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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Bengaluru-headquartered ER&D company L&T Technology Services (LTTS) has announced a multi-year engagement within its mobility segment from an automotive manufacturer. The agreement involves software, connectivity and digital engineering services across vehicle technology domains. This win follows the company’s investments in R&D labs and mobility infrastructure designed for programs with global manufacturers.

The engagement covers mobility engineering capabilities, including embedded systems, digital platforms, verification and validation, cloud integration and cybersecurity. LTTS intends to use its engineering expertise and delivery frameworks to support the customer's technology roadmap. 

At present, LTTS operates 22 design centres and 100 innovation labs globally.

The agreement strengthens the partnership between LTTS and the automotive manufacturer in the area of mobility engineering. The company provides design, development, and testing services across the mobility, sustainability, and tech segments. 

Alind Saxena, Executive Director and President, Mobility and Tech at L&T Technology Services, said, “We are proud to deepen our partnership with the valued customer through this strategic engagement. LTTS brings together domain-led engineering, secure development practices and excellence in global delivery to accelerate the future of premium mobility. The win reflects the trust placed in our teams and our commitment to delivering world-class engineering at scale”.

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French technology company Valeo and NATIX Network have announced a partnership to develop a multi-camera World Foundation Model (WFM). The project combines Valeo’s research in artificial intelligence and generative modelling with NATIX’s decentralised physical infrastructure network (DePIN) to create an open-source platform for autonomous driving and robotics.

The initiative aims to move beyond perception-based models by creating a system capable of predicting future states and reasoning about physical interactions in a four-dimensional environment. The model will be trained using NATIX’s data network, which has collected 600,000 hours of video data across the US, Europe and Asia over seven months. This data provides the multi-camera inputs necessary for the spatial perception required by autonomous vehicles and robots.

The partnership builds upon Valeo’s existing open-source frameworks, VaViM (Video Autoregressive Model) and VaVAM (Video-Action Model). While these frameworks were previously trained primarily on front-camera datasets, the integration of NATIX’s multi-camera network expands the AI’s field of vision to 360 degrees.

Under the open-source framework, the partners will release models, datasets and training tools. This approach is intended to allow the research community to fine-tune models and benchmark physical AI across various driving conditions and geographic regions. The collaboration seeks to accelerate the deployment of end-to-end AI models by learning from real-world edge cases captured by vehicles in operation.

Marc Vrecko, Chief Executive Officer, Valeo’s Brain Division, said, “Since our creation in 2018, Valeo’s AI research center has been at the forefront of AI research in the automotive industry, especially in the fields of assisted and autonomous driving. Our goal has always been to advance mobility intelligence safely and responsibly. By combining Valeo’s generative world modeling research expertise with NATIX’s global multi-camera data, we are accelerating both the quality and the accessibility of next-generation end-to-end AI models, enabling the research community to build upon strong open models.”

Alireza Ghods, CEO and Co-Founder, NATIX, added, “WFMs are a once-in-a-generation opportunity — similar to the rise of LLMs in 2017–2020. The teams that build the first scalable world models will define the foundation of the next AI wave: Physical AIs. With our distributed multi-camera network, NATIX has a clear advantage of being able to move faster than large OEMs.”

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Tata Technologies has announced the completion of the 3^rd edition of its innovation hackathon, InnoVent 2026, supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The initiative invited engineering students to develop solutions for mobility challenges in the automotive and manufacturing sectors. The programme received participation from 10,247 students across 404 colleges in India, resulting in 2,822 projects.

The competition focused on the theme of intelligence-driven mobility for the year 2030. Participants received over 650 hours of mentoring and training from subject matter experts to convert their concepts into prototypes. The top 10 teams presented their work at the company's Hinjewadi campus in Pune before a jury of industry leaders from Jaguar Land Rover, Air India and ES-Tec Group.

Team Drushti from CMR College of Engineering & Technology, Hyderabad, secured the first prize of INR 300,000 for a system that customises vehicle infotainment for visually impaired drivers. Second place went to Team The T-Factor from Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai, for an AI-based breakdown prevention system. Team SwarmSync from the International Institute of Information Technology (I²IT), Pune, took third place for an intelligent fleet management solution using V2X communication.

Tata Technologies offered career opportunities to all 42 finalists involved in the top projects. Furthermore, all participants were granted one-year access to the iGETIT learning platform to study emerging technologies. The finalist projects covered areas such as blockchain for vehicle security, wireless charging for electric vehicles, and AI-led battery monitoring.

The event featured a humanoid robot that performed roles such as coordinating panel discussions and interacting with attendees. A panel of industry experts discussed the global demand for engineering talent and the impact of technology on future mobility.

Warren Harris, MD & CEO, Tata Technologies, said, "InnoVent at Tata Technologies represents our conviction that the future is shaped by those who combine engineering excellence with human purpose to engineer a better world".

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Kia India has announced the re-launch of its Kia Inspiring Drive (K.I.D) Program, debuting alongside the New Kia Seltos. The initiative is a driving score system designed to monitor real-time behaviour and provide insights into habits. Accessed via the Kia Connect app, the programme will be rolled out across the company’s connected vehicle portfolio in phases.

The K.I.D score is calculated using a three-month rolling average based on parameters including rapid acceleration, rapid deceleration and sudden starts. To ensure data accuracy, the system applies a weighted value based on the specific vehicle. This methodology aims to reflect long-term driving patterns rather than isolated incidents.

The programme incorporates community-based leaderboards, allowing owners to compare scores and track their standing within the Kia community. By turning road safety into an interactive experience, the manufacturer intends to encourage responsible driving through recognition and competition.

The behaviour-based scoring system provides data to help users understand the impact of their habits on road safety. Kia is supporting the re-launch with a digital and press campaign to increase awareness among its customer base.

Atul Sood, Senior Vice-President – Marketing & Sales, Kia India, said, “Safety remains at the core of Kia’s philosophy, and with the re-launch of the Kia Inspiring Drive program alongside the New Seltos, we are taking another meaningful step towards encouraging responsible driving behaviour. By offering customers clear, data-driven insights into their driving patterns, the KID program empowers them to make safer choices on the road, while also enhancing their overall ownership experience.”

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