Date: 30/05/2008

India's automotive electronic growth

With zooming car and bike sales in India, the automotive industry in poised to grow for some more years. Along with the manufacturing and assembly of imported cars, there is great amount of automotive design research going on in India to produce cars and motorbikes highly customized for Indian environment. Strategy Analytics, a research firm predicts, a total market of US$1.5 billion for automotive electronics in Indian produced cars. In a year more than 50 new models of cars are released to market.

Few relevant examples are Tata Motor's low priced car; Nano and various bike models from Bajaj and TVS motors. Irrespective of the cost of the car, the share of electronics hardware is raising in every car.

Though the Indian made entry-level cars have limited electronic system such as engine monitoring, dash-board display and few other basic switching controls; the volume of demand created by Indian car sales is the driving point for automotive electronic industry. For semiconductor vendors to gain the market share, they got to keep their hawky eyes wide open for any design requirement from Indian auto maker to get an early bird advantage. Generally in India, the chance of changing the selected semiconductor is less, after once the component is successfully used in the system.

One more notable point is, every entry-level car will come with two or more models. The electronics in basic model is as said above very minimal in use, but advanced models will have the differentiating factor through various electronic based passenger comfort and safety enhancing features. Here is the broader opportunity for all types of electronics systems and components.

It can be roughly estimated, the average share of electronics in Indian car is in the range of US$1000 to US$ 1500 per car. The share is growing with the times.

A decade ago, a motorcycle hardly had a microcontroller based hardware unit. The most common electronic ingredient during those times was simple transistor multivibrator (or some other RLC oscillator based turning indicating flash light controller).

In today's scenario, every motorbike is at least fitted with one or two microcontrollers and other associated electronics.

The applications include dashboard digitization, ignition, lighting, engine monitoring, and fuel saving systems.

Another interesting trend is, India is registering a growing market demand for electric cars and bikes, where the electrical and electronic semiconductor components and systems are the engines of the vehicle.

To get better share of the market, the semiconductor vendors need to provide very high level of customer support by becoming part of the vehicle design team.

The cost is a big issue in Indian market !!