With the steady increase in use of electronics in the automotive space, cars are likely to have higher 'intelligence quotient' going forward, and India may possibly see adoption of driverless cars in a few years 'with appropriate localisation', Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions (RBEI) said in its study about Automotive Technology Trends for 2014.

Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions is a fully-owned subsidiary of German engineering and electronics major Robert Bosch GmbH.

A driverless car, also called a robotic car or an autonomous car, is a vehicle capable of sensing its environment and navigating without human inputs. As of now, such cars exist only as prototypes and demonstration systems, with several global including Bosch and Google experimenting on the technology.

“Bosch already has such demo cars. In around 10 years from now, we will have serial cars which will run semi-autonomous in dense cities but on highways they will definitely be fully autonomous,” Vijay Ratnaparkhe, managing director, Robert Bosch Engineering said.

Even as Ratnaparkhe joked that in India, “a driverless car would be so safe that it might not drive”, he said that the such cars have been tested in some western countries like Germany and the US, and based on the technology being used there, it is possible to replicate such vehicles here.

Besides driverless cars, Bosch sees 'green wave' and 'platoon automobiles' as the other two automotive trends that are on the upward curve in Europe and will possibly trend in India also in a few years, as the country's road infrastructure develops.

'Green wave' is a controlled activity in which a series of traffic lights are coordinated to allow continuous traffic flow over several intersections in one direction. 'Platoon automobiles" is an automated highway system allows several cars to accelerate or brake simultaneously, thus increasing the capacity of the roads..

Additionally, Bosch said mobile applications, data analytics, and alternative energy resources would also be among the rising trends in the automobiles space going forward.

“Apps can be used not only to visualise various vehicle parameters, but also to control these parameters remotely. In a modern vehicle, such kind of solutions can easily replace some of the traditional features that would otherwise be part of the instrument cluster,” the study said.

“The Gen-Y user expects all the features that are available on his smartphone to be available in his car and also seamless exchange of information between his car and his other communication devices."



With the smartphone market growing by 50% and two billion devices expected to be sold this year, this trend cannot be ignored, Bosch said.