There might be some really exciting innovations coming onto affordable cars in 2018
2017 was the year of the automatic in India as Automated Manual Transmission (AMT) vehicles gave Indian buyers an affordable and economical clutchless experience. In-Car infotainment systems progressed rapidly as well, but what will 2018 bringIJ More technology but driver aids in this case. Recently, I had a chance to drive a couple of brand-new products from Volvo, the XC60 and the XC40 and I was amazed by the onboard technology. Earlier, I also drove several new products from BMW, including the electric i3s and onboard technology is amazing. And with the costs of the technology coming down, some of these features should make it onto affordable cars in India as well, but there is a problem, that is the Indian motorists inability to follow rules.
late last year, I drove the forthcoming Volkswagen Passat, which is a lovely luxury car but what was unique during the test drive, is the fact that for a large part of the journey I drove with my thumb using Cruise Control. The roads were relatively empty and honestly, as I get older I become less of a speed demon on the road, and honestly it was a Volkswagen Passat with a two-litre diesel, it can go fast but most buyers won’t buy a Passat to go fast. They would buy a Passat to travel at a decent highway speed, and the cruise control feature on most Volkswagen group cars is incredibly easy to use, it can hold 90 kilometers an hour over dips and turns and all that. Earlier in the year, I drove the forthcoming Audi Q2 and the S3 down Sheikh Zayed road in the UAE and the Emirates are extremely strict on speed, but even those cars held 120 kilometers per hour easily on the road between Dubai and Ras al Khaimah. I understand that on many roads in India you can’t use Cruise Control but modern systems and be disengaged and re-engaged easily, with the push of a button.
But it were the cars I drove in Europe that were really impressive. The new BMW’s and Volvo’s all had a bunch of camera and radar assisted features. One of them is radar-assisted cruise control and braking, what happens is that the car maintains a safe distance from the car ahead, and it measures the distance to the car ahead by radar. So even if your cruise control is set at normal European highway speeds of 120 kilometers an hour but the car ahead of you is doing 110, that is what your car will do, until you switch lanes and overtake. On Volvo’s, this is a feature even in India, you can’t just switch lanes without an indicator, otherwise the steering wheel will give a little shake to warn you. In fact, on the XC60 in India, Volvo has a feature that will actively brake and turn the steering in case you try and merge into traffic coming from the back or the front. You can switch this off, but the car aims to keep you safe. Heck, the autobrake feature even brakes Volvos when cows cross the road, a huge issue in India.
But what I like about the lane feature is the active lane-assist, I tried this a bit on the BMW 6GT and i3s as well as the Volvo XC40. The system uses a combination of the radar-assisted cruise control and a multitude of cameras to actively keep a car in the middle of the lane, even if the road is curving. This is one step away from fully autonomous cars, and while I would not recommend this, I actually took my hands off the wheel recently on the XC40 while I was at highway speeds – 120 kilometers an hour, we were on a curve with all these active feature turned on and the car turned itself. The idea is that your hands have to be on the wheel all the time, there is a pressure sensor on the steering that sounds a audible warning. This even happened on the BMW when I tried it, but this is the future of driving in India.
Unfortunately many features may not actually work that well in India, because traffic rules get thrown out the window when you start driving here. lane markings are crazy, for example the main road in South Delhi’s posh Greater Kailash 1 is separated by double white lines, which, if you know the rules mean ‘no cutting across under any circumstances’. Having double-whites in a residential neighbourhood is ridiculous but nine out of ten drivers wouldn’t even know they’re breaking the rules if you told them they were, I’m not sure most traffic policemen would know either. And then there are Indian roundabouts, which are insane. When I experienced Volvo’s autobrake feature there once and I was a bit taken aback. You can dial down these features and even disable them, but I believe that they will gradually make it on more affordable cars in the coming months. The Volvo XC40 for example would be in the 30-35 lakh mark but cruise control and even radar-assisted cruise control might make it on a sub-15 lakh car by the end of 2018.
Maybe having all these safety and driver assistance features on cars might actually make Indians start to follow rules because the cars will be programmed to follow rules even if the drivers are not. That won’t be a bad future at all.