Tata Elxsi to help Tata Motors develop its connected vehicle platform

Product design and technology services provider Tata Elxsi has partnered with Tata Motors to develop the latter’s existing unified connected vehicle platform.

The subsidiaries of the Ratan Tata owned salt-to-telecom conglomerate worked together on the platform that powers the Nexon EV range of electric cars. The companies declined to share financial details of the partnership.

The two companies have developed a cloud based internet of things (IoT) platform, which provides Tata Motors with a common standard technology stack that delivers the scalability and performance required to support the entire range of electric, commercial and passenger vehicles, according to a joint statement released on Monday.

“We are delighted to have partnered with Tata Elxsi, which not only allowed us to take the decision of developing a native platform for the connected vehicle program(me), but also helped us jump start and meet the critical product launch timelines,” Rajendra Petkar, president and chief technology officer at Tata Motors, said.

The common digital services platform will create data and analytics synergies for the automobile maker across product development, customer use cases, dealerships, allied businesses and service networks, the statement added.

“We are proud to be a strategic ecosystem partner to Tata Motors in their vision for the future of mobility that is connected, electric, safe and shared,” Manoj Raghavan, managing director and CEO at Tata Elxsi, said.

Bengaluru-based Tata Elxsi works with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and suppliers in the automotive and transportation industries for research and development (R&D), design and product engineering services from architecture to launch. Its domain experience includes connected infotainment, autonomous driving, telematics, powertrain, body and chassis electronics, along with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, cloud and IoT.

Last month, it unveiled RoboTaxi, an in-house autonomous AI-based taxi, in partnership with California-based advanced artificial vision hardware provider AEye.

Read: Carmakers, startups accelerate for an EV future in India

IoT-enabled electric vehicles didn’t take long too long to make the shift from R&D labs to development of the technologies for commercialised use.

In December, Sweden-based telecommunications major Ericsson partnered with US-based Microsoft to build its connected vehicle cloud on top of the Microsoft connected vehicle platform that runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

When it comes to the IoT of connected automobiles, various formats of collaborations have emerged in the recent past. In November, Tata Communications and Microsoft partnered to work on connected car applications, in a project that involved the former’s IoT connectivity platform called MOVE, which provides network-independent, cross-border connectivity to help enterprises deliver IoT services at a faster pace.