[dZired]

Maruti Suzuki will be investing Rs. 1,900 crore to expand its R&D facility located in Rohtak, Haryana. A major part of this investment will be dedicated towards vehicle safety evaluation and pacing up the development cycle of a product. The said investment will be made over a period of two years.

This is Maruti's second major investment in the Rohtak facility. The company had earlier invested a similar amount to build up the facility in the first phase. Spread over an area of 600 acres, the R&D center is partially operational at the moment and has played a key role in development of the company's compact SUV - the Vitara Brezza.

The automaker claims that its 5 models - Ignis, Baleno, Ertiga, Ciaz and S-Cross are already compliant with crash test norms that will soon come into force in the country. These vehicles are claimed to have gone through 35-40 tests each at the R&D center in Rohtak. Maruti is now aiming to make 75-80 percent of its on-sale car models compliant with the new safety norms, ahead of the mandatory deadline. The said investment will thus help the automaker to make the R&D center ready for the impending task.

According to the Central Government's plans, new models launched after October this year will need to comply with full frontal impact and offset impact crash tests. On the other hand, existing models will need to be tweaked to be compliant to these tests by October 2019.

Source: Business Standard

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[Dr.Naren]

Good move by the largest car manufacturer of India!! This would save lot of time and money. Cars need not be airlifted to Japan and also India would be the global hub for Suzuki . Not to forget, Baleno is manufactured only in India.

[shibujp]

Great to see this initiative from Maruti. Given their position of leadership in the market it is fitting that they take this initiative.

The facility also seems to have a wide range of facilities from crash test facilities to high speed tracks. For instance it has more thant 30 test tracks to test endurance, high speed and NVH. Source : Autocar

Drive on,
Shibu.

[GTO]

For a company that did no R&D 10 years back and was continuously begging Suzuki for 'gearbox technology', Maruti sure has strengthened its product development capability. And you can see it in their newer cars which are much improved. Always happy to read about local R&D efforts.

[AutoNoob]

Originally Posted by GTO

For a company that did no R&D 10 years back and was continuously begging Suzuki for 'gearbox technology', Maruti sure has strengthened its product development capability. And you can see it in their newer cars which are much improved. Always happy to read about local R&D efforts.

Rephrasing : For a company that did no R&D 10 years back and is still continuously begging Suzuki for 'engine & gearbox technology' (and for pretty much everything else which involves technology), Maruti sure has strengthened its product development capability.

(based on inputs from rightly placed birdies)

[volkman10]

Maruti promises to boost its safety ratings for every car developed toady.

Watching a brand-new car being dragged down by a cable at 64 kilometres per hour straight towards a wall is an oddly-mesmerising sight. And then there is the noise when the car strikes the target. Believe me, the movies and television can’t quite capture it. The sound overwhelms the high-speed cameras pointed at the scene of the planned disaster, recording over 10,000 frames every second.
These tests are essential for meeting new safety norms such as the proposed Bharat New Car Assessment Program (Bharat NCAP). Every new vehicle that Maruti develops today undergoes as many as 50 crash tests, from the very first prototypes to production vehicles rolling off the line.

A brand new Maruti Brezza was crashed only for our benefit. Maruti engineers on the site told us that it was a pre-production model and would need to be scrapped anyway, so they decided to put on a show.
And it was not just the crash test. Earlier that day, had driven the new Grand Vitara SUV on the impressive test-track facilities. But before that, witnessed to some of the fascinating work that Maruti engineers are doing in Rohtak.

Built at a cost of over Rs 4,000 crore (and counting) the labs at Rohtak are used by the country’s largest carmaker to test and validate all their new vehicles. Operational for the last five years, this centre has only grown to over 400 engineers and an army of drivers who work here. The company has also maintained some of the wetlands in the area to make it attractive to birds as well.

Alongside another 1,500 engineers at Maruti’s original factory in Gurugram, the carmaker has taken massive strides in designing, developing and then validating vehicles within India.

it all began in 2005, when 30 engineers from the Indian company spent a few years in Japan at the headquarters of Maruti’s parent, Suzuki Motor Company, to help develop the first-generation Suzuki Swift and give it more of an Indian feel. Since then, Maruti’s own engineering capabilities have expanded dramatically.

While the company has not yet played the lead role in developing new platforms and engines, they work alongside Suzuki engineers in Japan to do so. But Maruti engineers make refinements to engines and develop new vehicles in India such as the Brezza, both the first and the new second-generation of the car. India-specific developments take place as well, in engine labs where on twenty test-beds, engines are tested continuously for weeks on end, even in special cold and hot weather simulators. Maruti engineers are already working towards the government’s plans to blend up to 20 per cent Ethanol in petrol from 2023.

Engineers test for ‘BSR’, for example, which stands for ‘Buzz, Squeak and Rattles’. As car cabins become ever quieter, engineers are spending a lot of time eliminating such noises. Extremely sensitive microphones can find sounds even at isolated frequencies, allowing engineers to make component-level improvements to remove any such noises.

In another lab, engineers test the vehicles for electromagnetic resilience and emissions from the car. This has become important nowadays as interference can muddle up not just cellular and satellite signals but also potentially wreak havoc with the tens of microprocessors onboard vehicles. However, across the hall where the highly-sensitive electromagnetic testing was taking place, Maruti was also testing batteries and cells for their first electric car coming in 2024. A battery pack was being put through intense charging and discharging cycles with hundreds of sensors monitoring every aspect of the test.

In another chamber, individual lithium cells were being stress-tested for both heat and cold. These tests have been taking place for a few years already, and while we could not see Maruti’s first electric vehicle, it is clearly being studied intensely at Rohtak.


After all, until a few years ago, all crash tests had to take place abroad, today alongside Maruti-Suzuki, Mahindra and Tata Motors have advanced testing facilities in India. The International Centre for Automotive Technology (ICAT) in Manesar has an advanced test facility as well and the National Automotive Test Tracks (NATRAX) test site near Indore has among the largest test tracks in the world.


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