Q) How do you see the Indian automotive market, and what are the factors that drive and influence Covestro’s product offerings in India?

Anand Srinivasan: The McKinney Report 2019 states that India is likely to become the third largest automotive market in the world. The report says that the key factors that drive this would be rapid urbanisation, a burgeoning middle class, increased consumer spends, continued government focus on the sector, and low sharing of mobility barring high-density urban areas.   

We feel there could be a spike in the luxury car segment and the mid-entry level cars. These are facilitated by the government focus on infrastructure development and the love of inter-city independent travel. In India, cars are seen as a status symbol and this will continue to drive the consumption pattern.

This year's Auto Expo was dominated by electric vehicles where auto-giants like Hyundai, Mahindra and Mahindra, and Tata Motors unveiled their plans.

Another significant factor is that India continues to be the centre for frugal engineering. This leads to cost-efficient, ground-up innovation that also fits into each consumer's value proposition and fuel the growth in consumption.

Q)  Consumers are very choosey about the car interior. Personal car users want interiors that appeal to their personality and emotions. Riders in share-riding expect the interiors to be robust, and functional. Such broad expectations are putting much pressure on designers and engineers of the OEMs. How do you take this challenge as a material supplier? What products do you offer for automotive interiors?

Anand Srinivasan: In India, car interiors traditionally have been robust – irrespective of the type or choice of interior. The end-consumers always prefer robust and highly functional products to delicate and limited functionality products. This comes from the value proposition ingrained in the Indian DNA.

The expectations in the personal car space are most likely to become a requirement in the share-riding space also. This will be essentially driven by pressure on margins which will force share-car owners to focus on value-addition to generate premiums. As a result, a product today for the personal car space will become an innovation for a share-car owner tomorrow. 

So any product, we create for the personal car space becomes an investment in the innovation for the more mass requirements of share-riding. Covestro provides materials like polyurethanes for seats, coverings and coatings. Covestro's flexible polyurethane foam car seats offer significant ergonomic advantages over seats in other materials and reduce fuel consumption.

Q)  Automotive lighting has gained momentum due to the growing focus on safety and energy efficiency. The designing of headlamps and rear lamps is getting more complicated. What kind of challenges are you facing in this segment, and how are you tackling them? What new technologies do you are work on in the segment?

Anand Srinivasan: Safety and energy efficiency is definitely on top of our agenda. Factors such as emphasis on road safety, implementation of stringent government regulations, and rise in production drive the growth of the automotive lighting market. However, the high cost of LEDs had restrained the automotive lighting market growth. Lighting is one of the more challenging needs to address. Simple understanding like the type of lighting and the impact on cars coming on the opposite direction can often be the critical differentiator.

The most important contribution to cost is the demand for vehicles equipped with advanced technologies. While globally, features like communication with the pedestrians to ensure better safety have gained momentum, the focus in India is more skewed to convenience. The concept of safety (which is among the slow-moving traffics globally) is significantly different. In that, the ability to use halogen lighting without inconveniencing the driver on the opposite side could be a very simple example. These and the focus on reducing carbon footprint on any consumption have gained momentum.

However, to our advantage, India is a highly skilled and bright-minded innovative nation. Therefore, our limitations impose on us the need to innovate cost-efficiently without compromising on the product quality and end result.

This holds us in a very good state – where we like to call our innovations as being N&N (needs & norms) compliant. We as an organisation have been able to focus on "Building the Future" through our energy-efficient products across many different industries and are confident of bringing the same to the automotive sector.

Q) A supplier may create excellent materials for the interior or exterior, but it has to be compatible with the design of a product. OEMs also want to offer differentiators in the market. With the growing complexity of interior and exterior designs, what are the challenges that you face?

Anand Srinivasan: For the interior or exterior, the key challenge lies in estimating consumer expectations. The need for any OEM is to read the current and latent needs of the end-consumers and to enable automotive companies to integrate their products into the consumers' life. Before answering this question, I think it is very important to understand the drivers of change in consumer expectations.

The evolving lifestyle of the urban classes and DINKs, DISKs and DIDKs are driving the economy. This essentially means less time at home and more at work. The ability to leave from the work will largely depend on the time utilisation during travel. The second is the need for better connectivity, even on the go. To improve their own productivity, for home tasks or for office work, cars will increasingly need to cater to smarter, easier and more interactive tools like touch screens instead of music systems, voice-activated products and similar others. The third one is a culture of digitised work environment penetrating into family time. With increased exposure to digitisation, even children have taken to it like fish in the water. As a result, family cars are expected to be compliant with the latest gizmos and gadgets that make a child's travel time more interactive while giving parents the chance to complete work on chores on the go. 

The luxury segment, on the other hand, is leaning more towards ensuring that travel is the downtime that people need in their busy lives. Thus the focus on a premium look and feel products, entertainment like exotic grills and mood elements, interactive panels, capacitive switches and more. In this segment, the driver is clearly making the PVQ (Perceived Value Quotient) less elastic. To do that, redefining luxury every 6 months becomes a mandate. I think the level of consumer expectations is very high. For that we are in a constant state of Research and Innovation. (MT)

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European ride-hailing platform Bolt has selected the NVIDIA Alpamayo Stack autonomous driving software to operate its vehicle fleet in Europe, starting with Lucid automobiles.

The deployment commences in Madrid in 2027, with subsequent deployment planned in Germany and France. The initiative supports the integration of at least 25,000 Level 4-ready Lucid vehicles equipped with NVIDIA Hyperion compute and sensor architecture. The program contributes to Bolt's objective of deploying 100,000 autonomous vehicles across Europe and the UNECE region by 2035. The system integrates reasoning artificial intelligence with perception and planning modules alongside NVIDIA Halos safety controls.

Jevgeni Kabanov, President and Head of Autonomous Driving, Bolt, said, “Autonomous driving will change how people move around cities, and Europe should play a major role in how that future is built. Our ambition isn't to bring autonomous driving to just a handful of cities. We want to make autonomous ride-hailing available at scale across Europe, with 100,000 vehicles on our platform by 2035. We're bringing together some of the best technologies in the world to make that possible. Following our first autonomous mobility launch in Luxembourg, our next step with NVIDIA and Lucid is to begin a programme in Madrid in 2027. The Region of Madrid is pioneering a structured framework for commercial autonomous mobility in coordination with national authorities. Germany will also be a priority for what comes next, with cities already setting out clear ambitions for autonomous mobility.”

Rishi Dhall, Vice-President of Automotive, NVIDIA, said, “Robotaxis will scale when every vehicle is built on a common, safety-engineered foundation. NVIDIA Hyperion standardises the compute and sensor architecture across vehicle platforms, while NVIDIA Alpamayo Stack and Halos provide the driving intelligence and safety foundation. Bolt’s European platform, operational experience and work with cities and regulators make it a strong partner to bring autonomous ride-hailing to market at scale in Europe.”

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French tier 1 supplier Valeo has announced plans to develop and industrialise high-performance compute platforms utilising the NVIDIA Hyperion reference architecture and NVIDIA Halos safety system.

The initiative combines Valeo's vehicle integration capabilities with centralised computing architectures to support software-defined mobility systems. The platform utilises the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor architecture to deliver processing performance and redundancy for Level 4 autonomous driving, commercial trucking and robotaxi applications. The development framework enables automakers to integrate features and deploy autonomous technologies across vehicle models.

Marc Vrecko, Chief Executive Officer, Valeo Brain Division, said, "Our work with NVIDIA marks a significant milestone in our mission to make autonomous driving a safe, scalable reality. By seamlessly integrating NVIDIA’s advanced compute power into our next-generation platforms, we are delivering the flexible, centralised intelligence vehicle manufacturers require to redefine the driving experience and meet the evolving demands of tomorrow’s intelligent vehicles."

Rishi Dhall, Vice-President of Automotive, NVIDIA, said, "Valeo’s expertise in high-performance computing, vehicle integration and automotive-scale industrialisation will help automakers adopt NVIDIA Hyperion and NVIDIA Halos at production scale. Together, NVIDIA and Valeo are providing the AI performance, functional safety and scalability needed to accelerate the development of Level 4 autonomous vehicles and robotaxis."

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HCLTech has introduced an artificial intelligence (AI) verification and validation platform utilising NVIDIA simulation tools, agentic systems and open models.

The offering targets vehicle manufacturers and tier-1 suppliers to automate software validation workflows and accelerate release cycles. Built on a simulation-first operating model, the platform connects requirements, test creation, execution, analysis and compliance reporting.

The system integrates HCLTech's engineering expertise and validation model with NVIDIA Omniverse, Cosmos, Alpamayo, NuRec and Isaac Sim technologies to generate scenarios in virtual environments, reducing reliance on physical testing.

Additionally, the platform utilises the NVIDIA Agent Toolkit to orchestrate AI agents powered by Nemotron open models across the validation lifecycle.

Pankaj Tagra, Chief Growth Officer and Global Head of Mobility, HCLTech, said, “Automotive software is evolving faster than traditional validation processes were designed to handle. Frequent software updates, increasingly complex vehicle systems and the need to demonstrate compliance across changing configurations can make validation slow, fragmented and difficult to scale. Powered by NVIDIA, HCLTech’s V&V for Auto is designed to help organisations shift from periodic, labor-intensive testing to continuous, intelligent validation, using simulation and AI to make software release decisions with greater speed and confidence.”

Dr. Sebastian Scheurle, EMEA Industry Lead of Automotive Enterprise, NVIDIA, said, “Validation now sets the pace for software-defined vehicles. With NVIDIA Omniverse, Cosmos and Nemotron at its core, this solution leverages world-class simulation and AI capabilities to support automakers in their journey towards moving more testing into simulation, covering rare and safety-critical scenarios earlier and releasing software with greater confidence.”

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HARMAN has received recognition from the AutoTech Breakthrough Awards, marking the fourth consecutive year the company has been honoured by the market intelligence organisation. The Ready Aware platform received the Driver Safety Solution designation for 2026.

Ready Aware operates as a software-defined vehicle-to-network solution that integrates infrastructure feeds, vehicle telemetry, cloud analytics and digital twin data to provide contextual in-vehicle warnings.

The system processes information regarding road conditions, weather, traffic hazards and signal timing to deliver alerts beyond the driver's line of sight. The architecture works with existing 4G and 5G cellular hardware and vehicle cloud environments, enabling automakers to deploy software updates without hardware modifications. The platform supports Euro NCAP compliance requirements and offers over 15 safety use cases, including intersection warnings, red-light notifications and hazard alerts.

Bryan Vaughn, Managing Director, AutoTech Breakthrough, said, “HARMAN Ready Aware is redefining vehicle safety from reactive intervention to proactive awareness. Almost a quarter of U.S. traffic deaths and roughly half of injuries are related to intersections. Cameras and sensors can be limited by physical occlusions and, on their own, may not have access to information about upcoming signal changes or other traffic conditions. Ready Aware’s software-defined model connects the intelligence already present in cities and connected vehicles, then delivers it to the driver as a timely, contextual alert. Ready Aware turns infrastructure data, vehicle telemetry and cloud analytics into actionable driver awareness—available today, scalable tomorrow, and quickly deployable.”

The system uses a cloud analytics and scoring layer named the Confidence Engine to filter data feeds, reduce false alerts and prioritise notifications to minimise distraction. Automakers can integrate the software via client-to-cloud or cloud-to-cloud configurations to support subscription services and feature monetisation.

Suman Sehra, Global Head of Connectivity Product and Portfolio Management, HARMAN, said, “Ready Aware gives automakers a flexible way to move connected vehicle safety from reactive intervention to proactive awareness. By transforming real-time road intelligence into timely, contextual alerts, Ready Aware helps drivers anticipate hazards before they come into view while giving automakers a scalable foundation to continuously enhance safety through software. This recognition reflects HARMAN’s vision for safer, more informed mobility.”

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