‘We are into a new design philosophy’

This must probably be Tim Leverton’s toughest assignment in the over three decades he has spent in the world automotive industry, during which he has engineered, designed and developed a whole range of cars and other vehicles. As one responsible for the global R&D of Tata Motors, Leverton has led the team that has designed and put out two cars, hatchback Bolt and compact sedan Zest, a concept crossover Nexon and the promise of new cars every year. He took time off during the Auto Expo in Delhi to talk to Business Line about the challenges ahead for the company. Edited excerpts from the interview:

The new vehicles are wonderful and even the concepts look production-ready. What has been the challenge and how have you attempted to re-invent yourself?

We focussed on where we see opportunities to satisfy customers and to be innovative and to do things that will attract customers to our products. We focussed on these three areas of design, driving experience and connected experience.

We are into a new design philosophy, which is a more confident, dynamic image and a more sporty design language. We have reinterpreted the front of the car in a way which is more contemporary and gives a better proportion and stance. We are picking two or three elements of the exterior of the car, which will become elements of what run through the different products in our portfolio. That is the new design language for Tata Motors, which is a more contemporary feel.

We are changing the basis of the interior design to incorporate more technology and more interface, display of information and so forth. That is an area that is going to change rapidly in the next few years.

In driving experience, we focussed on two main areas. One is engines, in terms of the type of engine technology that we need to give both a good driving experience and good refinement and economy. And, good performance and fuel economy.

The second is in the dynamics of the car – steering, suspension, controls, people feeling comfortable and easy to drive and feeling secure and safe when they are driving the cars. That is reflected on the Bolt and Zest. We have used new suspension on the front and the rear and new electronic steering system with active return function. This is giving lighter steering and good feedback and good sense of control. Our Revotron turbo-charged gasoline engine offers 25 per cent more torque than any other gasoline car in that segment. This is also an important shift for us because we have been strong in diesel in the past. We were not so well represented in gasoline and we are now making a strong investment in gasoline; it is the first in a family of gasoline engines.

On the connected side, we are offering for the first time in the compact hatch segment, touch screen display and a platform for connectivity in the car, which means you can bring your smart phone into the car and you can mirror it into the screen. You can control its contents from the screen safely and easily. We are bringing features like text to speech technology where the console reads out your SMS messages while you are on the go. That is safer and more convenient. We worked with Harman, which is a leading technology developer in this area.

We have asked a different question – perhaps than has been asked a few years earlier, how do you integrate the phone with the car. We have asked ourselves how does the car fit into the customers’ connected world. We are becoming quite sophisticated in terms of how we get our data. How does the car fit into that. That is a different type of question.

Obviously, quality and reliability are big factors. As we have improved our development process, we have improved our quality control and that is evident in these new cars, and the way we go into production and the way we work with our supplier base.

The Indica was designed by IDEA. When you really looked at the design overall, there was nothing much to complain about the overall design. It was the other issues – quality of materials used, overall refinement. How have these been improved in these new cars?

The Indica was a fantastic design. Probably the shift that we have made in the last three years is we have grown lot of capability for design in-house. Our design work is now fundamentally driven in-house rather than being done outside. The way we can integrate that with the engineering process is much better. We have got three big studios in Pune, we have a studio in the UK and one, we have a studio in Turin, Italy. The output that you start to see now with the Bolt and the Zest and the concept cars reflects those capabilities. We have got international people in all three studios. From the early stage of the design process, we can work with suppliers to check the processes and check how things can be made to fit together. The product engineers themselves can do a lot of detail analysis.

What was your mandate when you started on the new cars?

The mandate was to come up to international standards and to make sure what we offered was innovative, that it was distinctive in terms of the segment the products were in. We created a portfolio band which runs across market segments and runs out until 2020. We are working towards a blueprint and this is the start of a pipeline of new products. We have had a bit of a quieter time and now you will see each year there will be new products. We are looking at each segment and we are looking how do we position against these three areas that I talked about to be leading in those areas, appropriate to each segment. That was the mandate, to create something that will be the basis of our success and customer delight in future.

All these would be global products? It is not just the Indian market that you are looking at?

In the short term our focus is here, because we need to have a strong position here. As we go ahead, we need to work to global standards and we need to be able to sell the cars internationally.

Is the new platform helping you in achieving the required safety and refinement that you expect?

It is. We have worked a lot on the development. We have changed a lot of what was there. If you look at those cars, we have new suspension – front and rear, new braking, we have new steering, new engines, we have the automated manual transmission, which is new. We have new electronics for the connectivity, new styling. It is a new cockpit. There is quite a lot of new content. When people drive the car they will be able to see the step change in terms of the feel. That is driven by our benchmarking against global standards we see in those segments. 

Can you tell us something about the automated manual transmission?

It is a system that gives a good balance of features in terms of affordability and fuel efficiency. It allows the driver to drive without a clutch. He can drive in an automatic mode so that the car chooses when to change gear or he can go into manual mode and change the gears himself. That is something which fits into an easier drive and easy to drive position for the vehicles. It was entirely in tune with what we are hearing from customers. They want that type of feature. We are launching this with the diesel in Bolt and Zest. It will come in petrol a little later. We are also putting it in the Nano. It will go across all our products in due course.

It is essentially a single clutch with a hydraulic actuator.

What is the kind of versatility the Revotron engine offers you and what kind of variations you can do with it?

The thing that led us down the path to configure that engine is because of boosting we can get a much improved torque performance particularly at low engine speed. So, around 1750 we come out to 140 Nm of torque. What that means this is you start to get a much more relaxed drive. You are not using that much of engine speed and that is what results in better mid-range driving. You get fuel economy and good driveability because of that. We can push further and we can get better performance in the future. There are around 20 innovations in the design of that engine which gives this combination of quietness, performance and economy and that is really a theme that we continue to pursue.

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