Chennai can emerge as the automotive research and development (R&D) hub, considering it is the house for global and domestic automotive majors, said R Chidambaram, principal scientific adviser to the Government of India.
In his inaugural address at the fourth edition of the Conference on ‘Automotive R&D Trends 2015’, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here, he said Chennai had automotive industry-led research institutions like Ashok Leyland and Nissan Research joint venture; Mahindra Research Valley; research teams of Hyundai & Renault and academia like IIT Madras, IIT Research Park, Anna University and Madras Institute of Technology, to carry out R&D on proprietary or generic automotive technologies.
The focus should be on areas like materials, energy efficiency, emission control, driver assistance, safety, embedded systems and creation of a disposal chain.
He said the Ministry of Heavy Industry and the automobile industry had set up a demo centre for automobile recycling at GARC (Global Automotive Research Centre), Oragadam, here. The industry has donated a large number of cars and two-wheelers to kick-start the centre. “Effective recycling could generate two million tonnes of steel, 150,000 tn of aluminum and 75,000 tn of rubber and plastics by 2020 and the figure would increase by 10 per cent a year hereafter,” he said.
V Sumantran, conference chairman and executive vice chairman, Hinduja Automotive Ltd, said, “there were many trends that lead us to believe that we can no longer address automotive technologies in the context of passenger cars alone.”