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| Edited By: Shahkar Abidi |Source: DNA |Updated: Jul 06, 2017, 07:15 AM IST
As automakers gear up for new safety regulations which are set to kick-in from October 1, Maruti Suzuki’s research and development head C V Raman, in an email interaction with Shahkar Abidi, talks about the company's preparedness in that regard.
The challenge is to meet the advanced safety norms without compromising on performance, fuel efficiency and comfort, all of which are important to the customer. It would have been straightforward to simply load equipment like airbags and anti-lock braking systems on a vehicle to make it safety-compliant, but that would have increased vehicle weight significantly. So, innovation is important.
While the new norms come into effect from October 1, the existing car models have time till October 2019 before they are equipped with advanced safety. But we have gone ahead and made six of our models compliant to these future norms. For each model, we crash about 35-40 cars in our advanced R&D centre at Rohtak and closely study the injury impact on dummy passengers using embedded sensors.
The most important safety feature ever invented for a car still remains the old faithful seat belt. All the multiple airbags in a car are useless and, in fact, may cause injuries if the occupants are not belted (including on the rear seat). But India’s performance on seat-belt usage is shockingly low. So while advanced safety will help, we have to follow basic safety habits and surely not see it as a licence for reckless driving.
As I said earlier, India has had national safety norms for many years and all existing cars meet those norms. We have been offering an airbag option with all variants for most of our models, inviting customers to choose safer options. The response of customers has so far been mixed. But as advanced safety norms become mandatory, that issue will be resolved and we will all move to safer and superior cars.
