 So from Carl Benz patented in the first three-wheeled motor car in 1886 to the era of smart cars, the automotive industry has come a long way. So you either love it or love it, everybody has an opinion about it. So today we have our eminent panelist here to discuss smart cars in smart cities. So I'd like to start with Mr. Balaji. This has recently partnered with Google and NVIDIA to take smart cars to the next level. Could you just tell us more about it and the other innovations that you're bringing in? The mics are on, you can start. Thank you. Yeah, first of all, good afternoon everyone and happy to be here. And so you talked about Google and NVIDIA collaboration. I don't know how many of you watched recently, we actually showcased a lot of things that we do as a part of a Mercedes-Benz operating system where we announced the cooperation with Google as well, where we intend to work with Google especially for one of their products or new products that they are developing for Mercedes called Google Places. This is something what we announced in Sunnyvale in the Silicon Valley recently. So there are a couple of areas where we are partnering with Google and NVIDIA. Of course, a lot on the autonomous driving, the level four and then the level three autonomous driving there. So this is something what we are very closely working with NVIDIA. And there already today, there are several cars that are getting tested in the Silicon Valley together with NVIDIA partnership. And with Google, we want to take our whole MBUX. We call our infotainment system as the Mercedes-Benz user experience, the whole MBUX. We are trying to take it to the next level. And of course, there are a variety of partners that we work with. And of course, Google is one of them. We recently partnered with even Dolby Atmos with Universal Studios and an online streaming with sync. And of course, with Google on the Google Places as a partner. Because we want to own the customer experience, but we also want to partner with a lot of companies where we could offer that kind of a luxury experience. What Mercedes is known for. And I would say these are, this is how we intend to work with Google and NVIDIA. Any other innovations that you're bringing in? Innovations, yeah, there are plenty. And of course, as Mercedes, as you can say, a creator of the automobile in the world, but also we want to be the first in terms of innovation in a variety of areas. Whether it be in the autonomous driving, for example, the world's first level 3 certified autonomous driving. It's actually running in Germany right now. And this is the first officially a level 3 system that we have in the world. And the second thing is also the same thing is getting introduced in the US. For example, this is one what I could talk about. And of course, there are a variety of things since we are out. The theme is today are smart cars and a lot of connected vehicle. There are plenty that are happening in the connected car space as well. For example, we provide a lot of data that are APIs that are available since several years. And we have actually partnered also with many other sometimes even other OEMs to see how we can bring a little bit more smart city and the whole ecosystem. There are projects like in London where we have partnered with even the traffic and the urban transport planners where we have tried to make the city safer, for example. So there are plenty of examples. So moving on to Nissan, as part of your intelligent mobility, you have developed the Nissan Connect. So how you are augmenting the space connected car space? Hi Shobna, so first of all, thank you for having me here. Yes, when it comes to connected cars, I would say it's always a combination of various technologies. We talk about smart cities, in terms of smart cities, we talk about electrification, autonomous driving, shared services and connectivity. So we had a lot of pilot projects currently. What we just completed was a pilot project in the UK. So we worked together with other brands backed by Nissan and the UK government called Soft City Project in the UK. We actually deployed a Nissan Leaf with additional sensors in a particular environment to really test and learn with the vehicle in terms of connectivity. Connectivity but also in terms of autonomous driving as well at the same time. So we drove the Leaf for approximately 1,600 miles, testing miles and really get a lot of insights in terms of driving behavior with the use of connected data and the ecosystem around. This is really interesting because the environment really fed a lot of data in terms of the overall traffic, the infrastructure to the car. And this helps us to be more preventive in terms of the way we manual with the car in autonomous smart city environment. Various systems we have currently deployed currently across the world in Japan as well. There's a similar operation going on in terms of connected cars and also autonomous driving as well. Adding to it, you spoke about data, right? So how are you maintaining data security when it comes to connected cars? In terms of data security, of course, that's of course number one question in the future because data is more important than ever, as one can imagine. Of course, we are working with internal engineers in the back end systems, of course, to make sure data is 100% protected. Hence, a lot of testing and attention goes into it across markets because we really want to make sure that data is fully protected. There are different consumer rights laws across the markets but data is, of course, utmost priority for us. Sir, my next question is for you. So in this entire move towards the automotive industry moving from hardware to software, it's all about software here. So how is TCS helping in the industry in the shift from the hardware to software? If you take a step back and look at the driver for this shift as you articulated in terms of move from hardware to software, the need for mobility is getting separated from the need for ownership. Earlier probably we used to see both of them with the same lens but today the new generation of people, it's not just about new generation of cars and technology but it is also the new generation of people, who probably have a set of priorities which not always would be aligned with owning every single piece of vehicle that they like. So mobility concept is being redefined and in order to cater to those requirements, software plays a very critical part. And this is not applicable just for vehicles, right? In our daily life in everything we would like to personalize and customize the way we use the product. So one of the things that we've been working on and of course we partner with my colleagues on the stage today is look at the fundamental dimensions of what enables this. Number one is data and the second is experience. So if you take a vehicle and segregate the two components, then a whole world of opportunities opens up to you because data allows you to work on multiple things including what we experienced today as subscription based models, usage based models which were not there prevalent earlier and the experience allows you to personalize and customize. So if we look at the car or the automobile as a customer experience platform or the car as a data platform, then effectively we've translated the car from a piece of metal to a digital product, right? And that's really the focus of our research and innovation where we are looking at how does this digital product which typically operates in an ecosystem, enable the need for mobility and also at the same time meets the other criteria which are so critical today. Since, as you mentioned, what we are discussing today is new generation of smart cars in smart cities. So what does that smart city essentially cater to is also important. It is to decongest, reduce the pollution levels, ensure interoperability of transport, safety. There are multiple dimensions and each of these becomes a new digital product that you can launch on top of the software defined vehicle. So the thrust of our work is around this concept of software defined vehicle. So how are you using this bit by bit scale driving data and you know then develop and deploy it for to guide autonomous vehicles? See data, one is data gives you all the requirements that are necessary for you to examine the possibilities of the scenarios that one would encounter. So that's the fundamental from an autonomous perspective which you just mentioned. The other side is data also helps you understand behavioral dimensions. How does a particular driving situation translate into a particular response? So obviously the human mind is more complex and has far more permutation combination than what we have generally embedded into the vehicles today. But bringing that logic into the vehicle and making sure that the elements that we are looking for which is optimization, safety and all other dimensions are taken care of with the data that we are able to collect. And at the same time that data is not only reliable but responsive at the speed at which we want the vehicle to behave. So there are multiple dimensions of data. Volume is just one of them. She mentioned about security and other dimensions. So there are multiple dimensions of data and all of these need to be treated in the tree. Data sharing, data privacy, all of those are elements of data that we seek to address as part of the software defined concept. Thank you. Mr. Fanindra, my question is for you. So you know what industry 4.0 practices are you adopting to accelerate workforce and increase plant efficiencies? I mean when we look around us, it's not just the connected cars, right? How do you now make your manufacturing very smart? You're a little feeble. Just take it closer. Pardon me? Yeah, just take the mic a little closer. So how do you make it very smart, right? So the world of manufacturing has completely changed. What is now earlier in the past would be paper and pen or a pencil is completely changed into smart manufacturing. And one of the things that is there is industry 4.0. So smart manufacturing is a part of industry 4.0 principles, right? And why do we need industry 4.0? Basically, you need to cater to the demands of the customer, right? You need to cater to the demands of the people. You need to cater to the demands of the organization. And these demands are very fast and rapidly coming at you. So the only way you can approach these things and take all these challenges to account would be industry 4.0. And within industry 4.0, there are so many things that you can do. For example, we talked about data. See, one of the key aspects for industry 4.0 is do you have the data? Now, when you have the data, what do you do with this data? So you need a system that would take this data into account and transform into something digital that would enable us to take decisions in the future. So that is where you need the systems to be connected, be it in the form of manufacturing, execution systems or any similar system that would connect all these data. Then you need an artificial intelligence system that would take this data and help it to analyze to give you the desired results. So in the end, it is very important that you take smart manufacturing, industry 4.0 and all the techniques that are embedded within industry 4.0 to help you in the manufacturing journey. Sir, my question is for you. So can you just share your insights into smart and connected cars, what Tata Motors is doing in the region? Sure, let me try. So see, at Tata Motors, we are actually one of the youngest car makers and an Indian OEM. And the segment of cars that we cater to are with a median price of something like 10 lakhs. So for us, this means completely different things when we talk of smart and connected and so on. Having said that, we have sold last year about 47,000 connected cars. And a lot of data is coming into us in terms of how those cars are behaving on Indian roads. In terms of going smart, for example, like in the COVID times, so there was a fear of catching the infection. So we kind of put things in a car where the car could sense air quality and improve the air quality with a less than 2.5 micron filter to make sure that people traveling in the car were free of the fear of catching infection from each other. So the smart part for us means a few more different things that our customers would appreciate and buy and go for. And it means to be working at a very, very frugal mindset in terms of what can be done. But it also in many ways helps us because we are able to leapfrog several of the steps that other manufacturers have gone through in their smart and connected journeys. And the products that we bring henceforth will be that much closer to what the world believes and what the world requires from us. So sir, you spoke about COVID and how it boosted certain elements that you have implemented. So can you tell us something more about it, like how COVID improved the space, connected car space? Quite unbelievable actually when the COVID hit, so all of us thought the industry is gone, but it didn't actually happen that way. So suddenly people developed the fear of sharing the rides with others and that kind of really boosted the passenger car space. And we found that people would like to travel. They would like to do that in their own car, in their own safety. And not only that, they would like the whole family to travel. So the size of the car went up. So rather than selling hatchbacks, we suddenly started selling bigger, larger SUVs that could take five people, seven people. So this was quite a shift in terms of what customer preferences suddenly changed and what the forces to do. So along with this, there also came requirements of going automatic suddenly because everyone in the family wanted to drive and not everyone was so familiar with the manual systems. And we found that our automatic suddenly started getting a lot of traction. So with that, for example, when we brought in our DCTs into the market, so we tried to put some very smart devices into it. India being India, you would expect a lot of oil contamination, for example, to take place in oil that's used for the DCT. In a wet DCT. So there's a mechanism by which in our DCT, the system can actually make out if dust is sitting on the walls and send in extra pressure oil just to clean that dust. And that way then the car remains trouble free and can keep going on and on. By the way, the DCT is also smart enough to understand who in the family is driving and give you the required accelerated response. Depending on if you want to drive very sedately or very spotty, it could do all of those things. And these are few things that came out of COVID, by the way, unexpectedly for us. Sir, has something similar happened with Mercedes or Nissan? What we found out also during COVID was not only connected cars, but also the entire shopping experience as well, because everything has moved into the digital space, into the digital. When it comes to connected cars, maybe just to add as well, going forward, you can see very clearly the trend of customers wanting to have a seamless customer journey. I think that's the key, essentially, having the integration across devices, which is not only your handheld phone, but also your TV, your Google Home Alexa at home, and your car and the integration of profiles to consume content at the end of the day. So that integration is absolutely vital going forward while we can harness data, which is good for us, to really personalize the customer experience from a connected car perspective. But the consumer experience has to be seamless, which is of course key. Now, on the OEM site, this provides opportunities as well, because A, in the traditional way, we used to sell a vehicle to the customer. But of course, in the new era, there are new revenue streams coming up as well, because you can use data to personalize customer experience, but also create new revenue streams as a win-win on both sides, which also enhances the resale value of the car as well in the interest of the customer. So the total ownership experience will become very different and more beneficial on both sides, essentially. Would you like to add to it? Yeah, a few things. Some of the things like what my fellow panelists said, yeah, in terms of air quality and so on, that's general. I would say typical areas where a lot of OEMs focused on in terms of the occupant well-being. A few other examples, what I could quote is, we also started looking a lot on the mental well-being, for example. We have features, we call it like an energizing features, where we focus on a little bit more holistic wellness of the occupants in the car. If somebody is going on a morning drive to office, then what kind of things that you could offer to energize the, or you can say the kind of occupants of the driver. So these are some features that we offer, for example. That is one in terms of features, but in terms of business model itself, I would say sharing as a mobile, car sharing is a topic which really was disrupted a little bit. I would say not a little bit, but a big time in terms of the need for personal mobility. And then the push for electrification has accelerated, I would say it has accelerated a lot. But for example, at Mercedes, we originally said our ambition is in 2039 we want to be carbon neutral completely. But today we have probably advanced it by more than 10 years. We said already by the end of this decade, we will have all electric fleet wherever market conditions allow. And so these are a few examples what I could quote. Since you spoke about electrification, so my next question is on, you know Mercedes is also working towards sustainable mobility. So you know how this entire smart car is driving the sustainable mobility? Sorry. Smart cars driving sustainable mobility. Yeah, that's a, I would say quite an interesting combination. If I have to give some examples, we also look at say a very smart way of calculating routes. For example, if somebody wants to go from a point A to point B, we actually tell in different ways. We also tell what is a safe route, but we also tell what is the most sustainable route. And which is the route that you could choose to, what to say, save a lot more energy. I would say these are one way how we build a lot more smartness and he talked about a lot of data. So we also use that kind of data. Not only that, but the data that we generate, the petabytes of data that we talked about earlier. We also use it sometimes on our mobile app to call it. You can say our customers. We have something called an eco coach where we also, you know, share a little bit about what could be a sustainable way of driving and so on. So these are some examples how we build a lot more. You can say smartness in the car, not only in the car, but also offline in the mobile app that we are able to, you know, connect the sustainability. As well as the intelligence in the car. So my next question is on a semiconductor shortage. So, you know, we talk about smart cars, but there's also a looming semiconductor shortage. So what's the impact? Like this is an open question. Anybody can take it. So if I can start on that. So this has actually led to kind of collapse in the whole of the world automobile industry, not just India. And you would find that very small pockets have been able to survive this. In India, for example, some of us could do a little better than others because the number of semiconductors in our cars were lesser. And then we were also maybe agile enough to go and find out other alternates for the chipsets that we were using with others that were available elsewhere, where we could very agilely and swiftly get onto it and, you know, procure those and prove our cars with that and go up. And I mean, surprisingly or whatever, while others were suffering in this phase, we could actually grow our sales from something like 1.5 lakhs to something like 5 lakhs in a space of two and a half years. So it was a matter of maybe being very agile in terms of managing with the chipsets that were available at that time. And having maybe less of those in our cars. I mean, if I may, to add from the manufacturing perspective, because we are manufacturing the PCBs, you know, the microcontrollers is the heart of the PCB. And being a global company like Continental, one advantage we had is we are able to work with other locations within Continental and try to do what is possible to do it. I mean, in the end, we had to be very agile, adaptable, flexible and smart. And how we were able to do it is basically because of some of the things that we have in place, especially when it comes to industry 4.0. And being in automotive industry, one of the key things is how do you trace it back now? If you are using a certain chipset on a bar, how are you going to trace it back? So for that, you need a very good system in place that would allow you to track this. And also give this data and information to the customer. So that's how we were able to manage a semiconductor shortage. Unfortunately, it still continues. They say next year, probably we're going to be out of it. So let's hope so. I'm just curious to know from what. Yeah, I think semiconductor shortage was, of course, at some stage, no one had it on the radar. And then suddenly, two years ago, semiconductor shortage was a big topic. And even in today's time, we are still feeling the pressure. This, of course, changed a couple of things fundamentally in terms of the business model and how we approach to the market. Because, of course, we plan certain things in terms of volume investments into development and manufacturing and also marketing and sales. But with the shortage of semiconductors, of course, our whole business model has changed more towards lesser volume. And, of course, this has to be amortized as well. That, of course, put a lot of pressure in terms of agile thinking, redeployment of plants. Agility, I think, is, I think all of us will know the word more than ever. I think agility was key in that situation to quickly react to the market environment in terms of changing plants, redefining the business model and going to the market with limited number of chips, hence limited number of cars. That was a big, big change which impacted all our business. Would you like to share your thoughts on it? If you look at it, there's a supply-side response, right? So I think there's a positive spin to it in the sense now how to build semiconductor self-sufficiency is gaining ground. But there's also an architectural response to it, right, since you asked me to speak about the software-defined vehicle as such. In terms of how do you optimize on that front as well and how do you have an architecture which enables you to deliver, instead of de-featuring, can you continue to deliver the same features through a redefined architecture? So we've seen an evolution in vehicle architecture itself over the last few years, which will allow you to therefore perform the same level of capability as was done before, but probably with less silicon usage as well. So all of this is an evolution. It's not kind of a destination that has been reached, but for sure all of these are a result of the crisis that you have seen. Do you want to share something, sir? Yeah, I can just add a few things like Mohan from Nissan, he said. It has fundamentally changed a lot of things, right, across the board, whether it's R&D operations, supply chain. I think if I have to give one example from an R&D from a Mercedes perspective, we have actually created, or at least in the future we have a kind of a chip to cloud architecture where we consider, I would say, the learnings from the current crisis in terms of how we decouple the whole hardware layer from the software layer to an extent, not only from learning from the semiconductor perspective, but also at the same time balance the future innovation. When you want to build us, because every car in the future, we announced in the MBSU event in Silicon Early that we will have a supercomputer in the car. So how do we balance then these, you know, the challenges and the learnings from the past and also securing the compute power that we need, both at the Edge device and, you know, in the future? Yeah, that's something that I would like to share in addition to what others said. So we have 5G now, the 5G boomers here. So, you know, I just want to understand if, in any way, going to help connected cars gain more popularity? Okay, sure, sure, sure. 5G. Yes. Okay, good, yes. With 5G, of course, there are multiple, from a customer perspective, opportunities, of course. From a customer perspective, this will, of course, enable, I understand, much faster bandwidth, which means data processing will be much faster. So from a customer perspective, you'll be able to do multiple tasks at the same time with much more complexity, for example. You can see more and more people working from outside the office. People can work in the car. At the same time, they can do a Zoom call. They can engage with engaging customer experience content in the car, have or consume more new services over the updates at the same time. This is enabled by 5G, for example, because you just have more computing power and it's faster. That's, of course, a big opportunity. At the same time, when you talk about over-the-air updates with 5G, you can really invest more into that space. So definitely an opportunity coming up across all the markets, and I believe in India as well. So one can actually look at 5G in two, three ways. One is, for example, the signals that a person sitting in the car can receive that much faster. So one would expect a lot of, let's say, services to become available to a person sitting in the car in terms of nearby places of interest or so many other things that are otherwise not so easy. The second part is maybe the speed of telemetry goes up, by which the number of, let's say, signals and data that can travel from a car to a cloud or the mother-host computers and back can go up. By that, let's say, so many other things like how well you're able to diagnose how the car is behaving at any particular time can keep on improving more and more. And the third one is, of course, things like V2X, where, let's say, if you have an edge computer on an intersection, it can manage the intersection that much more better and manage the flow of traffic through an intersection by making sure that all cars passing through the intersection have exactly the same kind of data to tell them when to cross and when to stop at the signals and so on. So that will be a much faster way of doing things. So, let's say, for people sitting in the car, it will be that much more seamless experience with the outside world as well as whatever else they would like to do when they're traveling in the car. Yeah, I can add to what they said. Is the mic not working? Yeah, I think it's working. Am I audible? Yeah? Okay, all right. So, in addition to what they said is, of course, the speed is given with a 4G from a megabit Mbps to go into a gigabit per second. Speed in 5G. So the customer experience, like what Mr. Mohan said, is definitely one big element. But I feel it will also churn out a lot of new business models, a lot of software-driven businesses. Maybe there are more partnerships that will emerge with the OEMs and so on because we see the whole software-driven business enabled by the technology enabler, as for example in 5G and so many others. That could be a big enabler. So in terms of software-driven and universities, we call that the digital extras. So we think this is a business area that would really grow. Yeah, so if you look at it again from two dimensions, one is, of course, it will ensure elements of functional safety or performance and other dimensions. At the same time, if you look at the experience perspective, is it serving an unmet need as it stands today? Because that's where the customers will value the tradeoff of an additional feature, cost, and the utility. And the whole challenge, since you asked the question of how will it promote connectivity in general or adoption of connected vehicles, one of the bigger challenges, especially mass-market connected vehicles, has been that the feature requirement has literally become an in-thing, which means that you can't charge that out to the customer at an additional price point. Therefore, you know, any additional elements that you bring on to a vehicle, as a manufacturer, whether you get the additional delta value from a pricing perspective, is where probably, you know, the new revenue models or something has to kick in. So the feature on its own will therefore have to be monetized rather than just hoping that people will adopt connected vehicles just because it's 5G. I'm very curious to know. I just had a couple of reports a few days back. Just connected cars, you know, have a high chance of getting hacked. Yeah, so open question. Yeah, I can start. So, yeah, automotive cybersecurity is a big topic and I would say as more and more digital services and the data is getting churned out from the car, I would say a lot more vulnerabilities also open up. That is true. But at the same way, I would say within all the OEMs and the suppliers, we are also working quite hard to build the kind of, we call it as a depth in the defense in terms of securing the car. Not only all the components and the vulnerabilities that we take care in terms of building the right level of security for the entire car, but we also take care even in the fleet. Sometimes we also take care of the fleet management overall in terms of how we ensure that the overall security operations, that's just like a typical IT side, how data center IT security has been established in the past. That is one, how all the OEMs and suppliers are working. And second, also in the standard space, we have also evolved and established some good standards over a period of time. There are ISO standards like 21434 and so on, so where there are some well established standards, which is giving a lot of guidance to the entire ecosystem that is working on these kind of products. So these are a couple of examples how we can say, yeah, it's always evolving. You never know who is actually in the dark web trying to hack your car, but constantly we are building the defense in such kind of attacks and doing the best as an auto-EM, for example, yeah. I mean, from a manufacturing perspective, I mean, there's a survey that was done by Kaspersky. It said that 50% of the companies fear that their systems will be hacked one day or the other. So now that we are talking so much data that is available to us, it's important that we have all those cybersecurity systems in place that will help us. One is how do I prevent the hackers from hacking my system? So you need to have the hardware in place that would enable you to protect your systems. Second is how do you detect when somebody has hacked into your system? So you need to have those kinds of systems also that would enable you to detect when your systems are hacked. And the third most important thing I would say is, I think the best way is how do you prevent the hackers from hacking your system? I think then you have to develop those systems which would enable the hackers not to hack your system at all. So cybersecurity not only in the connected cast, but when it comes to manufacturing also, it plays a very important role. And this is one of the things that is available as one of the system elements within Industry 4.0 that would help you to create a system that would deter the hackers from hacking your systems. So if I can add to that. So like there are regulations around safety of a car or emission, the Indian government is also working on a cybersecurity regulation which is in the works. And this is something that will help us all to address basic levels of cybersecurity at least. And I'm sure there will be people who can go around that and still hack your car. And that will then depend on the kind of system design, hardware design that each one of us would like to follow in our cars so that even if in the worst case an attack like that, there is enough redundancy for your car systems not to be unsafe, especially not getting into accident-like situations so that the people in the car are always safe. So these things are going to happen. They may be a little far away today, but one doesn't see an impossibility kind of situation there. It will catch up. When it comes to data and transparency and cybersecurity, of course, this requires a unique way of collaboration between the stakeholders. It means in an environment of smart cities and we talk about connected cars, we're talking about the OEM, we're talking about suppliers, we're talking about software providers, urban city planners, but also the government. And we also recognize a governance model as well in terms of safety and rules and regulations. Which also again differs from market to market. So this sort of cross-functional alignment in the early development stage is important so that we feed in in the right way when we deploy things when it comes to connected cars in a smart city environment. That will be key. Of course, everyone is working on it. Rigorous testing will go into it as well naturally in the interest of the customer. Any infusion of new technology will automatically come with its fair share of risks and apprehension of risk. What one needs to do is design for the new reality. So you can't stay away from connectedness. So you have to design for what's likely to happen or what might happen. And it is also an issue of what is the point of vulnerability. It could be the vehicle but it could also be the ecosystem connected to the vehicle. So it's not that security or securing for these requirements is not there. It exists today in different forms but probably not at the scale at which we are expecting it to be. So it's an issue of scale. So we've had aircraft flying for probably few decades. We've had many other systems, banking systems in place. We still have new vulnerabilities that are introduced every now and then but the system learns to deal with it. So it is a risk but at the same time it is not a risk which cannot be addressed. You have to mitigate the risk and control the risk and that will address the problem. Thank you.