Car manufacturers around the world are slowly changing cars into devices that people use to commute. They are adding more and more features for safety as well as convenience. Tesla, one of the largest electric car manufacturers in the world, has been testing autonomous driving. Here in India too, we have manufacturers such as Mahindra, Hyundai, Tata, offering Level 2 ADAS to make the life of the driver easier on the road. There are several start-ups that are working on autonomous driving technology. Here we have one such video where a Mahindra Bolero has been turned into an autonomous vehicle.
The video has been shared by Swaayat Robots on their Twitter profile. In this video, we see a Mahindra Bolero with several sensors, cameras, and radars installed being tested in a suburban area in India.
The video clearly shows that the area where the vehicle was being tested didn’t have proper roads and had several obstacles too. The video shows how the Mahindra Bolero performed in various situations. As this was a test vehicle, a person was sitting in the driver’s seat for safety. The vehicle detects obstacles and was easily turning around from them.
The car started its trip from a broken patch and later joined tarmac. The car joined the two-lane road and stuck itself to the left lane. The car was actually maintaining a safe speed. As part of the test, they were putting obstacles in front of the MUV. In the video, we also see pedestrians, vehicles coming from the wrong side of the road.
Whenever the Bolero was detecting the obstacle, it was either turning away or coming to a stop to avoid a crash. It looks like the test was being carried out somewhere in Madhya Pradesh as we see a police barricade with the name Raisen police. The Mahindra Bolero was detecting the gap between cars parked on both sides of the road and was slowly and cleanly moving through the gap.
It was following the route properly and was making necessary corrections when a vehicle or obstacles were being detected. Towards the end of the video, we see the Bolero entering a busy road with several vehicles approaching from the wrong side. There were even bikers who were cutting in front of the vehicle without proper indication.
The Bolero performed well in all these situations and even applied emergency brakes in some cases. We see that there are a set of cameras around the Bolero that read the surroundings.
The feed from these cameras along with the sensors placed around the vehicle create a field. The system is designed in such a manner that the car can avoid a crash.
This is probably the first time we have seen a company perform such experiments on a made-in-India car. We have firms like RoshAI that are working on similar projects but they are mostly using automatic cars from foreign manufacturers. The stock Mahindra Bolero – now called the Bolero Neo, is powered by a 1.5-liter turbocharged diesel engine that is available with a manual gearbox only.