Tata Motors is aiming to up the ante in terms of safety of its future products. Speaking to our sister publication Autocar Professional on the sidelines of last week’s Bharat Mobility Global Expo, Mohan Savarkar, chief product officer, Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles, said, “Our main aim is to ensure safe mobility for our customers, and it is not a journey that we have embarked on only recently. In 1997, we set up our in-house crash test lab in Pune even before the Indica was launched. It is one of the most advanced private crash-test laboratories in India till date.”
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Tata Motors: passive safety net to expand
Savarkar further said that while a higher-than-regulation structural safety is already built into Tata Motors' cars – with all its products having received some crash test rating or the other by agencies like the Global NCAP – the company is closely watching the space about augmenting passive safety features like six airbags, and offering them as standard.
While the latest versions of its Nexon, Harrier and Safari SUVs were introduced with six airbags as standard, the entry-level models – the Tiago hatchback and the Tigor compact sedan – continue to get just two airbags. The two cars, launched in 2016 and 2017, respectively, are in the last leg of their current lifecycle, and are due for a complete model change soon.
As per Savarkar, while the government had considered bringing a regulation to mandate six airbags in all new cars, now it has chosen to make it voluntary by introducing the BNCAP regime that requires a car to be equipped with six airbags to be eligible for a 5-star rating.
“BNCAP is an aspirational safety yardstick for automakers to choose to apply to. We are watching this space very closely. As there is demand for such levels of safety from customers in this segment, we will be going for that,” he said.
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Tata Motors: active safety systems
“We are now focusing on ensuring that a vehicle does not get into an accident in the first place. That is where active safety and ADAS come in,” Savarkar said.
He explained that the first prerequisite for such level of accident prevention is to offer ESC, and then move towards ADAS functions like Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB), Lane Keep Assist (LKA) and other features that continuously monitor the vehicle's surroundings. Tata Motors introduced Level 2 ADAS features in the updated Harrier and Safari models – both were the first to be tested by BNCAP and secure a 5-star rating – and is likely to introduce the technology in other future models as well.
Road safety in India
Savarkar said that while COVID-19 nudged people in the direction of personal safety, the thought process extended to other spheres of life as well. “Generally, people want to be safe, and with the growth in personal transportation and families increasingly travelling together in cars, there is an increased focus on safety while buying a new vehicle,” he said.
“While the growth in SUVs, which today comprise around 48 percent of all passenger vehicle sales in India, has been fuelled by rising income levels as well as growing aspirations, it is also to do with the rising awareness on safety,” he added.
The company says that the Indian road infrastructure is improving by leaps and bounds, and another factor contributing to the higher sales of safer cars is the rise in average city speeds, which has consistently gone up – from 18kph in the past to 35kph in the present day. “This is when having a safer car becomes even more important,” pointed out Savarkar.
He also believes that public consciousness about the right and wrong practices on the road is also improving significantly, with people gradually understanding the benefits of opting for the safer route.
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