Can India make a driverless car?

Tata Motors developed the world’s cheapest car, the Nano, in 2010. It made headlines but also threw up a vital question along the way. Is India capable of just making low-priced cars? Can it actually dream big and develop a sophisticated driverless car?

The idea of a driverless car is not so new with the likes of Mercedes, Nissan, Audi and Volvo working on this for long. Technology majors like Google and Intel have also evinced interest in taking this idea forward.

India, in its turn, has premier engineering institutes with the IITs and NITs leading the way. It also has support from corporate houses like Mahindra & Mahindra whose ‘Spark the Rise’ competition offers $700,000 to develop a driverless car.

Different needs India’s needs could differ from the West which makes it important for companies here to develop their own driverless system and a disruptive innovation in the process. Ancillary makers can support this endeavour too. India has the right ecosystem to develop driverless cars. Will someone bite the bullet though?

Multiple benefits There are a host of safety benefits in this technology. Driverless cars do not lose focus or get drowsy; they react in milliseconds, which means that city cars will be efficient and roads, fast and safe. An MIT study in 2013 estimated that self-driving cars and trucks could eliminate a large number of accidents and traffic snarls.

At least 13 people die every hour in road accidents in our country where over speeding accounts for more than 50 per cent of cases.

The Planning Commission report by BK Chaturvedi estimates road accidents to cost roughly $20 billion annually. This is despite the fact that India has only one per cent of the world’s vehicles.

Self-drive technology may be a boon in this backdrop. With driverless technology, people can stop looking for a parking spot in busy streets and alight wherever they want. The car can find a dedicated parking spot all by itself and pick the passenger up from the exact point it dropped him/her. Cars can plan and take more efficient routes with less idling time in traffic. This will cut back on fuel consumption.

Future plans As a result, planners in India can get cars to merge in cooperative patterns and, hopefully, put an end to snarls. Traffic intersections can be reworked with the hope that every car on the road will comply with the rules. Traffic lights could also become scarce thanks to hidden sensors in cars and streets. Cities of the future could have narrower streets and cleaner air, with no need for parking spots.

A child old enough to ride a bicycle could be the right candidate to take a driverless car trip. The elderly and handicapped can also use it to go places. In terms of traffic policing, so long as a car is controlled by a driver, it needs to be operated manually.

The more it is run by a computer, the easier it becomes to password-protect the car’s security system. This makes it a lot harder to steal unoccupied cars.

Buying, insuring and maintaining a car is expensive for the Indian consumer. Driverless cars of the future would be the best source of sharing schemes, smart taxi firms and affordable leasing options.

The design of roads and traffic are built around human needs which means lots of road signs, lane markers and street lights. All this only increases government spending. Speed limits can be safely raised when cars are driven with machine predictability.

VV Ravi Kumar is a Faculty in Marketing and Parth M Doshi is an MBA student at Symbiosis Institute of Business Management Pune. The views here are personal.

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