India’s connected car push: How simulation is preparing vehicles for real-world chaos

India’s proposed mandate for Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication from October 2028 is set to change how automakers develop and test safety systems. But before vehicles can talk to each other on Indian roads, engineers need to make sure those conversations work when traffic gets messy.

That is where simulation is becoming critical.

India recorded 1.83 lakh road fatalities in 2025, around 6,000 more than the previous year. Against this backdrop, the government’s proposed V2V mandate aims to enable vehicles to exchange information such as position, speed, and movement, allowing connected safety systems to warn vehicles about potential collisions and other hazards.

But testing such systems exclusively on public roads is neither practical nor safe.

Andreas Gau, CEO of dSPACE India Solutions, and Brenton Jude Pereira, Head of Business Development and Marketing, explained to YourStory how simulation is helping automakers address this challenge as vehicles become increasingly software-defined.

“What works in Japan or Germany simply won't work in India,” Pereira said, pointing to the fundamentally different driving environment engineers have to account for here—from two-wheelers moving between lanes and agricultural vehicles to livestock, unmarked intersections and unpredictable obstacles.

The challenge becomes even greater when V2V and V2X systems are expected to make split-second safety decisions.

Founded in Germany in 1988, dSPACE entered India in 2009 initially through DynaFusion. In 2023, the company set up its operations in India under dSPACE India Solutions Private Limited, and currently employs over 160 engineers in India, with the team split between engineering, software development, sales, and support. Generating almost Rs 200 crore in local revenue, the company serves traditional automotive clients, commercial vehicle manufacturers, defense, aerospace, and EV startups. 

In India, the company supports the country’s growing automotive and software-defined vehicle (SDV) markets, catering to automotive manufacturers and tech firms to test electronic control units (ECUs), advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), electric mobility (E-mobility) components, and more.

Testing India’s chaos

For dSPACE, the answer is to recreate these situations virtually before engineers take a vehicle onto a test track.

The company’s Software-in-the-Loop (SIL) technology allows engineers to test control software in a virtual environment, effectively creating a digital representation of vehicle control units before physical hardware is available.

As development progresses, Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) testing brings actual electronic control units into the simulation. Sensors, motors, communication systems, and environmental conditions can be digitally recreated, allowing engineers to see how real vehicle hardware responds to situations that would otherwise require expensive and potentially dangerous road tests.

For V2V systems, this means engineers can simulate scenarios involving multiple vehicles, communication failures, and rapidly changing traffic conditions without putting real vehicles—or people—at risk.

The question is particularly relevant as India's automotive industry moves towards software-defined vehicles, where increasingly complex functions are controlled by software rather than conventional mechanical systems.

Simulating the Indian driving environment

dSPACE is also working to replicate another major variable: connectivity.

The company has partnered with test and measurement specialist Anritsu to recreate 4G and 5G network conditions. Engineers can simulate situations where connectivity deteriorates—for instance, when a vehicle enters a tunnel—and examine how connected or autonomous systems respond.

A separate partnership with Safran Data Systems allows satellite-navigation environments involving systems such as GPS, GLONASS and Galileo to be simulated indoors.

For Indian OEMs, the objective is increasingly to build these scenarios around local conditions rather than simply adapting systems developed for other markets.

dSPACE says its India engineering team is working with automakers and mobility companies to create test scenarios that reflect the country's specific road environment.

AI enters the testing loop

The testing challenge is becoming larger as vehicles incorporate artificial intelligence into functions such as perception, autonomous driving and battery management.

dSPACE is using AI within its own development ecosystem to generate virtual electronic control-unit artefacts, create autonomous-driving scenarios and manage large datasets.

Instead of manually programming every possible road situation, AI can generate thousands of potential edge cases including chaotic intersections and unusual interactions between road users.

The company also uses tools such as NeuralNet Coder to translate AI models into embedded C code that can be deployed on vehicle hardware.

The underlying proposition is straightforward: the more software a vehicle contains, the more scenarios engineers need to test and simulation provides a way to scale that testing without putting every scenario onto a physical road.

Physical testing, of course, is not disappearing.

As Pereira explained, engineers can begin with software entirely in a virtual environment, introduce real components such as radar systems or brake controllers through HIL testing, and eventually move to the test track.

By then, many of the potentially dangerous or time-consuming scenarios have already been tested virtually.

For India, that could become increasingly important as the proposed 2028 V2V/V2X mandate moves from policy to implementation. The technology may ultimately allow vehicles to communicate with one another—but before that happens, engineers need a way to make sure those conversations remain reliable when Indian traffic does what Indian traffic does best: behave unpredictably.