Sunny Sen and Anand Murali

11 December 2017

One sureshot – and, perhaps, foolish – way to test autonomous, or driverless, vehicle technology is to step in front of a four-wheeler equipped with it. If the tech works, the vehicle will stop or steer itself away. If it doesn’t, you could be roadkill.

One of the writers of this story chose to test an autonomous van at the premises of Hi-Tech Robotic Systemz, a Gurugram tech company that has been working on driverless cars for some 12 years. When he stepped in front of it, the van either stopped or drove past avoiding him.

It’s early days and you won’t see much about them but autonomous vehicles are here in India.

The era of autonomous driving in India was signalled last year with instances popping up in quick succession in India Inc. In July 2016, the then CEO of software services company Infosys, Vishal Sikka, arrived at a media briefing of the company’s quarterly results in a driverless golf cart together with his deputy, U B Pravin Rao. The following month, Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, and later his children Akash and Isha, were driven in an autonomous shuttle. It had a driver, just in case. Then, just a week before his ouster in October from the Tata group of companies, group chairman Cyrus Mistry was given a demo of the first ever fully autonomous Indian bus.

Seshu Bhagavathula, CTO – Product Development at commercial vehicle maker Ashok Leyland agrees it tough to predict the adoption of autonomous technology in India given the chaotic traffic on its roads. “While a fully-autonomous, self-driving vehicle might be years away from running on public roads, what we see is safety features like automatic or assisted brakes, assisted parking, adaptive engine mapping, etc. will see a faster adoption,” he says. “They will start with simple ‘driver warning systems’ and will gradually move to advanced ‘driver assistance systems’ over the coming years.”