Since the early days of Indian automobile industry, the local design engineers had been making the desired changes in the product of the foreign collaborators. One very obvious desired change used to be the clearance from the road to take care of the potholed road conditions. However, today the Indian automobile industry has traveled miles and miles ahead. Many are making its real original designs that are getting accepted globally.

Here are some unique designs incorporated in car designs that will be of use in India.

There had been one aspect that radars on the automobiles could not detect – cows. However, as reported, Daimler has equipped its cars with technology that detects any metal objects such as truck or cars on the autobahns and activates safety features such as automatic slowing. However, as cows aren’t made of metal, this is one of the numerous challenges Bharat Balsubramanian, vice president (VP), group research & advanced engineering (electrical & electronics, IT & processes), is currently working on.

Alcoholic driver causes many disastrous accidents causing loss of life and property too. Toyota Motor Corp. is developing a fail-safe system for cars that detects drunken drivers and automatically shuts the vehicle down if sensors pick up signs of excessive alcohol consumption. Cars fitted with the detection system will not start if sweat sensors in the driving wheel detect high levels of alcohol in the driver’s bloodstream, according to a report carried by the mass-circulation daily, Asahi Shimbun. The system could also kick in if the sensors detect abnormal steering, or if a special camera shows that the driver’s pupils are not in focus. The car is then slowed to a halt.

Indian engineers at DaimlerChrysler’s research and development lab are working on “intelligent night view,” a next-generation application that will let the driver catch up on his sleep while the car negotiates the night traffic. This feature builds on `night view’, where the car is fitted with infrared headlights, and an infrared camera feeds high resolution images to a TV screen fitted on the dashboard, so the driver can easily steer with his newfound `night vision’. When coupled with the ongoing work on contour mapping algorithms, which will let the car identify moving objects such as pedestrians and cyclists, this application will result in accurate and accident-free drive.

How do you like these developments? If India is to make difference with Chinese, it will have to distinctly excel and be far superior in designing of the cars and other vehicles. It can just live in glory of the designs of Indica/Indigo or Rs 1-lakh minicar or ACE mini-trucks of Tata Motors and Scorpio of M&M. Both the Indian automobile manufacturers are lucky to have a strong subsidiary of IT too that together can incorporate many high tech cutting edge features in the car design that can be a differentiator with the competition. And they must go for it to make their products robust physically as well as aesthetically for the customer satisfaction.

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