FISITA - 2018 Where is the Indian automotive industry going?

I had the opportunity to attend FISITA - 2018 Automotive World Congress in Chennai on 4th and 5th of October. For those who don't know, the World Congress is one of the largest forums for automotive engineers, executives and professionals to discuss, interact and exchange ideas on emerging trends. 

The theme of this year's event in Chennai was "Disruptive technologies for affordable and sustainable mobility". 

I had the chance to attend couple of technical sessions, a policy discussion on future of electric vehicles in India and the exhibition. Right off, let me say that the event was well organized and had some technical presentations from professionals and academics from across the world. As expected, the presence of domestic automotive companies was dominant. 

Coming to the technical sessions, here is where the wheels come off, with respect to the quality of research and development in the country. Many of the papers, in the session I attended, lacked rigor, depth and little that advanced pre-existing knowledge. I was disappointed that some of the results presented were textbook stuff taught to final year college students in the west. I've attended two editions of the SAE World Congress annually held in Detroit and presented in one of them. I'm sure none of these papers would've passed the peer review stage. I wouldn't entirely blame the engineers. The computational power, type of manpower and the capital that foreign OEMs deploy for product development is order of magnitudes greater than their Indian counterparts. The investment that companies pour in R&D is abysmal in India. 

Moving on to the electric mobility session, focus of the panels were on policy framing and integrating foreign technologies to domestic market. The talk on policy framing is very much welcome. Indian  govt still lacks a coherent understanding of India's needs and a vision for sustainable mobility for the masses. In the absence of high quality human capital, OEMs, policy makers and suppliers in India depend on critical technologies and inputs from outside and tend to design their electric vehicles and the architecture around these technologies. This leads to a mismatch between what is required and what is developed for the market. There was the knee-jerk comparison with China, an EV market that is 20 times larger, couple of order of magnitude more mature with thrust on all areas from encouraging domestic R&D and high end manufacturing, investing in american tech industry to a robust well capitalized policy that puts EV front and center on their mission ahead. 

Coming to the exhibition, it was a nice opportunity for Indian and foreign suppliers and OEMs to interact, learn about each other and explore business opportunities. BMW, Toyota, GM and a bunch of other industry behemoths brought in their concept technologies to display and experience. IIT Madras had some cool development stuff to show. There was obviously the overall upbeat mood that this market provides exciting opportunities in the medium term and everyone wants a piece of the pie. Students from local engineering colleges had the opportunity to display and share their projects and also experience the future of the industry. The disappointing aspect was the lack of thirst amongst Indian companies to capitalize on the opportunity to build a robust homegrown ecosystem. They seem to be happy to invest less, import necessary technologies and build a solution for the short term. 

Lack of human capital, lack of industry-academia research ecosystem and lack of a vision for Indian companies to look beyond the Indian market and into the global markets is keeping our industry couple of decades behind the state of the art. A broken domestic policy that focuses primarily on manufacturing and the jobs it creates doesn't help them either.