Cars in India to take a leap into the future:

New Delhi: It may not be enough any longer that you are able to sync your smartphone to your car. Auto makers want their cars to be smarter.

The kind of cars that can access the Internet, read out your emails, messages and social media updates, put out displays on an LED screen, pull up a route map, or make calls—all on the command of your voice. Or call an ambulance in an accident.

Smart cars, possibly with ecosystems of their own, aren’t products of the distant future.

Sankalp Kale, in fact, believes he will be able to buy one of these maybe soon after he graduates from engineering school next year.

That, of course, would be a car with several smart features, but far fewer and less powerful than what global car makers are envisaging.

At the recent Delhi Auto Expo, the 21-year-old student of SRM University in Ghaziabad was glued to Tata Motors Ltd’s ConnectNext concept car, the kind of car he might want to own one day. It claims to offer cloud connectivity and a human-machine interface.

Tata Motors’ Zest, Hyundai Motor India Ltd’s Xcent, and Ford India Pvt. Ltd’s Figo—compact sedan concepts that were on display at the auto show—will boast of similar technologies after their commercial launches.

“I think one thing that would influence my buying decision is if any of the manufacturers could connect my phone to the car,” Kale said. He owns aSamsung Galaxy S4, among the South Korean company’s most advanced mobile phones.

 

Many cars today already come fitted with Bluetooth, which allows users to sync the music stored in their phones to their car speakers and receive and make calls on the go.

Smart cars go further, with Siri or ‘Ok Google’ kind of features and applications ecosystems of their own that allow a more seamless and intuitive integration with smartphones.

The market has moved away from integrating a phone into the car, saysTim Leverton, president and head, advanced and product engineering, engineering research centre, at Tata Motors. “The question now is different. The question is how does a car fit into the customer’s ecosystem?”

Tata Motors, India’s largest vehicle maker, on 6 February entered a collaboration with Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd to put the features of a smartphone on its vehicles’ consoles.

The announcement largely went unnoticed, but the Indian car market is banking on potential young buyers such as Kale to reach an inflection point from where it can break into the top three global markets.

To be sure, in January car sales declined for a fourth month in succession after having grown marginally in September, putting India on course for its first decline in annual car sales in over a decade. Car sales declined 7.59% to 160,289 units, according to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (Siam).

India is already the second fastest growing auto market and is expected to see strong growth in vehicle production across all segments by 2020, according to the Automotive Component Manufacturing Association of India-EY Vision 2020 study.

Passenger vehicles sales are projected to rise to five million units by 2015 and to more than nine million by 2020 from around two million now. With a rapid change in Indian consumers’ demography, manufacturers will need to upgrade their products to suit the needs of customers such as Kale.

Pushing the need for connected technologies is the fact that Indians are spending more time in their cars as commutes get longer and slower. Additionally, “the thing that has changed customers’ views (of what they want from cars) is the mass availability of smart phones,” Leverton said.

“All our lifestyles have gone digital because of the information revolution and the technology that has become available,” said Kumar Gehlotra, vice-president (engineering), Ford Motor Co. “We can all carry our music with us. We can carry our phone lists, which are very, very long. We carry apps on our phones to access all kinds of content. Customers are going to have conversations in their cars. They are going to look at maps and they are going to listen to music.”

Ford, a pioneer in efforts to develop smart cars, has tied up with Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, to build apps and software for its cars.

  

The Ford EcoSport compact sports utility vehicle, launched in 2013 in India, boasts a subscription-free technology that will, in the case of an accident, automatically call emergency services such as a hospital and the police through the paired phone to provide the car’s GPS location. The technology keeps the phone line open so anyone in the car or the first responders can talk to the hospital or the police.

There are 51 million smartphone users in urban India today, 89% more than in 2012, according to the Smart Phone Incidence Study 2013 study byNielsen. The biggest spike in smartphone ownership came from 16-18 year olds, increasing from 5% of total smartphone users in 2012 to 22%.

“During the lifetime of a car, a customer would probably have may be five different phones because they upgrade their phones a lot faster than they upgrade their cars. We want them to have a seamless experience where if they sell their phone and get a new one and pair it to the car, it seamlessly takes all your data just like that,” said Gehlotra of Ford.

“Or, if two people drive the car—if you drive the car in the morning, you can listen to it, and if another family member drives it in the afternoon, the car customizes to that family member’s digital lifestyle instantly.”

Czech car maker Skoda AG, a part of the Volkswagen Group, too, may make a global announcement on a smart car by the next month, Werner Eichhorn, a member of the company’s board of directors, said on Thursday.

“We have been working on this as this is definitely a trend. We have to make sure that this is fully integrated in all accounts,” Eichhorn said.

“The challenge is to keep pace with changing technology in smartphones. The big issue is how to integrate a phone into the technology of a car and make it easy to use. We are working with a pool of IT (information technology) manufacturers.”

Another challenge, according to Gehlotra, is to make these technologies affordable. Executives refused to divulge how much these technologies add to a car’s price.

For “all of these technologies, the scale is very important. As more and more people would buy the technology, like any electronic technology, we would expect the prices to come down,” Gehlotra said.

“I think the issue really is how do you get the power of a smartphone and add that to a vehicle, and getting the balance of that right makes it really affordable,” added Leverton of Tata Motors.

Abdul Majeed, auto practice leader, PricewaterhouseCoopers, said that with the younger generation catching up fast with technological changes, it is imperative for Indian car makers to adapt to these changes.

According to a February 2013 Nielsen report, nearly half of the more than 40 million smartphone users in India are younger than 25 years of age.

“Every new generation will be more tech-savvy than the previous one and that is something that cannot be ignored by car makers as these people will be the future car buyers,” said Majeed. “While we are yet to see this phenomenon translating into car sales, it is one thing that cannot be ignored.”

Name:  Gauri Kesarwani.

PGDM 2nd (sem)

Date: feb- 17th, 2014.

Source: LiveMint.