Indian tech giant, TCS has set its firm sight over electric vehicles (EVs) and autonomous vehicles (AVs). To fast track its plans the company has partnered with over 15 startups in these areas, including Stoneridge, Velodyne and Luminar Tech. These ventures are working in areas including lidar and battery management systems.
TCS in 2019 acquired the assets of General Motors' technical centre in India in Bengaluru. Meanwhile company's including Stoneridge design and manufacture highly engineered electrical and electronic systems, components and modules, primarily for the automotive, commercial vehicle, motorcycle, agricultural and off-highway vehicle markets.
Velodyne, a San Jose-based lidar technology company, recently launched a design centre in Bengaluru to drive innovation in lidar sensor and software solutions. The centre is growing its engineering talent team in hardware, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), embedded software, board design, systems engineering, ASIC, perception software, functional safety, cybersecurity and other adjacent areas.
“You are aware of our investment in taking over GM's technology centre in India. For GM now, more than 20% of that workforce is involved in their electric vehicles and autonomous vehicle programmes,” TCS CEO Rajesh Gopinathan said in a recent earnings call.
TCS is supporting GM in its global vehicle programmes with engineering design services. Over 1,300 of the 2,000 employees in the GM centre had transferred to TCS, including teams focused on propulsion systems, vehicle engineering, controls development, testing, creative design and special projects.
Gopinathan said TCS is working with German vehicle technology firm ZF in areas including ADAS (advanced driver-assistance systems) 2.5 development, and to address the significant shortage in chipsets, which is one of the biggest challenges that the automotive industry is going through.
“Our teams worked jointly with ZF to put together some analytics and a procurement solution that maximised the contextual knowledge and the data in the ZF system, and combined that with the ecosystem of partners that they have to identify both sources, as well as to optimise choices of products and portfolios, to maximise value and customer-centricity across their ecosystem,” he said.
