automobiles manufacturers

While buoyancy in vehicle sales in India may be heartening for the industry and economy, it is also leading to a rise in road accident fatalities in the country. automobile manufacturers in india has the dubious distinction of being the second highest in the world after China in annual road accident fatalities. The number of annual road accident fatalities in India crossed the 80,000 mark in 1999 — a rising trend since 1990 when the number was 54,000 as per the department of road transport and highways data. In 2002, the number of road accident fatalities per 10,000 vehicles was the highest in China (17.10) followed by India (14.39). In most highincome countries such as Sweden, US, Australia, Japan and Germany it ranged between 1.08 and 2.58. While globally 90% of road crashes were attributed to “human error” by the World Health Organisation’s “World report on road traffic injury prevention”, in India “driver fault” was to blame for 83.5% of accidents, followed by passenger/pedestrian fault (4.7%), mechanical defect in vehicles (3%) and “other factors” (6.8%) such as cattle, fallen trees, non-functional signals and absence of reflectors. These were some details highlighted in a study published by Pune-based Central Institute of Road Transport’s (CIRT) latest edition of the Indian Journal of Transport Management. automobile supplies Society of Indian automobiles manufacturers (Siam) said sale of passenger cars in India rose by 69.23% between 2001-2005 — from 5.67 lakh in 2000-01 to 8.19 lakh in 2004-05. Siam statistics state sale of two wheelers rose by 58% during the same period, with domestic sales of two wheelers rising from 3.6 million in 2000-01 to 6.2 million in 2004-05. Based on the WHO report, the study by Alok Rawat, principal secretary with the Sikkim government notes the social cost of road accidents in the country was pegged at Rs 55,000 crore in 1999-2000, constituting 3% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for that year. Although road accidents have been traditionally viewed as random events “that happen to others”, according to Rawat, the new paradigm shift now views road crashes as “preventable and predictable.” This has been demonstrated in high income countries, says Rawat, where an established set of interventions through legislations and technology have led to “significant reductions in the incidence and impact of road traffic injuries.”

automobiles manufacturers

While buoyancy in vehicle sales in India may be heartening for the industry and economy, it is also leading to a rise in road accident fatalities in the country. automobile manufacturers in india has the dubious distinction of being the second highest in the world after China in annual road accident fatalities. The number of annual road accident fatalities in India crossed the 80,000 mark in 1999 — a rising trend since 1990 when the number was 54,000 as per the department of road transport and highways data. In 2002, the number of road accident fatalities per 10,000 vehicles was the highest in China (17.10) followed by India (14.39). In most highincome countries such as Sweden, US, Australia, Japan and Germany it ranged between 1.08 and 2.58. While globally 90% of road crashes were attributed to “human error” by the World Health Organisation’s “World report on road traffic injury prevention”, in India “driver fault” was to blame for 83.5% of accidents, followed by passenger/pedestrian fault (4.7%), mechanical defect in vehicles (3%) and “other factors” (6.8%) such as cattle, fallen trees, non-functional signals and absence of reflectors. These were some details highlighted in a study published by Pune-based Central Institute of Road Transport’s (CIRT) latest edition of the Indian Journal of Transport Management. automobile supplies Society of Indian automobiles manufacturers (Siam) said sale of passenger cars in India rose by 69.23% between 2001-2005 — from 5.67 lakh in 2000-01 to 8.19 lakh in 2004-05. Siam statistics state sale of two wheelers rose by 58% during the same period, with domestic sales of two wheelers rising from 3.6 million in 2000-01 to 6.2 million in 2004-05. Based on the WHO report, the study by Alok Rawat, principal secretary with the Sikkim government notes the social cost of road accidents in the country was pegged at Rs 55,000 crore in 1999-2000, constituting 3% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for that year. Although road accidents have been traditionally viewed as random events “that happen to others”, according to Rawat, the new paradigm shift now views road crashes as “preventable and predictable.” This has been demonstrated in high income countries, says Rawat, where an established set of interventions through legislations and technology have led to “significant reductions in the incidence and impact of road traffic injuries.”

automobiles manufacturers

From the time he was in high school in New Delhi’s Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, Sanjay Mehrotra was clear that he wanted to go to the US. In 1974, the system involved only 11 years of schooling, and US universities told him he needed to do 12 before he could apply. So he joined BITS, Pilani. At the end of the first year at BITS, he applied again US universities. They said could come as a freshman but he could not get credits for his year at BITS. He declined, and reapplied in the second year. This time, University of California, Berkeley, gave him admission with full two years’ credit in the electrical engineering and computer sciences programme. He joined, went on to do a Masters at Berkeley, and then worked for four Silicon Valley semiconductor companies, including Intel, between 1980 and 1988. Mehrotra was working specifically in the then nascent area of what is known as flash memory — the storage technology that involves no moving parts and where the chip retains the stored information even when its power source is removed. In 1988, Eli Harari, a former Intel colleague, approached him with the idea of founding a company focused on flash memory, and that’s what they did later that year, together with Jack Yuan, a colleague of Harari’s in Hughes Microelectronics. “We believed that in the future there would be applications that would need flash storage,” Mehrotra told us on a visit to Bangalore recently. “And 25 years ago, when we founded the company, we had said in one of our publications that in the future there would be phones like cellular phones and light computing devices that would need this technology.”automobile manufacturers in india That proved prophetic. Flash memory is today ubiquitous — it’s the memory that is used in cellphones, digital cameras, USB drives, external hard drives, set-top boxes, tablets and increasingly in servers and PCs (traditional servers and PCs run on hard disk drives that have spinning disks and other mechanical/moving parts and are therefore more prone to disruptions and higher energy consumption). With flash memory’s success, the company they founded — SanDisk — became a household name, and last year had revenues of $5.7 billion. “Globally and in India, we have a third of the retail market in flash products,” says Mehrotra. SanDisk’s early success was with camera makers. Cameras then used chemical films. “We worked with Kodak, Nikon, Polaroid and converted the industry to digital film,” says Mehrotra.automobile supplies Then came USB flash drives that toppled the floppy disc drives industry. And then flash in audio players and mobile devices. These have made countries like India particularly important for SanDisk. “Just look at India: Half the population is less than 25 years old and a big chunk of it is tech-savvy, digital media-savvy. They know how to use these things better than you and I, and they are much faster at it. They are capturing more data, sharing more data, they want to be able to access their data fast and anytime, anywhere. That’s driving increased local storage in mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets,” says Mehrotra. Within Asia, India and China are SanDisk’s fastest growing retail markets. The big push now is into laptops and enterprise servers, where solid state drives based on flash technology is replacing traditional spinning hard disk drives. Flash is enabling sleeker, lighter, more power-efficient and reliable laptops. Flash is also faster, giving fast boot up times and instant access. Mehrotra says solid state drives in computing is the biggest growth driver for the flash industry and for SanDisk.automobiles manufacturers Prices of solid state drives are still high, so last year only about 10% of the notebook computers had such drives in them. Estimates are that in another three years, about one-third of notebooks will have solid state drives in them. “But I won’t be surprised if the penetration rate is even higher by then,” says Mehrotra. All MacBook Air laptops and many of Intel’s ultrabooks today come with solid state drives. SanDisk’s Bangalore R&D centre, which has 350 engineers, or more than a tenth of its global R&D strength, works on the design of memory chips and controllers that go into flash memory products, as also on software development. It is integral to SanDisk’s operations. Would the company now be willing to do some manufacturing in India? The question was repeatedly put to Mehrotra during his Bangalore visit, given the Indian government’s recent push for electronics manufacturing. Mehrotra, who became SanDisk’s CEO on January 1, 2011, when Harari retired, would only reply that the company’s plants in Japan and China were currently sufficient. Is manufacturing in India a challenge? Mehrotra says the most important things are to make sure that the skilled resource pool is available, and that the infrastructure and the ecosystem needed to become a world-class supplier is there. “I can see that India is working towards attaining that,” he says.

Automobile sales plunge to multi-year lows in Nov,Sector Bears The Brunt Of Economic Turmoil, Witnesses Major Downfall

New Delhi: Poor retail finance and negative sentiment worsened domestic auto sales in November which plunged to multi-year lows as customers postponed new purchases in view of uncertain economic situation. Car sales, which had been slipping, crashed by record levels with major companies like Maruti and Hyundai leading the downfall. According to sales numbers released by Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (Siam), November car sales dropped 19% to 83,059 units against 1.03 lakh units in same month last year. The year-onyear percentage drop was biggest in last five years since a 31% fall in February 2003. The situation has been no better in eight months of this fiscal as car sales growth shrunk to a mere 0.48% in April-November ’08 period. The numbers appear alarming as except for scooters that came up with positive numbers, all other segments were down. Worst fall was noticed in commercial vehicles, where sales plunged by 49.5% at 20,637 units (40,879). The slowdown has already seen companies like Tata Motors, Ashok Leyland and Eicher announce major production cuts and even close plants temporarily. automobile supplies Within commercial vehicles, medium and heavy vehicle category was the worst hit as sales slipped by 63% and closed November’08 at 8,325 units against 22,453 units with both Tata and Ashok Leyland slipping. and automobile manufacturers in india Fall in economic activity has been a big dampener and freight operators are not willing to make any new purchases, analysts said. “In our history, all segments have never been down so badly together in a month,” Siam’s director general Dilip Chenoy said after releasing the sales numbers. automobiles manufacturers Motorcycle sales were also down and fell 20% at 4.3 lakh units against 5.4 lakh units in November last year. A sharp decline in sales of heavyweights like Bajaj Auto and TVS pulled the numbers down. Scooters, however, remained the sole category, where numbers grew, as sales were up 12%. Good growth reported by Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India and Hero Honda led to this increase. Analysts feel that the 4% excise duty cut announced by government would not immediately revive auto sales. “While it will make cars cheap, real booster will come when financing becomes easy and interest rates climb down,” the analysts said. “Banks must cut their rates and start lending more,” Chenoy said.