Bags ISOL trophy for ‘Excellence in Automotive Lighting Technology’
The International Centre for Automotive Technology (ICAT) and Hella took the joint initiative of giving top priority for the topic of arresting avoidable road deaths in accidents at the prestigious biennial event, the International Symposium on Lighting (ISOL-2015) organized by ICAT.
Dr. Michael Kleinkes, Vice President, Development Lighting Technology, Hella of Germany, an expert on automotive lighting technologies, presented his technical paper on “New Semiconductor Light sources (LED, OLED, Laser) – Future possibilities for Styling and Functionality”. This was followed by a panel discussion on “Losing Light of Life on Indian Roads! Let’s join hands together in arresting road accidents in dark hours”, moderated by Mr. Ramashankar Pandey, Managing Director of Hella India Lighting Ltd. (HIL).
In the light of the alarming road accident scenario with one death every four minutes in the country, the topic has a strong relevance to the automotive industry in general and the automotive lighting industry in particular, due mainly to safety criticality of lighting and signaling devices while driving on Indian roads.
Mr. Pandey delivered his introductory address on the topic of “Arresting Alarming Road Deaths involving Commercial Vehicles – is there a business case for safety in India?”. This was followed by a panel discussion at which the unanimous view expressed was that education and individual behavioral change among automotive users has to form an integral part of making Indian roads safer and that engineering and regulation alone won’t be enough to solve the issue. Educating users and bringing urgency to this topic is a shared responsibility of the automotive and auto component industry. Further, it was observed that key decision makers in the industry have to necessarily pool their resources for the purpose.
The panel agreed to initiate a nation-wide awareness campaign on road safety and compliment the engineering excellence brought about by various stakeholders in the area of Visibility & Lighting through nation-wide education and enforcement of these life-saving technologies.
Mr. Pandey observed: “The latest data on road accidents in India don’t show any decline, and with one accident every minute the country is losing approximately three per cent of its GDP. The situation is very critical and cannot be left unattended to for long”.
He added: “Bringing safety-enabled products and awareness among masses were the two key objectives of the mission”.
The panel also agreed to initiate a scalable approach to road safety and focus on improving visibility on roads as a key measure to ensure safer drivability. This doesn’t stop individual companies to focus on technology upgradation of lighting systems as a means to fight road accidents.
It is also agreed that “safety” made an interesting business sense as more customers would give higher priority to safety-enabled products as awareness spreads among masses.
The overall emphasis was on the continuous commitment to sustainable programs for lowering the number of accidents on Indian roads, and all panel members expressed their personal involvement to the cause by announcing their participation in programs such as ISOL-2015.
All the panelists, as responsible industry partners agreed to give the highest priority to this topic.
This platform gave an opportunity to the automotive lighting group consisting of leading auto and auto component industry members to lead the safety campaign from the front.
Coincidently, HIL also won the prestigious ISOL trophy for “Excellence in Automotive Lighting Technology” when ICAT announced its firstever ISOL Awards.