Wonder Wheels

Bengaluru’s Ati Motors is looking to crack a global market with its autonomous cargo vehicle.

- Harichandan Arakali

V Vinay, Saurabh Chandra and Saad Nasser, co-founders of Bengaluru’s Ati Motors, had certain limitations to contend with when they decided to build an autonomous electric vehicle. They did not have the deep pockets of a Google or a Tesla, and a passenger vehicle would mean bending design to meet human needs as well as navigating a whole set of regulatory approvals.

A level-4 autonomous cargo vehicle (one that isfully autonomous within private spaces, according to classifications set by the Society of Automotive Engineers), which could carry up to 1 tonne of payload in a semi-private location like a factory or an airport, hit the sweet spot for many reasons. By eliminating human takeover completely, it gave them enough room to tinker with design and its expenses were perfect for the $1.1 million in seed money that their self-funded venture had to build a working research prototype. The team of 30 at Ati Motors is now building a functional prototype that is likely to be ready for commercialisation in two years. A proof-of-concept vehicle is being tested on the campus of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, where Ati has a research collaboration.

“I wanted to make one more technology play,” says Vinay, 54, a veteran innovator, who left his teaching job at IISc to first cofound Simputer, a hand-held tablet computer, and later Strand Genomics (now Strand Life Sciences). Chandra, 39, adds, “Philosophically, we wanted to do something ambitious and not just say, ‘Oh, this came out of India’. We wanted to make a global play. An autonomous cargo-carrying electric vehicle offered us the best of both worlds. Commercially, it is an attractive problem to solve, and we were going to make a full vehicle, and not just a software stack, or a set of programs.”