recyclable, locally anchored foundation it already provides. Acknowledging that is not a retreat from ambition. It is what a holistic industrial strategy looks like.

India’s Trucks Are Connected. The Next Test Is Performance

Autocar Professional Bureau — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:40:10

India moves more than 70 percent of its domestic freight by road, making trucking one of the most important engines of the country’s logistics economy. Over the past decade, that engine has been strengthened through highways, freight corridors, warehousing capacity and larger commercial fleets. AIS 140 now adds a critical digital layer to this physical buildout. By bringing vehicle location tracking, emergency alerts and backend monitoring into the formal transport framework, the mandate has moved commercial mobility from fragmented adoption to a more connected operating environment. That is a meaningful policy achievement that creates the base layer for visibility across India’s commercial transport network. However, visibility is only the beginning.

A device fitted inside a truck can establish compliance. It does not automatically improve mileage, prevent breakdowns, reduce idle time or raise asset productivity. The next phase of connected mobility must therefore move from tracking vehicles to improving how they perform.

Fuel is the Clearest Test of Value

This distinction matters because commercial vehicle operations in India are intensely margin sensitive. A truck is not just a transport asset. It is a daily profit and loss unit. Every avoidable stoppage, inefficient route, delayed repair, idling pattern or fuel
anomaly directly affects operating economics. A higher fuel bill is rarely just a fuel issue. It can point to poor driving behaviour, excessive idling, route inefficiency, overloading, weak vehicle health, pilferage or billing gaps. These losses often appear small when viewed vehicle by vehicle. Across a fleet, route network or operating corridor, they can become a material drag on profitability.

This is where connected vehicle intelligence becomes commercially relevant. Location tracking can show where a truck is. Diagnostics, onboard data and fuel analytics can explain why efficiency is falling. That shift from visibility to diagnosis is the critical change. For fleet owners, the value of connectivity is not in watching vehicles move across a dashboard. It lies in identifying avoidable losses early enough to act.

Converting Leakage into Savings

Once these leakages are visible, the next test is whether fleets can act on them consistently. This is where connected mobility moves from compliance infrastructure to performance infrastructure. The value is not in generating more vehicle data, but in using that data to reduce recurring losses across trips, routes and fleets. This distinction is important because transport economics are shaped by repetition. A few litres of avoidable fuel use, a recurring idle pattern or a delayed maintenance decision may not materially affect one trip. Repeated across hundreds of trips, they begin to affect margins, working capital and asset utilisation. The commercial case for connected intelligence is therefore not built on one dramatic intervention. It is built on the steady removal of preventable inefficiencies.

The potential savings underline the point. With vehicle tracking, diagnostic trouble codes and onboard diagnostics data, annual savings can reach about ₹1.53 lakh per vehicle. With CAN data added, the potential can rise to around ₹3.93 lakh, according to Intangles data. Even at a conservative 25 percent probability, the estimated annual benefit ranges between ₹40,000 and ₹1 lakh per vehicle. For small fleet operators, this can protect working capital. For larger fleets, it can strengthen margin discipline across routes, vehicles and drivers. For the wider auto ecosystem, it shifts connected vehicles from a regulatory requirement to a performance asset. The truck is no longer only producing a compliance record, but generating intelligence that can improve fuel productivity, asset availability and operating economics.

The Next Reform is Trust in Vehicle Data

India’s logistics future will not be shaped only by adding more roads, ports, warehouses or vehicles. It will also depend on how efficiently existing transport assets are used. AIS 140 has created the digital foundation for this shift by connecting commercial vehicles at scale. The next phase must ensure that this connectivity delivers measurable operating value through trusted data, reliable systems and actionable intelligence. For fleet owners, the opportunity is lower leakage and stronger productivity. For OEMs and technology providers, it is a sharper view of vehicle performance in real operating conditions. For policymakers, it is the chance to turn a compliance mandate into a national productivity platform. India has connected the truck. The next test is whether that connection can make every trip more predictable, every litre more productive and every vehicle more profitable to operate.

India’s Trucks Are Connected. The Next Test Is Performance

Autocar Professional Bureau — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:40:10

Fuel is the Clearest Test of Value

Converting Leakage into Savings

The Next Reform is Trust in Vehicle Data

India's Growing Shift to Product Innovation for Safety & Smart Mobility

Autocar Professional Bureau — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:18:50

A quiet transformation is unfolding across the vast transit networks of the Indian subcontinent. For the last several decades, it was quite easy to evaluate a vehicle almost exclusively based on fuel economy and long-term resale value. Today, a subtle but fundamental reshuffling of priorities is underway, rewriting the considerations of commuters, logistics managers, and automotive developers alike.

It is no longer enough to simply get people or goods from Point A to Point B. The focus has shifted completely to how safely, intelligently, and smoothly that journey is made. As urban ecosystems expand and modern expressways connect remote economic centres, the traditional mechanics of transport are being forced to evolve. This systemic change is not merely superficial. It begins with an invisible transformation in vehicle design.

The Regulatory Catalyst and Shifting Consumer Expectations

Recent market benchmarks reveal that Indian consumers are undergoing a significant behavioural shift. Research indicates that more than sixty per cent of new car buyers now consider advanced safety features a key factor in their purchase decisions. This organic consumer demand is being complemented by a rapidly evolving regulatory regime.

The operationalisation of the Bharat New Car Assessment Programme has introduced stringent, localised crash-testing and safety assessment protocols that bring domestic products in line with international standards. At the same time, directives from the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways are increasingly mandating electronic safety monitoring across heavy commercial vehicles and passenger fleets.

This potent combination of consumer awareness and regulatory stringency suggests that basic structural integrity is no longer the ultimate objective. The industry is now moving towards systems capable of proactively identifying and responding to road hazards.

From Passive Protection to Active Electronic Intervention

The transition from passive protection to active electronic intervention represents the modern frontier of product innovation. Once considered luxury features, advanced driver assistance systems are rapidly moving into mass-market segments.

Analytical reports show that the adoption of Level 2 autonomous features, such as Adaptive Cruise Control and Automatic Emergency Braking, is growing significantly. These advanced systems employ a complex network of radar and camera-based sensors, supported by localised electronic control units.

However, implementing these technologies in India's uniquely complex driving environment presents considerable operational challenges. Standard international software models often struggle with mixed traffic conditions and inconsistent lane markings. This shifts the strategic focus towards specialised component engineering.

The Convergence of Connectivity and Electrification

With the increasing integration of active safety systems into new vehicle models, the industry is witnessing convergence with a broader transition towards smart, electrified mobility. Today's car is no longer a standalone mechanical device but a highly connected digital asset.

This trend is evidenced by a 67 per cent year-over-year increase in connected electric passenger vehicles. The expansion of this ecosystem is supported by advanced telematics, intelligent digital cockpits, and software-driven architectures that enable continuous over-the-air updates.

Fleet operators and logistics companies are leveraging this interconnected data to improve route efficiency, monitor driver fatigue, and optimise battery thermal management in real time. Yet, this continuous flow of operational data places considerable demands on the underlying hardware infrastructure. It requires electronic assemblies capable of processing immense computational workloads reliably and without failure.

Engineering for the Domestic Crucible

Sustaining this high-tech mobility ecosystem requires product engineering that can withstand the uniquely demanding environmental conditions of the region. Vehicles must operate flawlessly across extreme temperature variations, intense dust exposure, high humidity, and unpredictable electrical voltage fluctuations.

Standard off-the-shelf electronics are fundamentally inadequate for such severe operating conditions. This makes the development of ruggedised, automotive-grade printed circuit board assemblies an absolute necessity.

Supported by the national Production Linked Incentive scheme, the domestic supply chain is successfully pivoting away from the mere assembly of imported kits. The priority has evolved towards comprehensive, localised product design, creating specialised hardware platforms capable of seamlessly managing complex sensor fusion and predictive algorithms under extreme conditions.

The Strategic Path Forward

The ongoing transformation of the automotive sector highlights a fundamental economic shift. The region is rapidly outgrowing its historical role as a low-cost manufacturer of foreign designs and is establishing itself as a genuine hub of localised engineering innovation.

The long-term competitive advantage will belong to organisations capable of translating sophisticated software into highly reliable physical electronic hardware. As active safety standards become more stringent and reliance on smart, real-time connectivity grows, the foundational electronics within vehicles will increasingly determine their market viability.

The future of mobility is already running on intelligent circuits. The real victory will be secured through the sophisticated engineering taking place silently beneath the dashboard.

(Pavan Puri is Founder and Managing Director at Greencore. Views expressd are the author's personal.)

Beyond Subsidies: How Rising Consumer Awareness Is Driving India’s EV Adoption

Autocar Professional Bureau — Sun, 31 May 2026 13:28:01

India’s electric vehicle market is entering a far more mature phase of growth. For the longest time, conversations around EV adoption were largely centred on subsidies, incentives, and cost savings. While these policy measures played a critical role in accelerating the early adoption curve, the market today is increasingly being driven by something far more sustainable - rising consumer awareness.

What we are witnessing now is a clear shift in consumer mindset. EVs are no longer being viewed simply as an economical alternative to conventional vehicles. They are increasingly being recognised as a smarter, more practical, and future-ready mobility choice. This transition is important because long-term industry growth cannot rely only on incentives. It has to be supported by genuine consumer confidence and behavioural change.

Over the past few years, Indian consumers have become significantly more informed in the way they evaluate mobility solutions. Earlier, concerns around charging infrastructure, battery life, reliability, and vehicle performance often dominated discussions around EVs. Today, buyers are asking far more evolved questions. They are comparing long-term running costs, understanding battery technology, evaluating warranties, researching charging accessibility, and looking at the total cost of ownership rather than just the upfront purchase price.

This growing awareness is reshaping the EV ecosystem itself.

For many consumers, the appeal of electric mobility begins with predictability and convenience. Unlike conventional fuel prices that fluctuate frequently, electricity offers a more stable and manageable cost structure for everyday commuting. Maintenance is also considerably simpler due to fewer moving parts, which creates greater long-term reliability and lower ownership stress for consumers.

At the same time, improvements in infrastructure are gradually strengthening confidence around EV adoption. Home charging solutions, increasing public charging networks, and better battery efficiencies are helping reduce the range anxiety that once acted as a major barrier. For a large section of urban users with predictable commuting patterns, charging an EV overnight has seamlessly integrated into their everyday routines.

Another significant change is that EV awareness is no longer limited to metro cities. Consumers across Tier II and Tier III cities are also becoming more aware of the practical and financial advantages of electric mobility. Digital access, online reviews, social media conversations, and visible EV adoption around them have collectively helped normalise electric vehicles within mainstream mobility conversations.

Importantly, sustainability is also becoming a stronger influencing factor in purchase decisions. Consumers today are increasingly conscious of pollution, environmental impact, and the long-term need for cleaner transportation systems. While sustainability may not always be the primary trigger behind a purchase, it certainly reinforces the decision in a meaningful way.

What is encouraging from an industry perspective is that rising consumer awareness is also pushing manufacturers to improve continuously. Customers today expect stronger after-sales support, better product quality, improved battery performance, intelligent technology integration, and reliable service ecosystems. This is helping the industry evolve faster and build products that are more aligned with real consumer expectations.

The real success of India’s EV transition will not be measured only by policy support or sales numbers, but by how naturally electric mobility becomes part of everyday consumer life. And increasingly, that shift is already underway.

Jhumarmal Pannaram Tunwal is Promoter, Chairman & Managing Director, Tunwal E-Motors Limited. Views expressed are the author's personal.

Bridging Clean Fuels: Auto LPG Powers Today, EVs Charge Tomorrow

Autocar Professional Bureau — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:01:24

India's automotive landscape stands at an exciting crossroads, where electric vehicles embody our clean, efficient, and transformative long-term vision. Yet with 33 crore vehicles still cruising on petrol and diesel, that shift can't happen overnight. Auto LPG steps in as the practical bridge solution, offering a clean, affordable retrofit that complements EVs rather than competing with them. This will lead to the formation of a smart dual-fuel strategy to cut down on emissions drastically today while propelling India toward its 2070 net-zero dreams.

Auto LPG: The Practical Present

Auto LPG is a clean retrofit champion that makes the switch effortless. Unlike CNG's complex infrastructure, LPG kits cost barely ₹25,000-45,000 and can be installed quickly, making it much easier for commuters to transition. Existing petrol vehicles gain 30-40% better economy and slash emissions by 50% (CO2, NOx, particulates) when retrofitted with Auto LPG — which is easy on both the pocket and the environment. It doesn't even require extensive engine changes; an LPG kit connects directly to the car's existing fuel ports like a USB charger, working instantly for bikes, cars, taxis, and light commercial vehicles.

EVs: Certainly A Worthy Companion

Everyone agrees EVs have huge potential. The government wants 30% of vehicles to be electric by 2030. They support this with FAME subsidies, PLI schemes for batteries, and more charging stations.

Sales reached 2 million EVs in FY25, mostly two-wheelers, but cars are catching up too. Battery prices keep dropping, making EVs more affordable and accessible for those who desire to switch from conventional vehicles. Range anxiety is also easing with 10,000+ public chargers live now.

But the reality is still quite stark. India has 33 crore petrol/diesel vehicles on roads today — bikes, cars, autos, and trucks. Converting each to EV would impose a heavy financial burden. We don't have enough batteries for that scale yet.

Moreover, replacing all of them would take decades and, given the state that we are in, time is of the essence. Most owners can't afford it; they're stuck with old petrol vehicles or expensive new EVs. Rural areas lack chargers due to poor accessibility, while urban power grids struggle during peak hours. EVs also cost 2-3 times more upfront than petrol cars, keeping mass adoption slow for now.

Complementary, Not Competitive

Auto LPG doesn't sideline EVs; it accelerates the transition by working hand-in-hand with them. Here's why they thrive together so beautifully.

LPG delivers instant emission wins, slashing 75% of black carbon, which is a powerful warming agent, across India's legacy fleets, while EVs eliminate tailpipe pollution wherever charging infrastructure reaches. Together, they improve air quality much faster than EVs could achieve alone.

LPG stations can evolve into dual-fuel hubs, dispensing clean gas today while adding EV chargers tomorrow, eliminating the "either/or" dilemma and smartly leveraging existing infrastructure.

Economically, LPG retrofits sustain millions of workshops, drivers, and MSMEs, while EVs spark battery manufacturing jobs, creating an exponential employment impact across the clean fuel ecosystem.

Smart deployment puts LPG in high-mileage fleets like taxis, deliveries, and rural transport where EVs struggle, while EVs capture premium urban personal use where chargers work reliably.

Economically, this dual approach creates jobs across the board. LPG retrofits keep millions of local workshops humming, and small MSMEs thrive by converting everyday vehicles. Meanwhile, EVs ignite high-tech battery factories, assembly lines, and charging networks, generating skilled manufacturing jobs. Together, they multiply employment exponentially throughout India's clean fuel ecosystem.

The Road Ahead

To accelerate this transition, India should launch a national programme with a target of 1 crore LPG retrofits by 2030, offering kit subsidies, tax breaks, and widespread awareness campaigns that make clean fuel accessible. Extend FAME-style incentives to LPG conversions so that LPG retrofit owners receive financial support, making clean fuel accessible to every family. Mandate that 10% of public transport run on alternative fuels, putting governments at the forefront, leading by example while creating immediate demand that improves the ecosystem for all. The end goal is to preserve and protect environmental health and leave the planet better than we found it.

Suyash Gupta is the Director General at Indian Auto LPG Coalition. Views expressed are the author's personal.

How Multi-Channel Distribution Will Shape the Next Era of Motor Insurance in India

Autocar Professional Bureau — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:01:06

India’s motor insurance sector is changing in ways that are not always immediately visible. While technology, automation, and data analytics attract much of the attention, the more fundamental shift is happening in how insurance is distributed. The way customers discover, evaluate, buy, and service motor insurance is evolving, and this change will have a deeper impact on the industry than any single technological upgrade.

Motor insurance touches a wide and diverse customer base. It serves first-time vehicle owners and experienced drivers, individuals in large cities and customers in smaller towns, digitally confident buyers, as well as those who still prefer personal guidance. This diversity makes one thing clear: no single distribution channel can meet all expectations effectively. As customer behaviour becomes more fluid, insurers must move away from rigid channel thinking and towards integrated distribution models.

A multi-channel distribution approach brings together agents, bancassurance partners, institutional relationships, digital platforms, and vehicle manufacturers. Each channel has a distinct role. Agents continue to be critical for explaining coverage and resolving concerns. Bancassurance provides reach and familiarity, especially for customers who associate insurance with long-term financial planning. Digital platforms cater to customers who value speed and convenience. OEM partnerships place insurance at the point where vehicle ownership begins. The effectiveness of this approach lies not in scale alone, but in how well these channels work together.

Customer behaviour already reflects this reality. Research across industries shows that people rarely rely on a single channel when making decisions. A widely cited Harvard Business Review study of over 46,000 consumers found that nearly 73 per cent used multiple touchpoints during their purchase journey. Motor insurance customers behave in much the same way. They often research policies online, seek confirmation from an advisor, purchase insurance through a dealer, and expect digital servicing later. When insurers treat these interactions as isolated transactions, the experience becomes fragmented.

There is also a business imperative behind multi-channel distribution. Over-reliance on one channel exposes insurers to regulatory changes, partner concentration, and shifts in customer behaviour. A diversified distribution network provides balance. It allows insurers to respond more steadily to market changes and pursue growth across segments without excessive dependence on any single source of business.

At the same time, motor insurance itself is evolving. Products are becoming more responsive to usage, claims are getting faster, and underwriting is gradually shifting towards real-time data. Electric vehicles, telematics, and changing mobility patterns are introducing risks that traditional models were not designed to address. These changes place new demands on distribution—particularly on the ability to explain evolving products and support customers over longer ownership cycles.

Technology is enabling many of these changes, especially in underwriting and claims. According to a known tech giant, insurers globally are allocating close to 40 per cent of their AI investments towards improving operational efficiency. These investments are reducing claims processing timelines and helping insurers introduce products more quickly. In a competitive market like India, such gains have a direct impact on customer satisfaction and retention.

Claims remain the most critical moment of truth. Faster processes and automation have reduced friction, but customers still seek clarity and reassurance when something goes wrong. This is where distribution continues to matter. Digital tools are most effective when supported by people who can provide context and guidance in complex situations.

The growing adoption of electric vehicles adds further complexity. EVs introduce new risk considerations—from battery performance to charging infrastructure—that will continue to evolve as technology and regulation mature. Distribution channels will play an important role in helping customers understand how coverage applies to these newer risks and how it may change over time.

OEM partnerships reflect how distribution is adapting to these shifts. When insurance is integrated into the vehicle purchase journey, protection becomes more relevant and easier to understand. It aligns insurance with mobility rather than positioning it as an afterthought.

Looking ahead, the challenge for insurers is not choosing between digital and physical channels. It is ensuring consistency across all of them. Customer data must move seamlessly so interactions feel connected rather than repetitive. Partners need tools that strengthen their role rather than diminish it. Governance and transparency across channels will be as important as innovation.

As customer expectations continue to rise—shaped by experiences in banking, e-commerce, and mobility—distribution will increasingly define how insurers are perceived. Multi-channel distribution is no longer a tactical choice. It is a structural requirement. Insurers that invest in integrated, flexible, and customer-aligned distribution models will be better positioned to remain relevant as India’s motor insurance market evolves.

Birendra Mohanty is the Chief Business Officer at Zurich Kotak General Insurance. Views expressed are the author's personal.

The Intersection of AI and EV: How Artificial Intelligence is Enhancing Electric Vehicles

Autocar Professional Bureau — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:00:49

Artificial intelligence is quietly revolutionizing electric vehicles, smoothing out the bumps that once held them back and creating drives that just feel effortless. Picture smarter batteries that last longer and self-driving fleets gliding through traffic. AI pulls in endless streams of data on real-time road conditions, weather shifts, and power grids to make every trip safer, greener, and simpler for drivers.

In India, EV sales crossed 2.27 million units in CY2025, fueling demand for AI-enhanced charging networks projected to grow from USD 588.6 million to USD 5,695.6 million by 2030. Companies with an eye on the future are leveraging AI smartly to roll out robust charging networks.

Revolutionizing Charging Infrastructure

AI is making the biggest splash in EV charging networks, turning chaos into clockwork by enabling smoother navigation. Smart algorithms now predict exactly when you'll need to plug in, spreading out the load on power grids to ease peak-hour pressure and trim costs as well, thereby increasing affordability. AI reserves spots before drivers even arrive, timing charges with cheap renewable energy and sharing power from nearby chargers to erase range anxiety on long routes. This is one of the many ways AI is facilitating riders' smooth journeys.

AI is taking vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication to the next level, making EVs true two-way players in India's power game. These cars aren't just pulling energy from the grid anymore; they're giving it back when we need it most. Smart systems route excess battery energy to homes or stations during blackouts, stabilizing India's power network amid growing demand. It's a quiet revolution that turns range worries into real resilience.

Battery Optimization for Longer Life

AI really comes into its own when it comes to keeping EV batteries in top shape. Machine learning keeps a constant eye on individual cells, crunching data like voltage swings, heat buildup, and daily driving habits to stretch battery life by 20%-30%—a huge win in India's scorching summers that chew through packs twice as fast. Forget the old days of overcharging and wasting power; now, it spots trouble brewing early, tweaking charge cycles on the fly to save owners big bucks and keep e-waste piles from growing.

For charging networks, this spells fewer headaches too. Predictive tools catch glitches like voltage dips weeks ahead, sending crews in before a station goes dark, which is vital in smaller towns where fixes aren't around the corner. IBM's work shows how it digs up hidden flaws we used to miss, pumping up battery longevity and making resale values much healthier.

Predictive Maintenance and Personalized Routing

Thanks to AI integration, data from vibration sensors, telematics, and charger monitoring systems is increasingly being used to detect early signs of wear in EV chargers and motors. For instance, AI-led predictive maintenance platforms deployed by charging infrastructure companies use real-time equipment diagnostics and machine learning models to identify anomalies before failures occur, helping operators reduce unplanned downtime and improve charger reliability. Personalized energy routing is another advantage that is of great help to riders while navigating the roads. AI apps crunch your calendar, route, and battery status to suggest optimal stops, factoring in traffic and station crowds. In congested metros, this technology slashes wait times. Quite commendably, Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication technology lets groups of EVs share charging spots smoothly.

India's Make-in-India Momentum

India's government is betting big on EVs, pouring funds into AI-powered hubs in places like Gujarat and Tamil Nadu through PLI schemes. These spots are cranking out local chips and software, all with an eye on hitting 30% EV adoption by 2030. Still, the power grid struggles to match the growing demand, data privacy concerns loom large, and issues such as range anxiety and scarce chargers in smaller towns keep everyday adoption from taking off. If these hurdles are addressed, the whole EV wave will truly gain momentum.

Path Forward

To make the EV future truly hum, automakers, charging networks, utilities, and startups need to team up on open standards for V2X and predictive tech. As 2026 rolls out, AI will turn electric vehicles from green machines into smart, reliable travel partners that we cannot imagine a future without.

Raghav Arora is the Co Founder & CTO at Statiq. Views expressed are the author's personal.

The Algorithm Doesn’t Know What Leather Smells Like

Autocar Professional Bureau — Sun, 24 May 2026 15:01:40

There is a moment that no digital interface has yet replicated. You open the door of a well engineered car and something registers before cognition catches up. The solidity of the closing mechanism. The particular resistance of the seat under load. The way the cabin isolates and shapes the outside world. These are important signals. They communicate trust that no dashboard screen, however large, has learned to broadcast.

The automobile industry is in the middle of one of its deepest transformations. Electrification, connectivity, software-defined vehicles, over-the-air updates, autonomous capability staged across five levels of ambition etc. Sure, the architectural change is real and irreversible.

But running parallel to this genuine transformation is something else. It is a representational inflation. A tendency to describe what has been built in language borrowed from what has been imagined. This tendency will cost the industry something it has spent a century accumulating namely the trust of people who buy cars because they believe in them.

Let’s call it AI washing. The chatbot with a press release. The deck that says machine learning while the product says if-then-. The automotive variant is specific and worth naming plainlyz AI washing in this industry is when the voice assistant that mishears every third command gets positioned as an intelligent co-pilot.

When predictive maintenance means a warning light that appears three weeks after the problem. When the immersive digital cockpit experience resolves, on delivery, into a touchscreen that requires four menu levels to adjust the temperature. When ‘personalisation at scale’ means the car remembers your seat position. Nobody in the room says so. But everyone in the room knows.

Why Automobile AI Washing Is Different

Most industries can absorb a gap between promise and product with limited structural damage. Software companies ship, iterate, patch. The invoice arrives monthly and the relationship is low friction to exit. Automobiles are different in almost every respect.

The product costs between two and two hundred times an average monthly salary. The purchase decision takes months and involves showroom visits, test drives, finance negotiations and a handover ceremony that many manufacturers still treat as a ritual. The ownership cycle runs seven to ten years. The physical experience of the product has varied facets - its ride quality, its acoustics, its ergonomics, its smell . All of it is evaluated every single time the vehicle runs.

In this industry, trust is built in kilometres. Unlike most digital products, the automotive experience is recursive. A badly designed interface is not encountered once. It is encountered in traffic, in rain, while parking, while tired, while late for work. The psychology of disappointment compounds because the interaction repeats daily.

A brand that overstates its AI capability is setting up a daily, embodied disappointment. The driver who was promised an intelligent vehicle and received a complicated one will not forget. She will tell people.

The stakes of AI washing in automotive are therefore compounding. They are not corrected by a patch. They are corrected ,if at all , only with the next model cycle.

What Genuine Integration Looks Like

The case for digital and AI integration in automobiles is overwhelmingly strong. The use cases that have earned their place are instructive precisely because they serve the driving experience rather than perform against it.

Adaptive cruise control with genuine scene understanding reduces fatigue on long hauls without removing the driver’s relationship with the road. Predictive navigation that learns a driver’s regular routes and adjusts for real-time conditions is invisible when it works which is the highest compliment any interface can receive. Condition based servicing that reads actual component wear rather than calendar intervals reduces cost and builds rational trust.

Battery management software in EVs that genuinely extends range through thermal and charging intelligence is AI doing what AI does well which is optimising a complex system across more variables than a human can hold simultaneously.

These share something in common. They operate beneath the surface of experience rather than on top of it. They earn their presence through outcomes. They make the car better at being a car, rather than making the car perform the appearance of being a computer.

The benchmark for automotive intelligence is therefore not feature density. Think in terms of cognitive relief. The best systems reduce friction, reduce distraction and reduce the number of decisions a driver must consciously process.

The failure mode runs in the opposite direction. No one likes AI that surfaces itself as a feature rather than serving as an enabler. The 'large language model' integrated into the infotainment stack that requires the driver to formulate precise queries while navigating traffic. The emotion detection camera that monitors fatigue but whose recommendations appear at precisely the moments requiring full attention. The AI curated driving mode selector that removes the tactile pleasure of choosing for oneself.

The instrument for distinguishing good integration from AI washing is simpler than it sounds. Just ask does this make the experience of driving — or owning, or trusting — this vehicle better?

The Joy Problem

Automobiles carry emotional freight that almost no other manufactured object does. It is a design and commercial reality, not a sentimental one. The car is the object that took the family across the social levels. That was present at the first job, the first relationship, the move to a new city. That represents, for a first-generation buyer in an emerging market, a form of arrival in material, social terms. In markets like India, the first car purchase still involves rituals of blessing.

AI, introduced without care, risks flattening this relationship into a transactional one. Shifting the language of ownership toward the language of access and subscription. This is not inherently wrong because mobility as a service is a legitimate and growing segment. But for the privately purchased vehicle, the personal car, the one that sits in the family’s name, the emotional architecture matters enormously.

Digital experiences can themselves create attachment and increasingly do. But software-led attachment operates differently from mechanical attachment. It asks for tactility, memory and physical familiarity. The industry’s challenge is understanding the trade offs between them and not choosing sides.

An AI layer that personalises the experience , one that remembers preferences, anticipates needs and reduces friction can deepen attachment. An AI layer that surveils, nudges, restricts or simply confuses will sever the bond that makes someone a loyal buyer across three model cycles.

The question for product and marketing leadership is whether the AI being integrated has been designed in relationship to the emotional architecture of automobile ownership or grafted onto that architecture from outside it.

An Optimality Framework

For an industry navigating this terrain, three principles suggest themselves. Earn before you announce. The sequence matters. A capability validated in real world conditions, across diverse drivers and geographies, in the full complexity of ownership rather than the controlled conditions of a demo . Such a capability has earned its communication.

The AI washing problem is almost always a sequencing problem because the communication precedes the proof. Reversing that sequence is a discipline, not a concession.

Design for Invisibility

The best AI in an automobile should be experienced as the car being better and not as the AI being present. When a driver thinks ‘my car knows me’ rather than the integration has succeeded. Interface designers and AI product teams in automotive need to answer a single governing question - does this surface the technology, or does it serve the experience?

Preserve the moments of interaction that matter. There is a class of automotive interaction - the gear selection, the driving mode, the suspension setting, the steering weight - where the act of choosing is part of the pleasure. These are part of the experience being purchased. AI that automates them without offering the option to choose manually has misunderstood what it is optimising for. The optimality being sought is human satisfaction across a decade of ownership.

Human satisfaction in mobility is not produced solely through automation. Confidence, familiarity, tactility, and the retained feeling of control are equally productive of it.The automobile is a vehicle. What you do must make the journey better?

The algorithm doesn’t know what leather smells like. The buyer does. That is still the benchmark.

Shubhranshu Singh is a business leader and marketer. He served as global head of marketing at Royal Enfield and as Chief Marketing Officer at Tata Motors CV across the last decade. Views expressed are the author's personal.

The Future of Motor Insurance Lies in Prevention, not Just Payouts

Autocar Professional Bureau — Sun, 24 May 2026 14:42:38

For most of its existence, motor insurance in India has followed a straightforward logic that if something goes wrong, you file a claim, and the insurer steps in. It is a model built around damage control which is useful, certainly, but fundamentally reactive. The question the industry is now beginning to ask is whether it can do something more meaningful, prevent the damage from happening in the first place.

India makes this conversation particularly urgent. We have one of the largest road networks in the world, vehicle ownership is expanding rapidly across Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, and yet road accident fatalities remain among the highest globally.

For insurers, this creates a compounding problem, rising claims frequency, pressure on underwriting margins, and customers who associate their insurer primarily with paperwork and waiting periods. The current model is straining under its own weight.

The Data Behind the Driver

Technology is beginning to offer a way out. Connected devices, telematics, and data analytics are giving insurers something they have never had before, visibility into driving behaviour in real time. Not after an accident, but during the thousands of decisions a driver makes every day, how hard they brake, whether they are driving through a high-risk corridor at night, how often they use their phone behind the wheel.

This kind of data changes the nature of underwriting entirely. Instead of pricing risk based on broad proxies like vehicle age, city of registration, past claims history, insurers can now build a far more precise picture of individual risk. And more importantly, they can act on it.

A driver who displays safe behaviour can be rewarded with lower premiums. A driver who regularly overspeed’s can receive a timely alert before an incident occurs. The insurer stops being a distant financial backstop and becomes something closer to a co-pilot.

Pay how you drive and usage-based insurance models are the early commercial expression of this shift. In India, acceptance is still nascent, but the conditions for growth are improving.

Younger vehicle owners, many of whom already share health or fitness data with apps, are increasingly open to the same logic applied to driving, demonstrate responsible behaviour, and pay a fairer price for cover.

From Product to Partner

Electric vehicles are bringing fresh opportunities and challenges for insurers alike. EVs generate continuous streams of operational data, battery health, charging patterns, performance metrics. Rather than waiting for a breakdown or an accident, an insurer with access to vehicle health data can flag a potential issue before it becomes a claim. That kind of proactive service is difficult to commoditise and builds the sort of customer trust that outlasts any single policy renewal.

Prevention is not only about telematics. Progressive motor insurers are stitching together a broader ecosystem like roadside assistance, garage networks, emergency response, vehicle health alerts, and digital claims processing, into a seamless customer experience. The insurer stops being an entity customers reluctantly think about at renewal time and becomes a genuine partner in their daily mobility. That experience, more than premium pricing, is becoming the real competitive battleground.

The Road Ahead

None of this is without complication. Customers sharing detailed driving behaviour with their insurer need confidence that the data will not be used punitively or passed on without their knowledge.

Building that trust requires consistent transparency, clear consent mechanisms, and a demonstrable commitment to using data in the customer's interest.

Structural gaps also remain, the connected mobility ecosystem is far more developed in metros than in smaller towns, and affordability will matter. Preventive technology must create visible value for the customer, not simply add to the cost of a policy.

Regulation will shape how quickly this transformation unfolds. India’s insurance regulator, too, has gradually opened the doors for experimentation, giving insurers more room to test new technology-led ideas. But sustained progress will require close collaboration between insurers, vehicle manufacturers, technology providers, and regulators.

What is clear is that the direction of travel has changed. The motor insurer of the future will not be judged solely on how efficiently it settles claims. It will be judged on how much it helps customers avoid needing to file one. That is a harder problem to solve and for an industry that has long operated in the background of people's lives, perhaps its most significant opportunity yet.

Krunal Vora is the Senior Vice President and Product Head - Motor Insurance at Probus. Views expressed are the author's personal.

From Power to Precision: The New Definition of Vehicle Performance

Autocar Professional Bureau — Sat, 23 May 2026 13:24:21

For a long time, performance in the automotive world was easy to explain. More power, quicker acceleration, higher top speed that was the shorthand. It worked because the gap between vehicles was visible and measurable. That definition is now being stretched. Today, what matters just as much is how a vehicle behaves when things are not ideal—when the road surface changes, when a driver reacts late, when conditions are unpredictable. Increasingly, performance is being judged by how well a vehicle manages those moments, not just how it performs in a straight line.

From Individual Metrics to Integrated Systems
One of the biggest shifts has been in how vehicles are engineered. Earlier, systems could be optimised somewhat independently - engine, suspension, braking. Today, that separation is far less clear. Modern vehicles are developed as tightly integrated systems. Powertrain behaviour affects stability. Thermal management influences consistency. Software calibration determines how usable the performance is. This becomes even more evident in electric vehicles. Instant torque, for example, is not just about acceleration; it must be carefully managed to ensure the vehicle remains predictable and controlled. The same applies to regenerative braking, where calibration directly affects both efficiency and driving feel. What this means in practice is that performance is no longer a single attribute. It is an outcome of how well multiple systems work together.

Control Is What Drivers Actually Experience
Most drivers rarely use the full power of a vehicle. What they experience every day is controlling how the car responds in traffic, how stable it feels at speed, how confidently it handles a sudden manoeuvre. That is why systems like stability control, traction management, braking modulation, and steering feedback have become far more important in defining performance. In many cases, a vehicle that feels composed and predictable inspires more confidence than one that is simply quicker on paper. Especially in real-world conditions, where surfaces are inconsistent and situations evolve quickly, that confidence becomes the real measure of capability.

Safety Is Becoming an Active Part of Performance
This is where safety begins to overlap with performance in a meaningful way. Earlier, safety was largely about protection. This remains critical, but the focus is gradually shifting towards avoidance. Features such as automatic emergency braking, lane-keeping support, and driver monitoring are designed to intervene before a situation escalates. They are not separate from performance, but they directly influence how safely a vehicle can be driven in everyday conditions. The expectation from customers is also changing. Safety is no longer seen as an add-on or a higher-variant feature. It is increasingly part of the baseline, and it plays a role in how the overall capability of a vehicle is judged.

The Role of Software Is Only Growing
Another layer of this shift is software. Vehicles are now expected to evolve over time. Calibration improvements, feature updates, and system refinements can be introduced even after the vehicle is on the road. This changes how performance is delivered, and it is no longer fixed at the point of sale. But it also raises the bar for integration. Hardware and software can no longer be developed in isolation. The way they interact determines not just features, but the consistency and reliability of performance across different conditions.

Performance Is Proven in the Real World
Ultimately, performance is not defined in controlled environments. It is defined in daily use—stop-start traffic, long highway drives, varying road quality, changing weather. This is where factors like braking feel, ride comfort, thermal consistency, and energy management become far more visible. Increasingly, real-world data is feeding back into development cycles. It allows for more informed calibration, better understanding of usage patterns, and continuous improvement over time. In many ways, the gap between development and usage is narrowing.

Performance is no longer just about what a vehicle can do at its peak. It is about how consistently and confidently it performs across everyday situations. Power and speed will always remain relevant, but they are now part of a broader equation, one that includes control, predictability, and the ability to avoid risk. As vehicles become more complex and more capable, the definition of performance will continue to evolve. The ones that stand out will not necessarily be the fastest, but the ones that deliver that capability in a way that feels intuitive, controlled, and inherently safe.

Mohan Savarkar is Chief Product Officer & Chief Corporate Quality Officer at Tata Motors Passenger Vehicle. Views expressed are the author's personal.

Why LFP is Emerging as India’s EV DNA

Autocar Professional Bureau — Sat, 23 May 2026 13:23:15

There is no denying that EVs (electric vehicles) are the way forward for India, just like the rest of the world. In an ultra-competitive automotive industry, every edge gained via each element can mark the difference between profitability and the lack of it. Herein, battery technology is playing a defining role.

Although NMC (nickel manganese cobalt) batteries held the edge earlier, LFP (lithium ferro phosphate) batteries have stolen a march on the former – and with good reason. Previously, nickel-based lithium-ion NMC batteries were preferred due to their high energy density alongside the ability to provide power plus range. As the EV market matures, the conversation on battery cost is evolving as well.

The LFP Advantage Versus NMC
For a few years, it was debated whether NMC or LFP batteries were the better option. While NMC batteries were previously preferred, the pendulum has now swung towards LFP, due to cost, sustainability and other concerns.

According to a recently conducted study, it was found that LFP cells exhibited longer cycle life spans, delivering over 3,000 to 5,000 charge cycles, vis-à-vis NMC’s 1,000 to 2,300 cycles at optimal discharge rate and temperature. Additionally, the LFP battery’s degradation was approximately twice as slow under the same conditions. From a consumer point of view, this means an EV with an LFP battery can go for a long time, reduces range anxiety and with enhanced battery management, is a primary concern with new EV buyers.

Compared to an NMC battery, LFP batteries hold up to twice the charge-discharge cycles, leading to longer life and more long-lasting value. Precisely for such reasons, LFP batteries are particularly suitable for high-mileage duties sought in electric buses as well as in freight and shared mobility fleets.

Coming to higher energy density, though this leads to faster charging, the battery is exposed to additional stress. This means extra wear and tear, lower battery capacity and more heat generation. Combined, these elements negatively affect the battery’s life cycle. Therefore, a succession of rapid charges and discharges will reduce the NMC battery’s life cycle and even affect its maximum charge holding capacity.

This shift towards LFP has been noticeable in China, which was earlier heavily into NMC manufacturing. In China’s case, while the better energy density of NMC batteries drove the narrative, it was soon apparent that LFP offers 95% of the NMC performance at almost 30% less cost. In a hypercompetitive market, this robust margin is too difficult to ignore.

Unlike NMC, the LFP batteries’ stable phosphate structure makes them more tolerant to the stress linked with rapid charging. Depending on various elements like charging rate, performance, cooling systems used in the vehicle and the battery’s safety mechanism, typically, LFP batteries will offer about twice the charge cycles as that of NMC batteries.

Thus, whether it is mass-market EVs, 2-wheelers or energy storage systems, LFP is preferred due to the extra durability and affordability. This transition means NMC is increasingly limited to heavy-duty vehicles and premium cars.

Thermal Runaway Risks and Other Elements
However, battery safety and cost considerations have remained central to EV discussion from a consumer standpoint. Due to its thermal stability, LFP is more resistant to fire, overheating and thermal runaway. Some elaboration is required regarding thermal runaway. NMC batteries have cathodes containing metal oxides. While this material ensures high energy density, it is less stable thermally compared to LFP’s phosphate structure. In simple words, thermal runaway refers to a chain reaction that takes place inside a battery cell, causing a rapid temperature rise, in turn triggering a fire or explosion. Various causes could lead to this process, such as physical damage, overcharging, excessive internal or external heat and swift discharge. Thermal runaway is more important in urban zones with high population densities and warm climates.

Conversely, the LFP cathodes’ phosphate structure remains more stable, retaining its stability even while withstanding higher temperatures. Consequently, LFP is less prone to the thermal runaway risk. NMC and LFP batteries both have advanced thermal management systems installed to control this process, which makes them safe for daily usage. With control mechanisms and sensors, this system restricts the voltage, temperature, current and discharging rate. But the NMC system is usually more complex than the LFP.

India’s Late-mover Advantage
India has been a relatively late starter in this segment since domestic battery manufacturing began later. Nevertheless, this could prove to be the biggest blessing in disguise. When the world backed NMC heavily four years ago, India held back its investment in the space. In hindsight, the late entry is proving useful since it has helped the country invest funds in the winning segment, LFP.

Finally, the late-mover advantage is beneficial for electric 2-wheeler brands that are now targeting urban families with the increased safety features of LFP. Given the country’s hot climatic conditions and unique use models, LFP is gradually emerging as India’s EV DNA – thereby benefiting both buyers and brands.

Mr Ram Rajappa is Chief Operating Officer at Greaves Electric Mobility. Views expressed are the author's personal.

Why LFP is Emerging as India’s EV DNA

Autocar Professional Bureau — Sat, 23 May 2026 13:23:15

Mr Ram Rajappa is Chief Operating Officer at Greaves Electric Mobility. Views expressed are the author's personal.

From Guesswork to Clarity: What Deep Inspection Really Changes for Pre-Owned Two-Wheeler Buyers

Autocar Professional Bureau — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:13:36

Buying a pre-owned two-wheeler has never really been about finding options. It has always been about making peace with uncertainty.

Most people don’t walk away from a used bike because of the price. They walk away because something doesn’t feel certain. It could be a small hesitation. The engine sounds fine, the ride feels smooth, but there is always that question in the back of the mind. What is missing?

That hesitation has shaped the pre-owned market for years. And in India, where nearly 90-95 percent of used vehicle transactions still happen through unorganised channels, that uncertainty is not misplaced. But today, organized players are changing that with deep inspection.

Turning Doubt Into Something Measurable

For a long time, evaluating a used vehicle was inconsistent. Buyers usually relied on a short test ride, a quick look over the bike, or advice from someone they knew. Two people could inspect the same vehicle and still walk away with very different opinions.

What’s changed is how structured the process has become.

Today, many organised platforms assess vehicles across 150 to 300 checkpoints along with vehicle quality report, going well beyond basic inspection to look at engine health, braking, suspension, electrical systems, and even traces of past damage or repair work. That depth of evaluation does two things. It makes the condition of the vehicle more visible, and it makes different listings comparable.
Technology is quietly strengthening this layer AI-assisted tools are now being used to capture images, flag inconsistencies, and ensure inspections follow the same process across locations.

It does not remove human judgment, but it reduces variation, which is what buyers struggled with earlier. For a buyer, this changes the starting point. Instead of asking broad questions, they are working with specific information.

What This Actually Changes for Buyers

The value of deep inspection shows up in behaviour, not just process.
A buyer who would earlier spend weekends checking multiple bikes can now shortlist faster. With structured vehicle quality reports, it becomes easier to eliminate uncertainty early and focus only on relevant options.

Think of a first-time buyer in a new city. Without local contacts or a mechanic, they trust, the process often meant trial and error, with plenty of risk along the way. Now, inspection-backed listings offer enough clarity to move forward without leaning entirely on offline checks.

Or take a commuter picking up a second bike. A report that spells out tyre wear, brake condition, or battery health makes it easier to plan both immediate and upcoming expenses. It lowers the risk of surprise costs right after purchase, which remains one of the biggest worries in this category.

In simple terms, the decision becomes less about avoiding risk and more about understanding it.

A Ripple Effect on Sellers and Supply

Deep inspection is also influencing how vehicles enter the market. When listings are backed by structured evaluation, sellers know that discrepancies will be identified. This naturally pushes more accurate representation of the vehicle’s condition.

The impact is visible in how transactions move. Inspected listings tend to see faster closures because buyers are not negotiating blindly. Both sides are working with the same information.

Over time, this also improves supply quality. Vehicles that meet certain standards move faster, while others are either repaired or priced more realistically. For buyers, this means less time filtering out unreliable options.

Why This Matters Now

India’s pre-owned two-wheeler market is already large and continues to expand at an estimated 12 to 15 percent annually. In fact, the used market is larger than the new one - roughly 1.2 to 1.4 times the size of the new two-wheeler market in terms of transactions.

At this scale, trust cannot be built through individual judgment alone.

Deep inspection is becoming a key enabler here. It supports financing, as lenders are more comfortable backing vehicles with documented condition reports and more & the right choice for the customers. It also makes warranty and post-purchase services more viable, since the baseline condition of the vehicle is already known.

As more buyers enter the segment, especially from smaller cities and first-time ownership groups, these layers become critical.

Confidence is Built Through Clarity

Buyer confidence does not change overnight. It builds through repeated, predictable experiences. When a vehicle performs the way its inspection report suggests, when there are no surprises post-purchase, and when ownership begins smoothly, trust starts to compound. That is when behaviour shifts. Used vehicles stop feeling like a compromise. They start feeling like a practical decision.

Deep inspection, supported by technology and more standardised processes, is helping bring that shift. It does not eliminate uncertainty completely, but it reduces it enough for buyers to move forward with clarity. And in a market where hesitation has always been the biggest barrier, that clarity is what ultimately drives the right choice decisions.

India’s New Safety Mandates: Driving OEMs to Rethink ADAS Integration

Autocar Professional Bureau — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:28:50

India's automotive sector stands at a decisive regulatory inflection point. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has mandated a new suite of active safety technologies governed by specific Automotive Industry Standards: AIS 184 for Driver Drowsiness and Attention Warning, AIS 186 and AIS 187 for Blind Spot Detection and Moving-Off Vulnerable Road User Detection, AIS 188 for Lane Departure Warning, and AIS 162 for Automatic Emergency Braking.

With approximately 18 months to the compliance window, OEMs face serious engineering and architectural decisions. AIS 184, 186, 187, and 188 are alerting standards — they warn the driver and leave the decision with the human. AIS 162 demands active safety: autonomous vehicle actuation that overrides human control. That distinction changes everything.

Alert Quality: The Foundation of Driver Trust

Before addressing autonomous braking, the alerting standards deserve scrutiny — because their effectiveness directly conditions driver trust across the entire safety system. Across AIS 184, 186, 187, and 188, the shared risk is alert fatigue. A drowsiness warning that fires prematurely, a lane departure alert triggered by a deliberate merge, or a blind spot notification from a stationary roadside structure — each false positive erodes confidence and desensitises response to alerts that genuinely matter.

The right alert at the right time is a safety requirement, not a convenience specification. Achieving it demands contextual intelligence: assessing whether a vehicle in the blind spot poses an actual risk given the host vehicle's path, speed, and traffic state — a level of reasoning isolated sensors cannot deliver.

Fusion as Architecture, Not Feature

Treating each AIS mandate as a discrete system with its own sensor pipeline is the most consequential deployment mistake anyone can make. Fragmented modules cannot share context, resolve conflicting inputs, or prioritise the most critical threat when multiple conditions overlap.

Effective ADAS — and viable AEB specifically — requires a unified intelligence architecture: surround-view perception fused into a shared environmental model, processed on a single compute platform with latency suited to safety-critical decisions. Driver monitoring must feed every system, not operate as a standalone AIS 184 module, because driver attention state should modulate when every alert fires and at what threshold AEB intervenes. This is a systems engineering philosophy — the only approach that produces coherent, trustworthy behaviour on a real road.

Why AIS 162 Is an Entirely Different Problem

India's expanding expressway and national highway network carries high-speed, high-density traffic — compressing braking time windows and raising the stakes of both missed detections and false activations. The host vehicle may be a 20-metre rigid truck, an 80-metre wind turbine blade transporter, or a tanker carrying 25,000 litres of liquid cargo. Load weight, centre of gravity, fluid surge, and trailer articulation all interact with braking force in ways a uniform AEB calibration cannot accommodate — an intervention that prevents a collision in one loading state can induce a rollover in another.

Monsoon-reduced tyre adhesion and seasonal sensor degradation further complicate the decision envelope. The AI underpinning AIS 162 must be trained on this full complexity through real-world field data. Models built on foreign test tracks carry systematic blind spots in India's traffic mix and driving behaviour. Local data maturity is a baseline requirement, not a premium differentiator.

The Cost Trap: When Compliance Replaces Capability

Cost sensitivity is structurally embedded in Indian OEM procurement. When a mandate arrives, the instinct is to find the lowest-cost component that satisfies certification, or to pressure suppliers into downgrading specifications. For active safety, this is dangerous. A system that passes homologation under controlled conditions but performs inconsistently in the field actively undermines safety.

Drivers who experience chronic nuisance alerts will distrust the technology; an AEB system that activates incorrectly at highway speeds creates hazards. A homologation certificate and a system that reduces fatalities are not the same outcome — and deploying technology to tick a compliance box will never achieve the latter.

India's ADAS mandates define the minimum. Whether AIS 184, 186, 187, 188, and 162 translate into fewer collisions depends on implementation quality — contextually intelligent alerting systems that earn driver trust, and locally validated AI with full vehicle dynamics awareness for AEB. Compliance is the floor. Safety is the goal. OEMs that internalise that distinction will build systems that matter on the road.

How GenAI and Human Ingenuity are Redefining Automotive Engineering

Autocar Professional Bureau — Mon, 18 May 2026 12:49:12

A few years ago, I watched a team of engineers use generative AI to redesign a simple structural member to absorb impact loading. What began as a learning experiment turned into something extraordinary. The AI-generated design was less iterative and therefore faster, lighter, stronger, and more sustainable than any version the team had created before. It was a small moment with a big implication: machines were starting to co-engineer.

In automotive product development, we are witnessing a transition as significant as the move from drafting boards to CAD or from combustion to electrification. Generative AI (GenAI) is no longer just another digital tool. It is becoming a creative collaborator, one that not only challenges and complements but also surprises us with its creativity.

The Expanding Canvas of GenAI

Automotive engineers today are not starting with a blank page; they’re co-creating with algorithms. GenAI tools now optimise designs that once took weeks in hours, helping teams balance performance, safety, sustainability, and cost in the same digital workflow. From Detroit to Stuttgart to Pune, GenAI is already reshaping how vehicles are imagined, validated, and brought to market as a competitive differentiator today. It touches nearly every stage of engineering design: innovative materials, rapid prototyping, sustainable and optimised structural design. But the real story lies in how it addresses age-old challenges: long vehicle development cycles, underutilised data, costly iterations, and knowledge loss between teams. Let’s look at how this plays out across three levels of design.

At the component level, AI generates thousands of alternatives for parts such as brackets, beams, or crossbars guiding engineers toward optimal, elegant solutions.At the sub-system level, it predicts design parameters that influence performance, enabling earlier, cost-effective design decisions.And at the system level, GenAI acts prescriptively, recommending design changes to meet regulatory or performance goals.

The cumulative benefit is fewer iterations, reduced prototyping time, lower material consumption, and a faster and more sustainable development cycle. More importantly, GenAI is teaching us new ways to think about engineering itself.

The Age of Co-engineering

For decades, the role of digital tools in automotive engineering was largely confined to simulation. These tools helped us test, validate, and refine what human engineers had already created. This approach made us faster and more confident, but it was always reactive.

GenAI flips the sequence completely. It moves AI upstream, into the earliest stages of design where creativity and decision-making begin. Instead of waiting for an engineer to produce a concept, GenAI starts by exploring millions of possibilities within defined goals and constraints. It can propose alternative geometries, materials, or layouts that humans might never consider, and then, together with CAE, optimise them for performance, cost, and sustainability.

The engineer becomes a curator who interprets, refines, and guides these AI-generated ideas toward practical realisation. This is co-engineering. AI is no longer just an analytical tool that validates expert ideas; it has become a creative collaborator that inspires them. We express intent, and together with AI we discover new ways to reach that goal.This shift from document-centric to data-centric engineering allows human intuition and machine intelligence to operate together. Foundation models trained on CAD, simulation, and sensor data are beginning to optimise entire vehicle platforms. In manufacturing, AI is starting to co-create processes, spotting anomalies and minimising rework through continuous learning loops.

Human Ingenuity Remains at the Core

Even as AI becomes more capable, it lacks one thing that defines true engineering: context. Algorithms may mathematically optimise for performance or shape for a component, but only humans can understand trade-offs around comfort, cost, manufacturability, or aesthetics.

Ingenuity in engineeringis about empathy, intuition, and imagination. The same spirit that led Carl Benz to ask, “Why do we need horses to move?” or drove Vinton Cerf to create email protocols to communicate with his deaf wife, these moments of human care and curiosity push engineering towards innovation.

GenAI amplifies, not replaces, this ingenuity.It takes on the heavy computation so engineers can think critically, imagine boldly, and connect disparate insights.AI-driven sentiment analysis helps engineering teams understand customer pain points in real time across markets. GenAI-based design tools compress prototyping cycles from weeks to hours. AI-powered testing simulates user behaviourto uncover corner cases long before physical trials. Engineering becomes faster, yes, but it’s more connected, contextual, and inclusive than ever before.

Ethics, Responsibility and the Edge Ahead

Every major technological shift carries risk, and AI is no exception. Biases in data, lack of transparency, insufficient functional understanding, and ethical use of generated content require constant attention. But within product development, proprietary data and controlled environments ensure traceability and accountability.

The urgent question is not whether AI can design like humans, but how far we want to push the boundaries of this collaboration. Within the next three to five years, machines may be capable of designing entire engineering systems that meet both functional and regulatory requirements, not just as black boxes, but as transparent, auditable partners in creativity. Responsible AI demands rigour and reflection, not restraint.

Redefining the Engineer’s Role

As we step deeper into the age of thinking machines, success will depend more on how well we co-engineer with intelligent systems. The best engineers of tomorrow will combine curiosity, judgment, and creativity with the analytical power of AI.

I often return to Alan Turing’s timeless question: “Can machines think?” Seventy-five years later, I think we have a better one: Can machines help us think and co-engineer better? In automotive engineering, that answer is already clear. What we have ahead is not the challenge of competing with AI but the opportunity to co-engineer with it.

Dr Anshuman Awasthi is Senior Vice President and Head of Powertrain Engineering at Mercedes-Benz Research & Development India. He is an automotive R&D leader and innovation strategist focused on the intersection of engineering, AI, and sustainability. He writes about how emerging technologies are impacting SW development, design, and manufacturing. Views expressed are the author's personal.

How Human Intelligence Inspires the Machines That Keep Us Safe

Autocar Professional Bureau — Sat, 16 May 2026 12:50:17

For decades, automotive safety has evolved through engineering precision, be it via stronger materials, better crash structures or incremental improvements in passive protection. However, today the change is far more fundamental, with OEMs not just building safer cars, but also entire intelligent systems that think about safety – the blueprint for which is human intelligence.

Human intelligence isn’t about just reacting to stimuli, but contextual and predictive. A driver navigating a busy street is constantly reading intent, prioritising signals and making micro decisions in real-time. Much of this is subconscious, drawing on experience and pattern recognition rather than explicit rules. This is exactly the complexity the automotive industry is now attempting to replicate.

The rise of technologies like Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) reflects this shift. According to JATO Dynamics, ADAS penetration in India has already reached around 8.3% in passenger vehicles in H1 2025, marking a 33% year-on-year growth in adoption.

While traditional systems operated on predefined rules, these modern systems are beginning to replicate human cognition, interpreting context, weighing possibilities and adapting to dynamic conditions.

Perception Reimagined

At the heart of intelligence lies perception, inspired by how humans process visual and spatial cues like distance, speed, movement and intent, often without conscious effort. Replicating this ability in machines has been a major breakthrough in automotive safety.

For this, modern systems have shifted from single-sensor input to sensor fusion. Intelligent systems like ADAS integrate inputs from cameras, radar, LiDAR and ultrasonic sensors to create a real-time 360-degree model of the environment. Today, features like forward collision warning, adaptive cruise control and pedestrian detection are becoming increasingly common across vehicles in India.

The arrival of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) takes this a step further. With the integration of AI, these systems aren’t just programmed - but trained. By processing vast datasets across diverse driving conditions, these systems improve their ability to identify and respond, much like how humans refine their driving over time. This “learn from experience” ability mirrors human cognitive development, where repeated exposure strengthens judgement and decision-making over time.

Moving from Reaction to Anticipation

A key trait of human intelligence is the ability to anticipate risks rather than merely react to it. Experienced drivers don’t just react, they are able to predict vehicle braking, changes in traffic flow and even pedestrian movement.

Translating this into machines, modern automotive safety systems are moving beyond perception to decision-making. Instead of simply identifying objects, these systems analyse how situations are evolving by tracking changes in the driving environment over time. By continuously interpreting various vehicle and driver parameters, the system can assess the likelihood of potential risks and initiate timely intervention, often before hazards fully emerge.

This shift towards anticipation is particularly critical in dynamic and often unpredictable driving environments such as those found in India. It represents a shift from reactive safety mechanisms to proactive risk management.

Building Trust & Validation

As machines start taking on a greater role in decision-making, the conversation inevitably shifts to trust. Unlike traditional mechanisms, intelligent safety systems operate in dynamic environments, making split-second decisions that directly impact human lives. Therefore, ensuring these systems function securely and reliably becomes essential.

Trust in experienced drivers isn’t because they are perfect, but because of their consistent decision-making abilities. For machines to achieve the same level of trust, secure software architectures and rigorous validation frameworks need to be involved. Automotive cybersecurity plays a key role here -isolating critical functions in embedded vehicle hardware, while secure architectures ensure thatconnectedsystems operate without compromise. This is particularly important in connected vehicles, wherein multiple systems communicate with each other and external networks as well.

Equally important is the role of automotive software validation, which has become far more complex. To address this, industries today are increasingly adopting AI-driven validation frameworks, combining large-scale simulations with real-world testing. These simulations help identify potential weakness, refine system responses and ensure consistent performance across different environments.

In many ways, this mirrors how humans learn. Similar to how humans improve their judgement through experience, intelligent systems are constantly being tested, trained and refined to enhance their decision-making capabilities – essential in building confidence in machine-driven safety.

Conclusion

As machines become more intelligent, the line between human intuition and machine capabilities continues to blur. In today’s evolving mobility landscape, safety has transformed from protecting passengers in an accident to preventing accidents altogether. This shift is being enabled by intelligent systems, which inspired by human cognition, support decisions, reduce uncertainty and build trust.

The future of road safety lies in the convergence of human insight and machine intelligence. As technologies continue to mature, vehicles will not only assist drivers, but understand the road much like humans, reaching a point where they could act faster and more effectively in keeping us safe.

Sharad Bairathi is Managing Director, Embitel Technologies. Views expressed are the author's personal.

Start of Production is Now Day Zero in the SDV Era

Autocar Professional Bureau — Sat, 16 May 2026 12:33:49

The real test of a modern vehicle often begins after the launch event, photo opportunities, and long after the final program review has been closed. A vehicle is already in the customer’s hands when a fault surfaces in one market, but cannot be reproduced reliably in validation. The diagnostic code points to one controller, while the logs suggest something else. Validation cannot reproduce the issue with confidence, and the supplier maintains that its Electronic Control Unit (ECU) is operating to specification. The cloud team has data, but lacks sufficient context. The dealership replaces a part, the issue returns, and another warranty claim is filed as ‘no trouble found.’ After-sales seeks answers, program leadership demands timelines, and the customer expects only one outcome – the vehicle should work.This is no longer a corner case, but the operating reality of the industry today. For years, Start of Production (SOP) marked the point at which the primary engineering effort was considered complete, with subsequent changes limited to service actions, field fixes, or the next model year, rather than continuous product evolution.

That logic is breaking down fast. A connected vehicle is not a finished product when it rolls off the line. It is a platform waiting to be evolved. It must be secured, updated, diagnosed, monitored, and improved for years after purchase. The metal may be assembled at the plant, but the engineering life of the product is just getting started.That is why Start of Production (SOP) is now day zero.The industry often talks about software-defined vehicles (SDVs) as a product shift. It is that, but the bigger shift is in how the business has to operate around the vehicle. Many OEMs are still attempting to manage continuous software evolution using rigid, hardware-era stage gates. This gap is increasingly visible in slower issue resolution, field quality challenges, rising warranty costs, and longer timelines for root cause closure. The product has evolved faster than the enterprise built to support it.

Software is no longer just another part

The old automotive model was built to handle physical complexity and it did well. The challenge now is different. A growing share of vehicle complexity lies in software behaviour, timing dependencies, backend interactions and cross-domain conditions that do not stay neatly within one component or team’s scope. That is why a battery drain complaint is not always about the battery, and a telematics dropout is not always about the telematics unit. What appears as a single malfunction may result from a combination of software state handling, network latency, backend handshakes, calibration dependencies and operating conditions that align only intermittently. These issues are rarely clean or contained.

What follows is often predictable and part of the problem. The issue gets split across teams: one reviews software, another checks logs, validation attempts reproduction and suppliers stay within their boundaries. Meanwhile, dealerships interpret software-driven behaviour using tools designed primarily for hardware diagnosis. By the time the full picture emerges, valuable time has been lost.This is one reason field issues now take so long to understand and even longer to close. The problem is not a lack of capable engineers, but that software-driven failures behave like system events, while many organisations still respond as if they were isolated component issues. The gap is costly visible in delayed root cause analysis, rising ‘no trouble found’ claims, repeated workshop visits and weak feedback loops between the field and engineering. More fundamentally, it reflects an inability to quickly determine what actually happened in the vehicle and why. The SDV is exposing a reality the industry can no longer ignore. A continuous product cannot be managed through disconnected engineering systems.

OTA is far bigger than an Update Mechanism

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the industry’s continued use of the term ‘over-the-air (OTA) capability.’ Too often, OTA is treated as a delivery mechanism almost like a glorified wireless USB stick, which underestimates what it has become. OTA is not just about pushing patches to the vehicle, it is a two-way lifecycle capability.It allows manufacturers to deploy improvements, calibrations and new features without requiring workshop visits. More importantly, a mature OTA pipeline does not just push software into the fleet, it pulls targeted diagnostic data back to inform the next engineering cycle.This fundamentally changes OTA’s role. It becomes the means by which manufacturers retain engineering control after launch, enabling product behaviour to be corrected, refined, governed and understood in the field, while addressing cybersecurity and sustaining software quality beyond SOP.

The complexity of OTA lies not in package transfer, but in the discipline surrounding it – dependency control, variant management, campaign logic, rollback strategy, software provenance, validation evidence, cybersecurity assurance and regulatory traceability. Many organisations are still building this capability. Sending software is straightforward compared to understanding what is changing, where, what it depends on and how field behaviour diverges from lab assumptions.In the SDV era, OTA is not merely a connectivity feature, it is the operating system of post-production engineering.

Edge Intelligence is no longer optional

The same blunt reality applies to data.Modern vehicles generate enormous amounts of data. The industry’s first instinct was to collect more, ship more, store more and analyze more in the cloud. That model has limits and those limits are now becoming evident. The cloud is too slow, too expensive and too distant to handle the full volume of raw vehicle data in a meaningful way. Without intelligence at the edge, OEMs are not building smart fleets, they are building expensive telemetry warehouses. This is why edge intelligence matters. Its role is practical. It acts as a filter by separating normal from abnormal behaviour, preserving context around meaningful anomalies and sending signal rather than noise. By the time raw data reaches the cloud, a brief glitch may have already lost its meaning. A local model at the edge can detect patterns, capture context and escalate actionable insights. This shortens diagnostic cycles, reduces bandwidth use, lowers cloud costs and improves the quality of engineering analysis.Raw telemetry is easy to generate but difficult to interpret. Edge intelligence helps determine what matters before the enterprise is overwhelmed by what does not. This is not a future concept, but a cost, speed and supportability issue today.

AI is the Multiplier, not the Engineer

AI is another area where the market is saying too much and understanding too little. There is a tendency to present AI as a solution that can fix bad software, processes and architecture on its own. It cannot. In connected vehicle engineering, AI is most effective when it acts less like a magician and more like a high-speed filter for human expertise, particularly in diagnostics, prognostics and root cause analysis.A good engineer can reason through a complex failure; the challenge is scale. Across fleets of hundreds of thousands or millions of vehicles, the relationships between software versions, usage conditions, environmental triggers, ECU interactions and backend behaviour quickly exceed what teams can process manually. This is where AI earns its place.It can detect weak digital signatures that precede physical failures such as small voltage drifts over time or patterns across the fleet that local investigations would miss. By narrowing the search space and prioritising what matters, it accelerates root cause analysis.However, engineering judgment remains essential. The final call rests with the engineer who understands system behaviour, safety implications, validation evidence, and real-world impact. AI should not replace that judgment, it should make it faster, sharper and better informed. It is not a standalone solution, but a means to shorten the path to the truth.

Software Factories are the Foundation of Scale

If OTA is the lifecycle mechanism, and edge intelligence and AI make the vehicle more diagnosable and supportable, software factories are what make the system scalable. The automotive industry can no longer integrate software like a craft activity. n this context, a software factory means industrialising code production in the same way the industry once industrialised vehicle manufacturing moving beyond manual, artisanal integration. It includes automated CI/CD pipelines, virtualised ECUs in the cloud, automated hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing, built-in traceability and tighter integration across development, validation, compliance and deployment.OEMs need this now for a simple reason that software scale has outgrown spreadsheet governance. Cybersecurity updates across vehicle variants cannot be managed manually, and regulations such as UNECE R156 cannot be addressed through fragmented toolchains or email-driven processes. Continuous software evolution is not feasible when release, validation and compliance systems remain disjointed.

A software factory is not just about speed. It is about controlled scale, discipline and repeatability. The focus is no longer on adding isolated digital capabilities, but on helping OEMs connect embedded engineering, cloud architecture, AI pipelines, validation and field operations into a continuous loop – one that will define future competitiveness.

The Winners will Build the Loop

The most important change in automotive is no longer confined to vehicle architecture. It is happening in the relationship between the vehicle and the enterprise responsible for it—and that is where the next decade will be won or lost. The companies that succeed will stop treating software as another item on the BOM and start treating it as the living logic of the product. They will recognise that SOP is not the end of engineering responsibility, but the point at which it becomes continuous. They will connect what others still manage in silos – embedded software, cloud platforms, OTA, AI, diagnostics, validation, cybersecurity and field operations, because that is what the SDV demands. Not better slogans. Not more dashboards. Not another layer of disconnected tools, but a continuous engineering loop. The companies that build that loop first will not just update vehicles more effectively, they will run the automotive business differently.

Nitin Kamble is Associate Vice President and Expert Delivery - Connected Vehicles, Tata Technologies. Views expressed are the author's personal.

Driving Safety, Sustainability, and the Road to the Centenary

Autocar Professional Bureau — Tue, 12 May 2026 09:27:21

As Volvo Cars marks 99 years globally this April, the milestone is less a celebration of history and more a signal of strategic continuity. Founded in 1927 in Gothenburg, Sweden, Volvo Cars has endured a century of change by anchoring itself to a clear philosophy: design mobility around people, not technology alone. In an industry where relevance is constantly contested, longevity has been earned through clarity of purpose and disciplined reinvention.

That purpose was articulated as early as 1936, when Volvo’s founders wrote: “An automobile is driven by people. The fundamental principle for all construction work must therefore be safety.” Nearly a century later, that philosophy remains intact - only now, it is amplified by software, electrification, and artificial intelligence.

Safety has never been a formatting feature for Volvo Cars; it has been the organising principle of the company. The three-point seat belt, introduced in 1959, remains one of the most significant safety innovations in industrial history, credited with saving over a million lives worldwide. What distinguishes Volvo is not just invention, but intent. Then-President Gunnar Engellau and engineer Nils Bohlin made the decision to share the patent freely, a conviction that safety should not be owned.

Decades later, that thinking continues to shape the company’s direction. As our CEO Håkan Samuelsson once observed, “There is no point in being the safest car if nobody else learns from you.” Today, that belief manifests in Safe Space Technology, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), real-time occupant sensing, and the next generation of multi-adaptive seat belts, technologies designed not merely to react, but to anticipate.

The past decade has introduced a second inflection point as consequential as safety: electrification. Volvo Cars was among the earliest legacy manufacturers to accept that the transition was not optional. As Samuelsson put it bluntly, “The industry will be electric—there is no turning back.” Under successive leadership, electrification has been framed not only as a climate responsibility but as a long-term competitiveness strategy.

That thinking has matured further. Another former CEO of Volvo Cars captured the shift succinctly when he said: “Electrification is not just good for the climate; it creates better cars. The real transformation is how software, data, and sustainability come together.” As a result, Volvo’s electric strategy now spans the full value chain from ethical raw-material sourcing and battery transparency to circular manufacturing and climate-neutral operations.

India represents a disproportionately important chapter in this 99-year global journey. While Volvo Car India is relatively young, the market sits at the intersection of three global priorities: rapid urbanisation, climate transition, and digital adoption. In that sense, India is not a peripheral market it is a proving ground for the future of mobility.

The shift to electric vehicles here is gradual but irreversible. Policy momentum, infrastructure build-out, and rising consumer awareness are reshaping demand curves. Importantly, premium buyers in India are no longer evaluating cars purely on performance or brand heritage. They assess trust, safety, sustainability, and ease of ownership. That shift aligns closely with Volvo’s global positioning.

At Volvo Car India, our role is to translate global ambition into local relevance. Our electric portfolio reflects this intent of combining Scandinavian design, world-class safety, and real-world performance adapted to Indian conditions. What is increasingly evident is that Indian customers are willing to adopt electric mobility when the experience is intuitive and uncompromising.

Luxury today is defined by simplicity. That is why we are investing in an ecosystem approach to EV adoption, starting with home-charging solutions, partnerships for long-distance charging corridors such as the Mumbai–Nashik highway, and exploration of decentralised renewable energy integration. These are not marketing initiatives; they are infrastructure decisions aimed at reducing friction in everyday use.

Sustainability, however, cannot stop with the products. Volvo’s philosophy has long been that businesses must earn their place in society. As our ex CEO once noted, “We don’t add sustainability for the sake of sustainability. It is embedded at the design stage, how it benefits the customer and how it benefits society.” In India, this translates into community engagement, urban restoration initiatives, and long-term social impact that complements our commercial presence.

As Volvo Cars approaches its centenary, the roadmap is explicit. Electrification will accelerate, safety systems will become predictive through AI, and circularity will increasingly determine how vehicles are designed and reused. In markets like India, which are young, complex, and aspirational, the winners will not be defined by horsepower, but by the ability to harmonise safety, technology, and environmental responsibility.

At 99, Volvo Cars is not reflecting on a legacy; it is investing in relevance. The road ahead is electric, intelligent, and human-centric, and India will be central to how that next century is shaped.

Jyoti Malhotra is the Managing Director of Volvo Car India. Views expressed are the author's personal.

Driving Safety, Sustainability, and the Road to the Centenary

Autocar Professional Bureau — Tue, 12 May 2026 09:27:21

Jyoti Malhotra is the Managing Director of Volvo Car India. Views expressed are the author's personal.