India's automotive test centers to facilitate industry demand in new tech era

ICAT is an important element of the automotive sector, with its world-class infrastructure and domain expertise providing services in development, testing, validation and homologation.

The automotive industry is the sunshine industry in India contributing to over 7.5% to the country's GDP. Government of India has a huge focus to facilitate and grow this industry. Creation of new automotive test centres in the country under NATRIP project is an important step forward by the Government to support the need of the automotive industry in the backdrop of tightening regulatory framework and technology shift driven by market forces in the new era. ICAT is an important element of the automotive sector, with its world-class infrastructure and domain expertise providing services in development, testing, validation and homologation.

The International Centre for Automotive Technology (ICAT), Manesar, located in the northern automotive hub of India, is a leading world-class automotive testing, certification and R&D service provider under the aegis of NATRiP (National Automotive Testing and R&D Infrastructure Project), Government of India.

ICAT continues its endeavour towards knowledge sharing and dissemination, through seminars and events, on important topics like Power Train, Emission, HEV and EV technology, NVH, Crash, Lighting, Inspection & Certification and Fatigue.

As India moves towards adopting complete electric mobility by 2030, ICAT’s Power Train lab/ COE, EMC lab and Automotive Electrical and Electronics labs have started rendering testing and developmental services in this domain. With Centres of Excellence (CoE) in Component, Powertrain, NVH and Tyre, ICAT intends to eventually transform it into an automotive product development centre.

 

Automotive electrical and electronics lab (AEEL)

The AEEL is an important lab considering the rapid increase in the use of electrical and electronics in vehicles. The lab offers services for certification and validation for a wide range of E&E components including systems, E-motors, ECUs, Batteries and RFIDS. It also provides consultancy services to the customers for product development and improvements.

Passive Safety Lab (PSL)

Passive Safety Lab is dedicated to supporting automotive industry for their needs of Crash Testing (Regulatory as well as Developmental), pedestrian protection testing, sledge testing and airbag deployment testing. The PSL has state of the art test facilities capable of conducting crash testing of vehicles as per Indian and international regulations. Some of the services offered are frontal impact crash test, side impact crash test, side pole impact, rear impact test, static rollover and pedestrian protection testing. The lab has successfully completed correlation activities with renowned OEMs.

Director, ICAT, Dinesh Tyagi, said that ICAT R&D team is comprised of highly qualified, competent, innovative and self-motivated engineers backed by state-of-the-art testing and development facilities. He said that the Centre has started undertaking advanced industry-sponsored R&D projects in the areas of frontier technologies like the use of Artificial Intelligence and robotics.

Dinesh Tyagi further said that ICAT’s vision is to emerge as a leading R&D centre in Asia, working together with the automotive industry in developing state-of-the-art technologies. ICAT is also supporting the automotive industries for ISO/IEC 17025:2005 implementation and NABL accreditation of their laboratories.